Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Oh

Joshua Warren  0:06  
so especially for us based business and you're you're looking at these options, I would say that if you're a larger company, you're a company that kind of wants that that level of compliance and a relationship with a big company like Adobe, Adobe commerce cloud definitely comes out ahead. If you're a smaller company, if your company that likes to kind of do it yourself, or if you have a tech team, and you really want to get in there and own and control every single piece of this from start to finish, then Magento open source can work really well.

Darin Newbold  0:41  
Hello, and welcome once again to Commerce Today. My name is Darren Newbold, and as always my awesome sidekick, Joshua Warren is here to talk about what's happening in the wide world of Commerce. Today, how're you doing today?

Joshua Warren  0:54  
Doing good, doing good. It's been a wild and crazy day, but

Darin Newbold  0:59  
we lost power today, we've got a bright sunny day, but it's windy and a bit chilly. But a we're driving on and we're going to talk, we're going to do a little, shall we say comparison shopping here, if you will, choosing the right ecommerce platform for your business. So for this one, Adobe commerce cloud versus Magento, open source who will be the winner, Dawn, Dawn Dawn,

Joshua Warren  1:23  
this is not a cage match. But But in some ways it is. So we are working on a platform guide and a guide to re platforming. And as part of all that we've been kind of profiling the top, top ecommerce platforms and thought it would be fun. We're gonna have a series of these over time where we basically pick two different platforms against each other. And yeah, decided to use a cage match. And so it kind of is Yeah. And really, I mean, it's because of the your platform and your platform decision. I mean, that is the core of your E commerce business. If you choose the right platform, you really set yourself up for success, you choose the wrong platform. And well, basically you set yourself up to pay to reap lat form again, and possibly again and again.

Darin Newbold  2:05  
Well, and I think there's a saying out there that size does matter. Or in the case, when it comes to ecommerce platforms, one size doesn't fit all. So all right, as we're looking at Adobe commerce, cloud and Magento, open source, what's kind of the overview of each so help me because if you ask me, I kind of know the difference, but maybe not as much as I ought to. And I'm guessing there, there's merchants out there that may not know any difference at all, or even know that there was a Magento open source?

Joshua Warren  2:37  
Yeah, well, in a lot of people don't even know there's a connection between the two. That used to be pretty common knowledge. But I think that's been lost over time. So Magento open source was first created many, many years ago by a company named Burien. That then became a company named Magento. Magento was then acquired by Adobe. And so Magento open source is that open source core that's been around for a long time was it went through a major rewrite and version two, not too long ago. And then Adobe commerce cloud is that exact same Magento, open source code base, plus some features plus some code plus some additional services around it, and a few additional modules. So they're actually fairly close together, but also very different in some ways.

Darin Newbold  3:22  
So all right, let's start talking some of the differences, the feature or functionality of each of the of each of the platforms. Let's start with Magento, open source functionality. What are some things pieces about it that are different than what you might find an Adobe commerce cloud?

Joshua Warren  3:37  
Yeah, so Magento open source. So basically, all of the Magento open source functionality is in Adobe commerce cloud. And so any feature that open source has commerce Cloud has that. Some of the differences though, are with open source, you can edit any and all of the code, I mean, literally anything. Sometimes things you probably ought not do, yeah, dangerous. Whereas Adobe commerce cloud, while it's a very open platform, and you do have the ability to customize quite a bit of the code. As part of that it's a platform as a service. And I guess I should have started there. So commerce clouds, a platform as a service, it does lock off your ability to edit certain core pieces of code to basically make sure it enforces best practices, whereas Magento open source, that's an on premise application, you can deploy it wherever you want. You can do whatever you want to

Darin Newbold  4:26  
it. Well, yeah, you kind of said the code. Were there on premise. So ones in the cloud, wherever that is, and and the others on premise. So maybe just a little bit more. I know we talked about this maybe in another episode, but

Joshua Warren  4:40  
let's refresh Oh, just a reminder, the cloud is just somebody else's computer. I love putting fancy names on it. But that's all it really is. It's computers. Someone else has to come

Darin Newbold  4:49  
from someone else's garage or closet is. The cloud is Amazon

Joshua Warren  4:53  
has some rather large closets they do. So yeah, that's that's what in the cloud base. only means is it's been run by hosted on other servers you and your company are not having to maintain. It implies cloud usually implies some level of redundancy and an Adobe commerce cloud there is that whereas this on premise version, the Magento, open source version, that you have to find a host, so you can host it in house. So if you have your own servers, you can run it there. You can go to a hosting company, have them hosted, you can even take an on premise application and deploy it yourself to the cloud. Which is a lot of steps which at that point, I would question if it's not just more cost effective, why not just

