Elastic Path vs Magento:
Which eCommerce solution is the best for your business?
Choosing between Magento and Elastic Path is similar to making the decision between taking public transportation to work, versus driving your car. If you choose to take public transportation, you may get the benefit of working while you travel; eliminating parking troubles; and avoiding possible traffic jams; but you may encounter crowded spaces during rush hour and less flexibility for timing. On the other hand, if you decide to drive, you have more flexibility and convenience to go and come as you please, but you could lower your productivity by sitting in traffic and searching for parking. No journey is necessarily better than the other, but depending on the experience you desire and what you’d like to achieve, one will be the better choice for you.
The same goes for choosing your eCommerce solution. Depending on the vision you had in mind for your eCommerce experience; specific business requirements you need your solution to be aligned with; and the level of flexibility and control you desire for your system; one will be the better fit for your business.
Whether you choose either solution, at the end of the day, you will be delivered with a commerce experience to represent your product or service online. However, each vendor has entirely different commerce offerings, and therefore, the end result and the process taken to get there, will vary widely. In order to help you better understand the difference we will start by highlight the biggest difference: Magento offers an eCommerce platform while Elastic Path offers Composable Commerce-as-a-Service.
The Differences Between Monolithic Platforms and Composable Enterprises for Your Business
Magento, one of the leaders among the legacy traditional platforms in the eCommerce ecosystem, was built as a single, monolithic application. Monolithic platforms are more rigid by nature and are configured with many interdependencies within the backend of the system, in order for it to be fully functional. This means each change made to discrete functionality, requires a full system integration by developers in order to be implemented. This can be costly and time consuming and would not be ideal for businesses who need to make rapid changes.
However, platforms like Magento will be appealing if your ideal goal is to have all the eCommerce features you need to run your business, provided from a single vendor. They provide an all-in-one bundled packaged offering with all the standard eCommerce functionality like the CMS, PIM, Tax, payment gateways, shipping, fulfillment, etc. It is important to note that all-in-one solutions rarely fully satisfy unique requirements for a business, and therefore this will be only great for businesses that require standard and basic functionality in the backend and need very few changes.
Businesses will be inherently compromising their commerce capabilities by depending on a single vendor to provide all their commerce capabilities. No vendor can be the best at all the capabilities expected in an eCommerce platform. You may be encouraged to believe that you can alter the parts you want and have the platform remain the same. However, customizing a monolith can be difficult, expensive and may cause the system to break and, therefore not worth it.
Elastic Path, the pioneers of composable commerce, is an API-first, headless commerce microservices solution. Composable commerce enterprises were designed to move away from the full-stack eCommerce platforms, towards building best-of-breed commerce solutions by leveraging packaged business capabilities (PBCs). The process of composable commerce is a fairly advanced, technical approach and therefore would not be ideal for businesses who don’t have a technically savvy eCommerce team, either in house or hired through a System Integrator or agency.
However, composable enterprises like Elastic Path, will appealing if your ideal goal is to orchestrate best-in-class services to deliver differentiating commerce experiences. Unlike all-in-one solutions, the Composable approach puts you in control to design your commerce functionality specific to your business requirements. For example, rather than relying on a full stack to provide all your standard eCommerce functionality, the composable approach would enable you to use vendors like Algolia for search, Contentful for your CMS, Salsify for PIM from our marketplace and have them work together seamlessly.
Due to this fully modular approach, teams will never have to worry about the implications of making changes again. You will be able to quickly swap in and out components to continuously optimize your commerce experience to keep up with demanding customer expectations. This also means you will never have to think about “replatforming” or “upgrading” ever again as it is built to provide for the present and adapt for the future.
"We have a complex and dynamic business, so embracing Composable Commerce will be key to our ability to achieve our digital commerce vision in a way that enables us to move fast, support our unique business requirements, and delight our customers and partners.” Rebecca Hicks, Senior Manager Digital Experience, Pella Corporation.
Is Magento a Headless Platform?
Magento states that they offer headless commerce, however what kind of headless commerce do they provide? Headless solutions were designed to solve the problem of highly coupled rigid platforms but not all headless solutions are designed the same. There are 2 main headless options that your business can adopt: Traditional Retrofitted Headless and Headless Microservices.
Magento falls under the “Traditional Retrofitted Headless” commerce solutions. This means they have modified their platform to allow for more design freedom on the frontend to create more unique UI experiences. However, because the backend is essentially still a platform, its couple nature prevents teams from making changes easily.
Elastic Path falls under “Headless Microservices” commerce solutions. This means the frontend and the backend are decoupled and separated by an API layer to provide more flexibility on both ends. It creates freedom to design unique frontend experiences but also facilitates seamless changes of the business processes in the backend to implement the specific functionality to need.
Website Performance Comparison Guide Every millisecond of page load time has a material impact on your eCommerce business, and it's no secret that Magento-powered websites are notoriously slow because of their monolithic application. A solution with a decoupled microservices and API-first architecture like Elastic Path can help!
A decoupled architecture → A custom frontend or customer experience without having to constantly update the backend like on a monolithic application like Magento eCommerce
API-first approach → Quick and cutting-edge integration of third party tools rather than using clunky, rigid plugins.
You’ve probably seen many articles on migrating from Magento 1 to 2 or another similar platform in your quest to work out what is the best solution to your problem but we’re here to compare the differences between what’s required to migrate to Magento 2 vs migrating to a lightweight, headless solution, like Elastic Path.
We want to make it easy for you to migrate from your monolithic platform. Consider these best practices outlined when choosing to migrate.