Magento vs. SAP CX and Commerce: The Ultimate Comparison

The underlying architecture and tech stack of a platform affect everything –  from performance and scalability to the talent required for its maintenance.

• • Magento (Adobe Commerce) is built on a PHP-based, modular architecture that historically follows a monolithic model. Nevertheless, it is highly extensible through the modules. Magento 2 enabled headless integrations with other systems thanks to a robust REST and GraphQL API. Magento’s architecture is praised for being developer-friendly and modular, allowing companies to plug in new features or integrations fairly quickly via its extension marketplace.

• • SAP Commerce Cloud (SAP CX) is Java-based. It follows a cloud-native, microservices-friendly architecture. Being a part of SAP Commerce Cloud, it’s offered as a cloud service hosted on Microsoft Azure, with SAP managing much of the infrastructure. Companies that prefer this platform typically rely on skilled developers to customize it.

Cost is a major factor when you have to decide which platform to choose. Both platforms come with additional licensing and operational costs:

• • Magento Costs: If you opt for Magento Open Source, the software itself will be free – there are no direct license fees. Your expenditures will come from hosting (cloud or on-prem infrastructure) and development or maintenance services. Typical Adobe Commerce enterprise plans may range roughly from $40,000 to $200,000+ per year. For smaller companies, the cost is lower. The exact price depends on the scale of your business and the variant of your deployment.

• • SAP Commerce Cloud Costs: For this platform, there’s no free edition, as it is fully commercial. As a rule, SAP licenses Commerce Cloud based on order volume tiers.  While SAP doesn’t publicly list prices, estimates for SAP Commerce Cloud often run from about $150,000 to $500,000 (or more) per year for licensing and cloud service.

Both platforms are loaded with core ecommerce features out of the box.

• • Magento: Magento has a flexible catalog system that lets you organize products with categories and custom attributes. Its Promotions Engine is highly visual and rule-based, enabling marketers to create complex promotions. However, Magento does not come with a native Order Management System (OMS) – you will need an extra add-on for it.

• • SAP Commerce: SAP Commerce is built with a “backend-first” mindset and excels at complex internal processes. It features an integrated Product Content Management (PCM) module and has powerful order orchestration capabilities. SAP emphasizes rigorous integration capabilities.

If you are interested in selling to other businesses – be it wholesale, manufacturing, or distribution –  both platforms can offer B2B features, with the only difference that SAP was born for B2B, whereas Magento evolved to accommodate it. Let’s consider their B2B Capabilities in more detail:

• • SAP Commerce (B2B): SAP Commerce Cloud includes a fully-fledged B2B Accelerator, which is essentially a ready-made template for B2B commerce. This provides native support for such things as company accounts with multiple tiers of buyers. It also supports workflow-driven quotes and excels at contract pricing and custom catalogs.

• • Magento (B2B): Adobe Commerce includes native B2B features that were added in Magento 2.2 and improved thereafter. Magento’s B2B offers such features as quote requests, purchase orders, quick orders, and requisition lists. However, Magento’s B2B, while being robust, is generally considered to be the best fit for mid-level B2B complexity.

Let’s compare the platforms in terms of how flexible they are and how quickly you can implement changes:

• • Magento: Highly flexible and extensible. Magento has open-source roots, which means that practically any part of the platform can be customized or extended. In terms of time-to-market, Magento might get you live faster than SAP, especially if you have a smaller team or straightforward requirements.

• • SAP Commerce: Highly customizable but with more effort and governance. SAP Commerce is built to be flexible as well, but the customization typically happens in a more structured (and thus time-consuming) way. It often involves a longer initial implementation cycle (6+ months is common for a full project).

Scalability reflects how well the platform can handle growth – whether in traffic, transactions, product catalog size, or international expansion. Both platforms are scalable, but again, their approach differs:

• • SAP Commerce: SAP Commerce is engineered for large enterprises and mission-critical performance out of the box. It allows auto-scaling, modular deployment, caching mechanisms, and can serve millions of users on multiple continents with complex personalization. SAP Commerce Cloud is often the safer bet for a global enterprise that requires multi-region deployments and 24/7 uptime guarantees.

• • Magento: Magento can also scale to very large sizes, but doing so requires careful optimization. Often, for this purpose, it relies on external infrastructure choices. Thanks to Adobe’s cloud hosting you can use elastic scalability and implement services like Fastly CDN for caching and global content delivery. Magento will be a great choice for a fast-growing online business or mid-market enterprise.

Your online store rarely stands alone – it needs to connect with other enterprise systems like ERPs (for inventory and orders), CRMs (for customer data), and PIMs or other content systems. Here, we will consider the critical factor of integration capability for both platforms.

• • SAP Commerce: If your top priority is seamless integration with ERP/CRM, and especially if that ERP is SAP, SAP Commerce would almost certainly be the better choice – it was literally built with that in mind.

• • Magento: In case you have a heterogeneous environment or want the freedom to choose different backend systems, Magento would give you that level of flexibility. But keep in mind that you’ll rely on middleware or custom development to enable the integration.