Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Magento: 2024 Comparison of Features, Pricing & Integrations

Scale is critical in ecommerce not only for fast-growing businesses but also for seasonal and unexpected sales spikes. Things can happen fast in online selling, where order placements can zoom from nothing to a magnitude in the hundreds in a matter of minutes when the stars align. That’s why your ecommerce platform should be able to scale fast when you need it to. This means getting a sophisticated enterprise platform beyond the plug-and-play type.

In this comparison guide, we match two such advanced ecommerce software platforms. It is a tight take matching Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Magento. Both are built on a powerful framework that lends itself to complex ecommerce backend while keeping the user interface neat and easy to navigate. Both are also backed by a solid native ecosystem, which extends the core architecture’s functionalities.

Below, you’ll find the subtle differences between the two though in key areas of usability, extensibility, pricing and more. We hope this guide will help you choose the better-fitting one.

As an online seller, you are never far from being immune to world affairs. Take for instance the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war and the harsh lockdowns in Shanghai, China. All these impact the global supply chain, which affects your ability to sell one way or another.

The irony is, the world has seen a record-breaking surge in online shopping in the last two years as households hunkered down due to the pandemic. The top 15 retail ecommerce sites bagged $648 billion in sales in 2020 alone.

In the face of a disrupted global supply chain and unabated demand for online shopping, you need an ecommerce platform that is flexible and scalable, one that adapts, not only to current market trends but to global events.

Overview of Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs. Magento

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based platform ideal for B2B, B2C and B2BC ecommerce. It is part of Salesforce 360 integrated CRM, powering your ecommerce with a suite of connected Salesforce apps. A scalable platform, it helps you roll out ecommerce strategies at your own pace.

The platform allows you to manage multiple storefronts in a single place. Its order management capability can accommodate hundreds of SKUs and huge order volumes. Furthermore, the integrated Einstein AI lets you generate insights to drive revenues, for instance, repeat sales or hyper-personalized deals.

You can also configure multiple delivery dates and places for complex shipping cases. And leveraging the Salesforce partner program and AppExchange marketplace, you have hundreds of apps and providers to help you extend the app’s core functionalities.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is priced by gross merchandise value with plans tailored separately for growing and large enterprise.

Magento (now Adobe Commerce)

Magento, now Adobe Commerce, is a cloud-hosted ecommerce platform with managed service plans built on its open source framework. It is comparable with Salesforce Commerce Cloud when it comes to enterprise features. It also scales to B2C and B2B merchants and can handle traffic spikes.

With extensive integrations with the native Adobe ecosystem and third-party apps, Adobe Commerce is ideal for fast-growing ecommerce businesses and enterprise selling.

The paid plan’s key components include the core commerce framework, business intelligence, single-tenant infrastructure and disaster recovery and data retention.

Meanwhile, this open source solution is available to third-party providers who want to build an end-to-end ecommerce infrastructure. The Magento open source is arguably an industry standard in this aspect.

Pricing is on a quote basis but is also dependent on gross merchandise value, plus, order volume. This comparison focuses on the paid platform, Adobe Commerce Starter and Pro.

Comparison of Core Features

Storefront

The storefront is the customer-facing website where visitors browse and select products and place orders. It is also where customers manage their accounts. Some of the factors to consider here are design, themes, mobile commerce, blogging, customizations and iterative development.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento both feature multistore architecture, mobile-first framework and white labeling of the storefront. They are both ideal for scaling your online store. However, they have key differences, as explained below by their core features.

Theme

Both ecommerce platforms allow you to configure your storefront theme with your own design, process, and branding. Both also target the complex needs of ecommerce, hence their architecture platforms are aimed at a technical team of functional architect, UX designers and web designers.

That said, Magento does offer a demo theme, Luma, that you can use to go live at once. Likewise, you can cherry-pick from hundreds of Magento themes and templates created by independent frontend designers. But if you go this route, you’re undermining Magento’s rich features, really.

On the other hand, Salesforce has no ready theme to launch a storefront at once. You need to configure the settings right off the bat, including applying a theme, loading your storefront data, configuring the pages and user settings. But, again, to put into context, Salesforce addresses the more complex needs of ecommerce businesses, hence small online sellers may find it a mismatch.

However, if you’re looking for an off-the-shelf storefront, you’re better off picking a lightweight app among the best shopping cart software solutions in the market today, instead of Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Magento.

Configuring theme on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Design

Both ecommerce platforms are designed for configuring your own storefront theme. Both shine in this respect, with Salesforce having an edge if you use other Salesforce software.

Salesforce makes it easy for a technical team to collaborate on a reference architecture platform. From wireframes to comps to final designs of pages, shopping carts and checkouts, the team can move and finalize tasks on a clear path, while ensuring that images, videos, other creative assets, and technical elements comply with your approvals.

