Craft Commerce vs Magento: Key Differences Explained
The great thing about the digital age is that it’s given us endless ways to buy our favourite products and services, most of which are just a few clicks away.
Of course, this is great for customers, who can find what they want instantly, but for commerce businesses, finding the right platform for their brand and products can be a challenge.
In this guide, we’re going to pit Craft Commerce against Magento (also known as Adobe Commerce), which are two of the most popular e-commerce platforms currently available, so that you can choose the platform that’s best for your business.
This guide at a glance
What is Craft Commerce?
Craft Commerce is a powerful and flexible e-commerce platform that’s built as an add-on for a Craft CMS website. It gives businesses the perfect platform to build highly-customisable online stores that can effortlessly integrate content into product pages, creating a rich user experience that’s difficult for template-based platforms (like Shopify) to replicate.
It wasn’t launched by Pixel & Tonic until 2015, but development actually began in 2013. And we’re proud to say we played some part in those early development days, contributing to the code and investing in it as a product. Not to brag or anything, but we were the first UK agency to become Craft Commerce verified because of the experience we have developing sites on this platform.
webdna lore aside, Craft Commerce is well-suited to small and medium businesses that place a large amount of emphasis on customisation and value a content-first approach.
What is Magento?
Magento is an enterprise-level e-commerce platform that’s designed for big brands with a diverse and large range of products. We’re talking brands like Samsung and Ford here, so you know Magento is a serious player in this game.
Magento was actually bought out by Adobe in 2018 and rebranded as ‘Adobe Commerce’, but most people still recognise the platform as Magento, so if you ever hear them being mentioned in a conversation, then just know they’re the same thing. It’s kind of like when Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X. Most people still call it Twitter because of how well recognised it was before the takeover (bit awkward).
Even before the takeover, Magento had been making a name for itself since its inception in 2008. Magento used an innovative framework that meant businesses could add features to their product pages without the risk of breaking the entire system. Not only that, businesses could manage multiple stores from a single admin dashboard, which made life much easier for e-commerce managers, who had previously needed multiple logins to manage different stores.
As you can imagine, a community of developers grew rapidly along with Magento’s popularity, cementing it as a popular choice for enterprises.
How do Magento and Craft Commerce compare?
Now we know what Magento and Craft Commerce are, we can compare the two platforms to help you understand which one is best for your business and long-term ambitions.
If we had to summarise, Magento is best described as a factory, whereas Craft Commerce is more like a bespoke tailor. They both provide a slick online shopping experience for customers, but they approach it from different angles.
Usability
When looking at the usability of these platforms, It helps to look at it from these two perspectives:
- Store managers
- Developers
Both of these roles have different requirements when using an e-commerce platform, and therefore, they’ll need their own solutions to help them complete their job effectively.
Store managers
Since these platforms aim to make e-commerce as seamless as possible, it makes sense to start with the people who will be using them daily.
Magento’s user-interface is best described as functional. It’s easy enough to find what you need if you haven’t used the platform before, but it’s common for businesses to develop their own user manuals because of how complex they can be to navigate once the product catalogue starts scaling up.
Once you’re familiar with Magento, it’s one of the best in its class for managing huge catalogues of products, since it can allow you to update hundreds, even thousands, of product listings with mass-actions and filters.
By comparison, Craft Commerce only displays the features it’s been developed to provide, meaning you don’t need to worry about navigating menus and settings that aren’t relevant to your business. From a content management point of view, this makes learning easier. A huge bonus is the ‘live preview’ feature, allowing you to see how the page is being updated in real-time, which is a real time-saver when updating product listings.
Developers
Although this is less relevant to businesses that simply need a platform for e-commerce, it should form part of the decision-making process, since it will ultimately influence how long it takes to create the site and maintain it, which will impact the cost.
Both Magento and Craft Commerce require a qualified developer to create and maintain them, which is no great surprise given how complex they are. The main difference between the two is that Magento requires developers to adhere to a rigid framework, whilst Craft Commerce provides a greater level of flexibility alongside more control over the database (think custom fields).
The structured approach implemented by Magento does mean you’re guaranteed a consistent platform to work with, but on the flip side, it can cause challenges when deploying patches or upgrades. Craft Commerce is generally less fragile because of the flexible approach it gives to developers throughout the initial building process, which really pays dividends when a security patch or platform upgrade is needed.
