The difference between Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce

Magento is an e-commerce platform owned by Adobe. There are two versions: Magento Open Source, the free open source version written in PHP, and Adobe Commerce, the paid version. For years, Adobe has been among the leaders in Gartner's Magic Quadrant™, which means that, even in 2022, Adobe is still a great choice for your online store.

The advantage to Magento Open Source is that you only pay the cost of hosting, any extensions and development. With Adobe Commerce, you also have to pay licensing fees, which depend on sales and average order value. 

When Magento released the first version of its software more than a decade ago, it was open source and therefore free. A lot has changed since then: the Magento portfolio has grown over the years and many versions and products have been released. In 2018, Adobe acquired Magento, and since 2022, Magento Commerce, the paid version of Magento, is now released as Adobe Commerce. With Adobe Commerce, you have to pay license fees as a customer. These depend on the number of installations and the revenue that the online store turns.

Magento is extremely flexible and versatile e-commerce software. As such, it can be customized to meet any requirements. The latest versions of Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce are based on Magento 2. Websites, categories, products, product features, prices and the like are also identified and managed in the same way. Therefore, in both versions there is navigation with filtering based on product characteristics or intelligent price control with individually configured price rules. Moreover, they can be easily combined with other IT systems via APIs.

With Adobe Commerce, you have to pay a license fee as a customer, but there is obviously a lot of value in return. We are therefore sure that the difference between Commerce and Open Source will only increase in the future. Adobe is investing more in Commerce and will also develop more new functionalities in it. E.g. Live Search, Product Recommendations, ... Below we have listed the differences per category.

STRATEGIC

• Adobe Support
  • As a Commerce customer, you can submit support tickets to Adobe for core bugs. Adobe then provides a patch that will be applied by PHPro. This technical support is available 24/7.
• Adobe Awareness
  • As a Commerce customer, you get a voice at Adobe. You have an Adobe account manager you can go to for feedback, concerns, ... . With Open Source you cannot contact Magento directly.
• Roadmap Commerce
  • Adobe will develop more features for Commerce than Open Source. An example is the Live Search
• Adobe Connection
  • Magento is part of Adobe. Adobe will pay more attention to Commerce and make deeper integrations with other Adobe packages for Commerce.

FUNCTIONAL

• Customer segmentation and personalization.
  • Create personalized shopping experiences that increase conversions by dynamically displaying content, promotions and pricing to specific customers based on attributes such as their location, gender, order history, lifetime purchase value, wish list items and more. You can also target unknown website visitors based on the products they have viewed or items in their shopping cart.
• Dynamic, rules-based product relationships
  • Set automatic rules to determine which products should be presented as up-sales, cross-sales and related products for each customer segment. Rules can be easily managed with a condition-based tool that allows you to effortlessly act on product suggestions to increase sales and average order value.
• Product recommendations by Adobe Sensei
  • Product recommendations can be automatically calculated by Adobe Sensei. This is the name within Adobe for Artificial Intelligence. Product are displayed by automatic rules such as “These products are often purchased together,” “These products most viewed,” ... .
• Management of customer attributes
  • Management/creation of custom customer attributes. These can be used in customer segmentation to increase user experience.
• Loyalty Tools
  • Offer your customers points for being a loyal customer. You can automatically distribute these points based on the actions users perform (e.g. subscribe to the newsletter, invite new customers, buy products, etc.). )
• Limited access to the catalog
  • Manage “view and purchase” permissions for customers. Certain customers cannot view a category or obtain purchase permissions in certain categories.
• CMS scheduling and preview
  • Increase sales and productivity by enabling your business teams to easily create, preview and schedule a wide range of content updates without involving IT. View all changes by date or store view to ensure a flawless shopping experience, and optimize the timing and impact of updates on the site by managing all changes through a dashboard with timeline. Deploy updates automatically at scheduled times for greater efficiency.
• Visual merchandise
  • Optimize product category pages to increase sales by arranging products with a simple drag-and-drop interface or sorting rules that order products by best seller, color, highest margin or newest addition. Save time by setting up rules to automatically assign products to specific categories based on their attributes, such as brand, price or date created.
• Extended administrator privileges.
  • Log and control the various actions performed by backend users. Set up different websites that are additionally separated for different backend users.
• Automated reminders
  • Automatically send reminders and coupons to customers with abandoned shopping carts and wish lists
• Advanced CMS
  • Create a CMS hierarchy to guide customers through all content pages. Moreover, you can restore CMS page content to historical backup.
• B2B
  • Offers B2B functionalities such as: company structure, representatives, quotes, ordering by SKU, separate catalogs per company, credits, advanced pricing, ...
• Returns (RMA).
  • Provides return management of all online orders. Customers can specify the reason for return. Returns are managed through the backend with different statuses.
• Gift Lists
  • Customers can create different lists such as wedding lists, birth lists, ...
• Google Tag Manager
  • A must-have marketing tool fully integrated into Adobe Commerce.
• Adobe Stock Integration
  • Use Adobe Stock Assets in your content pages. You no longer need to create your own images and can use Adobe's vast array of free images.
• Customer Login
  • Increase customer service by logging in by customer name. This allows you to add a product to the cart and help the customer further.

TECHNICAL

• ElasticSearch
  • Elasticsearch allows one to manage large catalogs and easily meet scalable search capacity with growing searches . Installation is quick and global deployments are easy with support for 33 languages out of the box. Elasticsearch offers suggestions for customer errors, support for stop words and weighting and synonym management through the Magento Admin to increase relevance and conversions.
• Multiple master databases.
  • Scale up the database level of your Magento application by using separate master databases to support checkout, order management and product data. This allows different functional areas to scale independently and ensures that merchandising and order management activities never affect the buyer's ability to browse and make purchases on the website.
• Multiple slave databases
  • Adobe Commerce allows each master database to have multiple slave databases to scale read operations.
• Support for MySQL cluster
  • Scale your checkout and order management databases horizontally to ensure high availability through Adobe Commerce support for MySQL Cluster. MySQL Cluster manages data sharing across multiple database instances so that multiple master databases can be used to increase your capacity.
• Deferred stock updates.
  • Make sure you don't miss orders during high transaction periods by using the optional deferred stock update configuration. Deferred stock updates for individual products or an entire website use the new message management mechanism to update stock levels asynchronously when orders are placed to improve throughput.
• RabbitMQ
  • RabbitMQ is a message manager - an intermediary for messaging to other applications. It provides your applications with a common platform for sending and receiving messages, and your messages a safe place to keep them until they are received. This increases stability between various systems.
• Order archiving
  • Increase order management speed by using archiving of old orders.
• CDN Support
  • CDN is supported to increase the speed of the environment. The Content Delivery Network provides to the user a fast version of the online environment from the location as close to the user as possible.
• Security
  • When building an eCommerce store, security should be your priority since you are exchanging critical customer information. Adobe Commerce edition has advanced security patches making it a much more stable and secure version than Magento Open Source.