Meanwhile, to apply a storefront theme in Magento, you need to set it to developer mode and apply a new theme manually. Once you’ve created a theme, apply it to to the file system, then add a logo.

You can also specify an alternative design for specific user agents instead of creating a separate store view by setting design exceptions for specific users.

A minor flaw though, because Magento has pre-built themes, is that compatibility issues can happen if you tinker with these themes by accident instead of creating a new one. In a file system with several themes, this scenario is not without a precedent.

Another point of comparison, Salesforce directly promotes design consultants and accelerators trusted as vendor partners. On the contrary, because Magento has an open source, you’ll find plenty of non-vendor certified “Magento experts” flooding the consultancy marketplace.

Magento’s design configuration.

Iterative Development

Both Salesforce and Magento allow you to scale at a pace and have your desktop and mobile versions on a single framework.

Salesforce features an out-of-the-box Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) for web design, merchandising and technical aspects. You’ll find it flexible when building an iterative mobile site.

It’s also worth noting that Salesforce is positioned to adapt to a wide range of industries, such as direct-to-consumer, pick-up, quick service, groceries and subscription-based. Magento is, too, but the vendor is not explicit about it.

To scale in Magento, Adobe has introduced split architecture with a minimum of 3 core tiers and 3 web tiers. This means you can scale vertically or horizontally.

Customizations

In our Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Magento comparison, we found that both are capable of standard and deep customizations through editing the HTML/CSS framework or utilizing app extensions to extend functionalities.

Salesforce has a more consolidated approach to deep configurations. Its SFRA serves as your team’s blueprint for customizing your storefront utilizing JavaScript controllers. It helps you segment merchant customizations from built-in and merchant codes into cartridges. Developers can build new functions in a custom cartridge separate from the core code, resulting in a clean codebase for sustained scaling.

Magento, meantime, also allows for extending its core storefront architecture with API sets and prebuilt integrations with third-party systems. But, noticeably, it goes for ease of use more than deep configurations when it comes to customization. If you’re only after a custom frontend, the ecommerce software fits your need. It provides tools for standard customization such as a blank theme, UI components and an admin pattern library. The last includes elements for address form, button bar, tabs, container and sign-in form. A custom theme in Magento can stand alone or inherit elements from the default design.

Not that Salesforce is found wanting in standard customization. Here, you utilize its ecommerce reference application (SiteGenesis). It features hooks, CommonJS modules and lets you import script packages. You can also layer over more functionalities using plugins for additional functionalities such as gift registries, wish lists, Apple Pay and product comparisons.

When it comes to third-party extensions, Salesforce offers more options via its AppExchange. Not only that, the marketplace has more ecommerce-specific functionalities such as AI-powered product recommendations, visual configuration and ecommerce tax calculations.

The Magento marketplace has several plugin options, too, for payments, accounting, marketing and shipping, among many others, albeit with fewer choices than AppExchange.

If you want to create your own app, Magento has an upcoming feature worth noting. Adobe’s App Builder, a cloud-native tech stack, will let you build custom apps to customize an existing Adobe architecture. For example, creating different storefront looks by demographics.

Customizing components on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Mobile Commerce

Both Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento offer a mobile-first framework in light of the fact that mobile accounts for 60% of online shopping.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud features a built-in mobile-first reference architecture that provides merchants with a framework for mobile design. Unlike traditional mobile optimization, which is done on top of existing desktop-first site architecture, Salesforce adopts a mobile-integrated approach. Iterating the mobile site is simplified through JavaScript controllers, a model-view-controller architecture and Bootstrap 4 development framework.

Similarly, Magento has its out-of-the-box blank and Luma themes that use responsive web design for optimal viewing on smartphones, tablets and desktops. You can design CSS and Javascript following the order: mobile > tablet > desktop. This means the extra styles needed in larger screens don’t have to load when mobile shopping.

There’s not much difference here except for the fact that Salesforce Commerce Cloud claims its mobile themes are engineered based on 2,000 mobile UX storefronts for optimal design. The platforms has prebuilt designs with preconfigured integrations. For one, you can reduce screen taps in the checkout flow.

You do have plenty of Magento mobile themes out there to choose from. You can pick the best one to your liking but these are third-party creations.

Magento’s responsive UI.

Blogging Platform

An ecommerce platform should allow you to manage blog posts, sales pages, landing pages and announcements, among other content requirements. In this way, you can run seasonal promotions with timely content or push products with featured content. Likewise, with a blogging platform, you can run a content plan and reap the benefits of content marketing.