Plugins and extensions
Both Magento and Craft Commerce are available with a suite of plugins (referred to as ‘extensions’ on Adobe’s store), which are designed to add extra functionalities that make life easier for store managers.
Magento has the broader choice of extensions as you can imagine, with over 3,000 options available to business owners. Chances are, if you can think of something you need your e-commerce store to do, then there will be an extension that can facilitate that for you. Although there’s a huge amount of choice, you do need to be mindful that some plugins could conflict with each other if you aren’t careful. For example, an extension that provides a ‘one-step checkout’ could try to control the same piece of code as a ‘gift wrapping’ extension.
Craft Commerce doesn’t have as many plugins to choose from; there are about 800. This means that if you can’t find the functionality you need, you’ll likely need support developing a plugin. This is not necessarily bad news. In the Craft community, there are some highly skilled plugin developers and, cost-wise, it’s not likely to be much different to what you’d pay for many popular Magento extensions.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Craft CMS plugins undergo rigorous testing and peer reviews before they can be made publicly available on the marketplace, meaning you don’t need to worry about purchasing a bloated plugin that doesn’t do what you need it to.
Scalability
Whether your business is just starting out or you run an established brand with a solid customer base, one of the things you need to consider is how easy it is to grow your online platform without hitting any major roadblocks.
Truth be told, you won’t hit any stumbling blocks with either Magento or Craft Commerce if you have good developers to fall back on. Really, though, it depends on what you value the most with a platform, and just how big you plan on becoming as an online retailer.
Magento may have its challenges, but it’s an exceptional choice if you have a vast number of products to advertise online. When we say vast, we’re talking over 100,000 products, which Magento allows store managers to update at scale with features like filters and mass actions. Remember when we referred to Magento as a factory earlier on? It’s because of the platform’s ability to conveniently display products at an industrial scale.
That doesn’t mean Craft Commerce isn’t suitable for large enterprises; in fact, our largest commerce client has thousands of product lines. With the right configuration of rules, it can allow you to upload as many products and variations as you need; it just isn’t as plug-and-play as Magento for larger catalogues. Which is why it’s well-suited to small and medium businesses with different priorities (i.e. content-rich experiences).
Content
In the ever-evolving digital landscape, content is frequently cited as one of the most valuable ways to increase your brand’s visibility, improve engagement with your target audience, and communicate the selling points of your product(s). That’s why it’s a common requirement for e-commerce platforms to display relevant content and create an engaging user-experience.
Magento can house content, and publishing it can be done using the platform’s page builder, but a common complaint is that the tools feel geared towards sales-driven content (e.g. promotions) as opposed to the sort of editorial content that really fosters relationships and builds trust. This makes sense, since Magento is more about automation at scale and focuses more on high-volume.
Craft Commerce approaches content from the opposite angle, giving it a priority seat at the table. You aren’t forced to adopt a theme, giving you control over the content displayed, whether it’s basic text elements or you want to create an editorial-style layout that’s bespoke to the product. Either way, you have that flexibility with your on-page content, which can come in handy if search-engine optimisation (SEO) is a focus for you.
Which e-commerce platform is best for you?
Choosing between Craft Commerce and Magento completely depends on your needs as a business, as well as the angle you prefer to take when advertising your products online.
If you manage the store for a large enterprise, or simply have a vast catalogue of products you need to advertise and manage, then Magento is a powerful commercial platform that allows you to effortlessly manage listings in bulk. It’s quite weak from an editorial standpoint and doesn’t offer much flexibility, making it hard to recommend if content is at the forefront of your priorities.
By comparison, Craft Commerce is perfect for small and medium businesses that want to provide a content-rich user experience. It’s highly customisable, giving you a huge amount of flexibility when creating a digital storefront for your business, which has a positive impact on brand perception, user engagement, and conversion rates. It can still scale to the same size as Magento, but it takes a notable amount of work to get it there.
So, referring back to what we said earlier. Magento is like an industrial factory that’s great for high volume, whereas Craft Commerce is more like a bespoke tailor that focuses on a customised look that provides a rich user experience.
Looking for an e-commerce platform that can grow with your business while helping you connect with your audience? Our team can help you create a webstore that's tailored to you. Drop us a message to learn more.
