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 many years, Adobe has been a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant™, making Adobe a great choice for your online store even in 2022.

The advantage of Magento Open Source is that you only pay the costs for hosting, extensions and development. With Adobe Commerce there are also license costs to be paid, which depend on the average order value and the turnover.

When Magento released the first version of their software over ten years 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 bought Magento, and since 2022, Magento Commerce, the paid version of Magento, is now renamed to Adobe Commerce. To use Adobe Commerce, you have to pay a license fee. This fee depends on the number of installations and the turnover of the webshop.

Magento is extremely flexible and versatile e-commerce software. It can therefore be adapted to all requirements. The latest versions of Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce are based on Magento 2. Websites, categories, products, product features, prices and so on are also identified and managed in the same way. Therefore, in both versions there is a navigation with filtering based on product features or intelligent price control with individually configured price rules. In addition, they can be easily combined with other IT systems via APIs.

As a customer, you have to pay licensing costs when using Adobe Commerce, but of course this adds a lot of value in return. We are sure that the differences between Commerce and Open Source will only increase in the future. Adobe is investing more in Commerce and will also develop more new functionalities. E.g. Live Search, Product Recommendations, ... Below we have listed the current differences per type.

• 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 also available 24/7
• Adobe Awareness
  • As a Commerce customer you get a voice at Adobe. You have an Adobe account manager to whom you can go for feedback, concerns, ... . With Open Source you cannot go directly to Magento.
• Roadmap Commerce
  • Adobe will develop more features for Commerce than for Open Source. An example of this 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.

• Customer segmentation and personalization
  • Create personalized shopping experiences that increase conversions by dynamically displaying content, promotions, and prices to specific customers based on attributes such as their location, gender, order history, lifetime purchase value, wishlist items, and more. You can also target unknown website visitors based on the products they viewed or items in their cart.
• Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations
  • Set up automatic rules to determine which products should be presented as up-sales, cross-sales, and related products for each customer segment. Rules are 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 like "These products are often bought together", "These products are most viewed", ... .
• Customer Attribute Management
  • Management/creation of own customer attributes. These can be used in customer segmentation to enhance the user experience.
• Loyalty Tools
  • Offer your customers points to be a loyal customer. You can automatically distribute these points based on the actions that the users perform (e.g. subscribe to the newsletter, invite new customers, buy products, ...)
• Limited catalog access
  • Manage the 'view and purchase permissions' for customers. Certain customers cannot view a category or obtain purchase rights in certain categories.
• Content Staging and Preview 
  • Increase your sales and productivity by enabling your business teams to easily create, preview and schedule a wide variety of content updates without involving IT. View all changes by date or store summary to ensure a smooth shopping experience and optimize the timing and impact of updates to the site by managing all changes via a dashboard with timeline. Deploy updates automatically at scheduled times for greater efficiency.
• Visual Merchandising
  • 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 Admin Rights
  • Log and monitor the various actions backend users perform. Set up different websites that are also separated for different backend users.
• Automated Reminders
  • Automatically send reminders and coupons to customers with abandoned carts and wish lists
• Advanced CMS
  • Create a CMS hierarchy to guide customers through all content pages. In addition, you can restore the content of CMS page to a historical backup.
• B2B
  • Offers B2B functionalities such as: company structure, representatives, quotations, order via SKU, separate catalogs per company, credits, advanced prices, ...
• Returns (RMA)
  • Provides returns management for all online orders. Customers can indicate the reason for return. Returns are managed through the backend with different statuses.
• Gift Registry
  • 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 Integratie
  • Use Adobe Stock Assets in your content pages. You no longer have to create images yourself and you can use the large amount of free images from Adobe.
• Login As Customer
  • Increase customer service by logging in on the customer's name. This allows you to put a product in the shopping cart and help the customer further.

• ElasticSearch
  • Elasticsearch allows you to manage large catalogs and easily meet scalable search capacity for growing searches . Installation is fast and global deployments are easy with support for 33 languages ​​out of the box. Elasticsearch provides suggestions for customer errors, support for stopwords and weighting, and synonym management via the Magento Admin to increase relevancy and conversions.
• Multiple master databases
  • Scale 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 the website and make purchases.
• Multiple slave databases
  • Adobe Commerce allows each master database to have multiple slave databases to scale reads.
• MySQL cluster support
  • Horizontally scale your checkout and order management databases to ensure high availability through Adobe Commerce support for MySQL Cluster. MySQL Cluster manages data sharing across multiple database instances, allowing multiple master databases to be used to increase your capacity.
• Deferred stock updates
  • Make sure you don't miss orders during high trading periods by using the optional deferred inventory update configuration. Deferred inventory updates for individual products or an entire website take advantage of the new message management mechanism to asynchronously update inventory levels when orders are placed to improve throughput.
• RabbitMQ
  • RabbitMQ is a messaging manager - an intermediary for messaging to other applications. It provides your applications with a common platform for sending and receiving messages, and a safe place to store your messages until they are received. This increases the stability between various systems.
• Archive orders
  • Increase the speed of order management by using archiving of old orders.
• CDN Support
  • CDN is supported to increase the speed of the environment. The Content Delivery Network offers the user a fast version of the online environment from the location as close as possible to the user.
• Security
  • When building an eCommerce store, security should be your priority as you exchange critical customer information. Adobe Commerce edition has advanced security patches that make it a much more stable and secure version than Magento Open Source.

After reading all this information, are you still not sure whether it is better to choose Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce? PHPro is happy to assist you in mapping out the advantages and disadvantages that are specific for you. During the analysis, we take a close look at the desired features in order to be able to make the right decision together. Contact one of our experts quickly and schedule a meeting.