In this aspect, Salesforce Commerce Cloud takes the cake as it has native integration with Salesforce CMS. On the other hand, Magento requires you to install a blog extension. The latter isn’t always a disadvantage though, especially cost-wise.

Having Salesforce CMS gives you an unmatched setup for personalized content. You use Salesforce CMS to build content and deliver it to your storefront. But at $10,000 per month/organization, the setup is pricey. However, if you have the means, using this CMS on top of Salesforce CRM and integrated with Commerce Cloud, you can imagine the depth of personalized content you can glean based on your CRM data.

An alternative is to use Salesforce-verified third-party CMS plugins that allow you to prepare content on WordPress and integrate it with your ecommerce site. It’s a bit unwieldy, admittedly, but this is the route taken by Magento users.

As for Magento, having been bought by Adobe, it leverages a native integration with widely popular Adobe content and creative tools and drag-and-drop tools. The setup simplifies the process of adding or updating content. Its Page Builder, WYSIWYG editor, helps you create pages formatted to your liking fast. For images, Magento now integrates with Adobe Stock, which hosts millions of stock photos, illustrations, vectors and videos.

Hosting

Both Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento includes managed hosting, that is, the vendor takes care of the technical aspects of hosting.

But a key difference with Salesforce vs Magento is, that the former has its own data centers across the globe. Magento and most SaaS providers, for that matter, rely on the three tech giants—Google, Amazon and Microsoft—to host their infrastructure. This may be a non-issue to the end-user, but in general, a native ecosystem is more stable (think of iPhone vs. Android phones).

As for Magento, it boasts of rapid development, enhanced security and continuous deployment. As mentioned, the platform infrastructure is built on AWS hosting and allows for customizing and scaling your storefront. Magento provides a PaaS integration environment.

Just a note, hosting isn’t included in Magento open source, where you can freely select your hosting provider. But go for a dedicated server to accommodate Magento’s demanding infrastructure.

Order Management

This system helps monitor orders across your ecommerce channels. It processes and fulfills orders and alert customers of the status of their orders. Both Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento have an integrated order management system.

Both platforms provide a single view of orders across customer touchpoints and real-time product inventory. They handle all stages in the order lifecycle in real time, from capture to fulfillment to shipping, invoicing, payment and post-sales support. And since both have a mobile-first framework, you can track orders and inventory from a mobile phone, albeit you can’t access the console features.

Salesforce’s slight advantage here is the fact that its ecommerce platform is built on its CRM. If you’re using Salesforce CRM, too, then you can leverage more opportunities for reselling, cross-selling or upselling in post-purchases. Support agents can tap into the order management system’s repository of order details such as returns, refunds, discounts, cancellations, etc. for insights. This isn’t the case with Magento, which, to its credit on another note, features a sourcing algorithm that helps you deliver from the nearest location to fulfill orders.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud order management UI.

Marketing

Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento provides marketing features to push products. You configure discounts and multiple campaigns such as free shipping, buy one/get one free, buy one item and get the next item at 50% off, or buy three items and get 20% off the price. You assign a product to a readiness criteria, for instance, if you’re using a limited offer.

Similarly, both feature catalog price rules for discounts and special promos. They have marketing menus that provide a single location from which to manage your communications, promotions, SEO and user-generated content. A private sales feature allows you to push deals exclusive to a segment, while a smart search analyzes terms for the synonym to help customers find the product. You can also set metadata, create a sitemap or use redirects to optimize search.

Creating a landing page on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Analytics

Ecommerec analytics allows you to generate visual reports on sales, promotions, traffic and other sales metrics. The reports help you spot trends and analyze strengths, weaknesses and opportunities by correlating metrics.

Both ecommerce platforms have robust analytics with export options and user permission levels.

Salesforce dashboards don’t lend themselves to customization as of this writing. However, the dashboards feature a rich set of reporting such as on revenues, best-sellers down to the SKU level, promotion performance, profitability and technical metrics. These are more than enough to get a whole picture of your ecommerce health.

On the other hand, Magento lets you set up unlimited dashboards and automate the way you generate reports and schedule when to forward them to the recipient’s inbox. In this respect, Magento beats Salesforce, especially if you want to simplify the dashboard down to the barebones.

Integrations

Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento both have an extensive integration framework that allows you to extend a personalized shopping experience either through native or third-party extensions. Both have an open API, too.

In our Salesforce vs Magento 2 review, we noted that, the latter being an open source (a free plan different from Magento/Adobe Commerce Cloud Pro), is clearly more flexible when it comes to integrating functionalities. The market is awash with managed services and “Magento experts” offering PHP-based programming, patches, and tools that let you build an ecommerce site on top of the Magento open source.

