Frustrated with Magento’s limitations? Learn how Elastic Path can help you move past Magento’s shortcomings, boost conversions, and drive revenue.
Elastic Path and Adobe Commerce, known as Magento, are both popular commerce providers. But retailers, manufacturers, and distributors should know the differences between Elastic Path and Magento.
Elastic Path is a composable commerce solution, which uses API-first, best-of-breed components. Magento is an all-in-one commerce platform, in which functionalities come packaged and out-of-the-box.
Elastic Path's modular, composable, API-first approach to commerce ensures fast, high-performing sites that boost revenue and conversion. Magento sites are known for being clunky and slow.
Over time, Elastic Path's composable architecture means less long-term maintenance and costs, reducing TCO. Magento has a higher TCO, due to complex customizations and site upkeep.
Modular, flexible components and integrations mean that brands using Elastic Path get to market faster. Magento brands move more slowly, needing more time and setup to bring new experiences to market.
Brands that use Elastic Path get customized, personalized commerce with ease through modular components and integrations. Brands that use Magento need extensions modules and extensions to customize.
Elastic Path is a commerce solution that grows with brands instead of holding them back. Magento brands often complain about their ability to scale, as it sucks up money and development hours.
Elastic Path’s modular, composable approach lets brands adapt by swapping in new components as needs evolve. Adobe Commerce struggles to keep up with modern customer expectations and flexibility.
Merchandisers and developers using Elastic Path have an easy-to-use interface and can make changes quickly. Magento developers have to spend dozens or hundreds of hours to get new experiences live.
Buyers on a commerce site powered by Elastic Path get fast loading times and personalized experiences. In comparison, Magento buyers get a dated, slow site experience - and are less likely to convert.
When we talk to manufacturers, retailers, and distributors still using Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), the sentiment is clear: the platform is struggling to keep up with the pace of modern commerce. Adobe’s focus has shifted toward enterprise clients, leaving many mid-sized and growth-focused brands frustrated with increasing costs, slow innovation, and technical debt.
The result? Brands on Adobe Commerce face:
Instead of driving innovation, personalization, and growth, teams find themselves trapped in a cycle of maintenance—patching security issues, troubleshooting bugs, and wrestling with an aging architecture. Commerce leaders want to focus on AOV growth, conversion optimization, and omnichannel experiments—but Adobe Commerce forces them to spend time and money just keeping the lights on.
For a growing brand, Adobe Commerce is a bottleneck, not a growth engine. Want to see how much it's holding you back? Get a fast, free commerce site analysis with our Storefront Grader™.
Compared to other commerce platforms, like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento, Elastic Path allowed us to get new experiences live and in front of customers fast. Our in-house team hasn’t had to learn complicated, new technology – we can make changes and get site experiences live in minutes and days instead of weeks and months.Stephen Cope CIO, Astrak Group
Compared to other commerce platforms, like WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento, Elastic Path allowed us to get new experiences live and in front of customers fast. Our in-house team hasn’t had to learn complicated, new technology – we can make changes and get site experiences live in minutes and days instead of weeks and months.
For many businesses, Magento is no longer a viable long-term solution. Adobe has shifted focus to enterprise customers, making Magento costlier and more complex to maintain. Businesses locked into Magento often struggle with slow innovation, high technical overhead, and expensive upgrades.
Yet, a full-scale replatforming to another monolith — whether it’s Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud — can be just as risky, costly, and disruptive as staying put. That’s why companies are adopting a gradual transformation to composable commerce instead.
With a composable commerce system like Elastic Path, businesses can replace specific Magento components—like product catalogs, checkout flows, or pricing engines—without disrupting their entire operation. This modular, API-first approach follows the strangler pattern, where legacy systems are replaced step by step until they become obsolete.
Key Benefits of Gradual Composable Migration:
✔ Reduce Risk: Avoid the downtime and failures of big-bang replatforming.
✔ Prioritize Business Needs: Start with high-impact areas like checkout, subscriptions, or product merchandising.
✔ Improve Agility: Make iterative upgrades, future-proofing your commerce stack.
✔ Lower Costs Over Time: Eliminate costly Magento maintenance without a massive upfront investment.
By embracing composable commerce, you can free your business from Magento’s limitations without a costly, all-or-nothing migration. Instead, you can modernize incrementally, unlocking revenue growth without the risk.
Learn the pros and cons of various commerce platforms, including Magento, to ensure that your brand has a commerce solution that maximizes conversions and revenue.
Some brands that use Magento may figure that continuously delaying a decision about new commerce technology incurs no cost.
Those brands are mistaken. In commerce, no decision means no innovation, and no innovation means no new experiences that drive revenue, conversions, and business growth. A brand that stands pat with Magento is trading today's cost for tomorrow's business success, and will be left behind.
The good news is that Elastic Path gives brands an option for innovation other than a costly rip-and-replace. Choose a commerce experience you want to improve and start there, today, with less cost and the ability to test and experiment. Over time, your commerce experiences will improve, and you will keep pace with (and maybe even get ahead of) the rest of the market.
A monolithic solution provides core commerce capabilities such as checkout, search, and catalog management, in addition to a frontend store, which is what your customers see and engage with.
Composable solutions allow brands to choose best-of-breed components to power the customer experiences they aim to deliver.
Extensibility allows brands to tailor their commerce solution to their needs and is a key benefit of an API-based solution.
From an commerce perspective, not all “headless” platforms are built equally. A “retrofitted” headless solution removes the front-end layer of an all-in-one solution while keeping the back-end commerce monolithic. This means that the core commerce capabilities are still tightly linked or coupled. That means making changes or customizing is slow and more expensive, as it requires in-depth implementation and testing.
In contrast, a microservices-based headless solution gives you control over the components that make up your commerce offering. You can quickly and easily swap one technology for another so that you’re employing the best components for your brand and your customers.
Magento advertises a headless solution. But not all headless solutions are equal. Magento’s headless solution is retrofitted.
A retrofitted solution means that Magento has modified their platform to allow for more design freedom on the front-end to create unique customer experiences. However, because the back-end is essentially still a monolith, making changes or innovating fast is difficult.
Elastic Path is a fully microservices-based headless commerce solution. This means that the front-end and the back-end are decoupled. An API layer helps the front-end and back-end communicate so that brands like yours have the freedom to deliver unique front-end experiences without clunky, expensive, time-consuming changes to the back-end.
Typically, we see a roughly 50% reduction over three years on total cost of ownership for brands moving to a composable commerce solution from a monolith or retrofitted headless solution.
It depends on your business and your business needs. Chat with one of our commerce experts today to better understand what solution would be best for your brand.
Talk to one of our experts about your Magento solution, and how you can address business challenges fast and without replatforming with Elastic Path.
Loading Form...
Thank you! The form was submitted successfully.