In terms of native integration though, the Salesforce ecosystem is undoubtedly superior. It can provide a close-in, end-to-end unified ecommerce leveraged on the vendor’s CRM infrastructure. Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides an omnichannel, multi-tenant store with a 360-degree view of customers without requiring a third-party system.

Still, you can integrate dozens of third-party apps via the Salesforce AppExchange, considered the App Store of business software. With this route, you get several extended capabilities from analytics and address verification to tax and testing.

On the other hand, Magento does have its share of a wide array of native extensions. Notably, it integrates with key Adobe products such as Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Creative Cloud.

You can also use the Adobe Experience Manager to build your own mobile apps, forms and websites that integrate with Magento. You also build custom Salesforce apps, but these are limited to a number of custom objects and a cap on daily API calls.

Pricing

Both charge by gross merchandise value but Magento also charges by average order value. Salesforce publicly published its rates, while with Magento, you need to ask for a price quote.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has three plans targeting B2B, B2C and B2BC selling.

B2B Commerce has three price tiers:

• Starter (basic online selling) – $4 per order
• Growth (multiple storefronts, multichannel orders, single-view of customers) – $6 per order
• Plus (full digital transformation)  – $8 per order

B2C Commerce also has three price tiers: 

• Starter (basic online selling) – 1% gross merchandise value
• Growth (platform at scale) – 2% gross merchandise value
• Plus (AI-powered shopping experience) – 3% gross merchandise value

B2BC Commerce has only 1 price tier:

• 1% gross merchandise value

You can add a support plan charged separately, plus, Salesforce’s other business applications for sales, service, marketing and analytics.

Magento/Adobe Commerce Cloud

Magento had a Starter and Pro plan. Both plans include the core features, PayPal onboarding tool and commerce reporting. The plans also include infrastructure and deployment features such as CDN, image optimization, PaaS and egress filtering. You also get 24/7 monitoring and email support in both packages.

Besides the Starter inclusions, Adobe Commerce Pro has an all-in-one package for sellers of any size and industry. Pricing is based on the average order value and gross merchandise value. A plan includes the following:

• core application, core application support
• business intelligence
• deployment tools
• single-tenant, dedicated infrastructure
• larger dedicated staging environment
• 50 GB of testing
• Varnish-based CDN
• DDoS protection and WAF
• Automated backup
• Expansive monitoring and alerting
• Scale globally on AWS and Azure

Ease of Use

Both ecommerce software’s frontend are user-friendly. Navigation is easy to follow and the essential elements like categories, order and checkout buttons, search and related products neatly laid out. They also seamlessly adapt to desktop and mobile displays. As robust as both platforms are, a skillful UX designer can build a smooth checkout process with a few clicks in both systems.

Where ease of use is more distinct probably lies in the backend. You’ll likely need more skillful developers to set up Magento, given its open-source foundation. Plus, integrating it with third-party apps requires more diligence and attention to details.

Whereas, Salesforce has a built-in starter code that includes the platform’s reference architectures. It good enough for standard storefront functionalities. And because it’s a cloud-based platform, scaling the features is easier than building a system from scratch.

As part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud puts in one place all the key modules you’ll need to manage customer lifecycle. You get to integrate natively tools for marketing, content management, merchandising, fulfillment, community management, service features, CRM and more, albeit for additional fees. With a native ecosystem, your ecommerce site is more stable and navigation flows seamlessly.

Likewise, if you’re already a Salesforce user, you’ll find the dashboards and navigation familiar and seamless as you integrate more Salesforce functions.

Use Cases

Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento are ideal for enterprise ecommerce sites. But smaller online sellers can use them as a solid foundation to grow the business on.

Both adapt to B2C and B2B industries, but Salesforce is also explicit about a B2BC model, where a business taps another business’ network of prospects for leads.

With an open source framework, Magento can adapt to more industries and use cases. But this requires a full tech team to build a custom ecommerce site on the open source.

Likewise, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento both count among their users industry leaders such as Coca-Cola, Adidas, Marriott, PGA Tour and Red Cross.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs. Magento Comparison Table

Which Is Better, Salesforce Commerce Cloud or Magento?

It is a tightrope comparing Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Magento. In most case, you’ll find both as the right choice for building an enterprise ecommerce business. They both have extensive features and native eco-systems. They both integrate to dozens of key third-party apps and they both offer reliable support.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has a slight advantage with its robust native framework built on its world-renowned CRM. This setup allows you to implement hyper-personalization.

Meantime, Magento boasts an open source code that lets you extend its functionalities to more scenarios. It also provides a seamless content management system, which leverages the native integration of Adobe’s content and image tools.

One thing is for sure: both ecommerce platforms are robust and ideal for major online selling businesses. That said, smaller online sellers may do well checking the top shopping cart software for small business instead.

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.