Darin Newbold  5:36  
go to the cloud of the cloud? Okay. And you'd already kind of said that if there's a feature or functionality that's in Magento, open source, you're gonna find it in Adobe commerce cloud, correct? Correct. Now is the opposite the same? So the opposite is not true. And I know you told me not to ask you about this, but I'm going to do

Joshua Warren  5:55  
well. And one thing we haven't talked about yet, we kind of get to in the next section is pricing. Yeah, yeah. Magento open source. It's an interesting, and that would be a whole podcast episode in and of itself. But basically Magento open source, it is technically still kind of owned by Adobe. But it is shepherded by a nonprofit association called the Magento Association. They're volunteers that are kind of managing it working on it, that sort of thing. So it's a free open source product, whereas Adobe commerce cloud you have to pay for. So to basically create more reasons that you get more value out of Adobe commerce cloud, Adobe does save some functionality just for commerce cloud. So probably the biggest, simplest example I can think of is Adobe commerce. Cloud adds extensive b2b functionality. I mean, just some amazing stuff that isn't present in Magento. Open Source.

Darin Newbold  6:47  
Gotcha. So in that case, if you had a more b2b oriented merchant that you wanted to work with, or, or interface with Adobe commerce cloud is a better could be the better choice versus definitely versus Magento. Open Source. All right, well, that's let's move on pricing scalability considerations, I'm sure there's some significant difference, because you already said my job Magento, open source is, quote, unquote, free ish.

Joshua Warren  7:13  
Yep. And as a lot of people in the open source community like to say it is free as in speech, not free as in beer. So you do not necessarily you can download the code and run it for free. However, you don't get free support, you don't just because it's released for free doesn't mean you can go to the developers that have donated their time and say you must fix this. And that's where I think sometimes you will get a little tripped up and thinking you know, this is totally free, because you're still going to need to pay someone to support it, whether it's your your in house team, a hosting provider, like someone's going to have to keep your site running. But with Adobe commerce, cloud, Adobe is going to keep your site running, they're going to give you that additional platform, since its platform as a service. So it adds in caching systems, air monitoring systems, deployment systems, all that tool, and you get all of that you get all that additional functionality that we mentioned. And it's designed really to scale like that's another key differentiator that Adobe tries to apply between cloud and open source is that if you really need to scale, especially if you need to scale in the direction of lots of transactions per second, then you need Adobe commerce cloud and the features built in there, but it's priced to match that. So this is not, it's not free. And it's not your $99 a month or heck, I think Shopify is even cheaper than that. But it's not your, you know, double digits a month pricing.

Darin Newbold  8:38  
So, okay, based on that, because we have several other things we want to talk about about this. And I do want to do these comparisons, but let's, we're gonna take a little pause right there. I'm a merchant, what would cause me to choose one versus the other? What what would be those scenarios of hey, maybe brand new merchant, maybe I'm technically oriented, or my three other people that are helping me start this business, more of a startup grassroots? Would that be more of the Magento open source willing to roll your sleeves up, dig in, throw some code around, it

Joshua Warren  9:11  
definitely could be in the early early days of Magento. Even back then, there was also a paid version, just different names. And back then we saw a lot of the companies that first started using Magento open source were very tech oriented founders, people that basically said, Hey, this is fun, I want to kind of have this level of control, I want to get in there and, and modify this code. And, and honestly, it was it's, it was a fun time. And it was a very fun group of people to work with. But it was a very tech heavy dev heavy sort of focus

Darin Newbold  9:45  
game. And then and then the flip side of that, the maybe more established type of merchant that has high growth potential or high on a high growth needs. That true omni channel experience, if you will, and and maybe he has lots of channels or multiple stores multiple ways that people are purchasing things that's going to be a much better, much better suited to Adobe commerce cloud. Yeah. And

Joshua Warren  10:15  
I will say pretty much all that you can do on Magento. Open Source, it's just a matter of how much effort how many additional services are you gonna have to bring to bear? And is that cost effective? Another interesting thing? Well, again, it's like our Federal Reserve talks a few episodes ago, I find this interesting, I don't know what the rest of the world does. But I've noticed early on and really the history of Magento open source merchants in Europe and another country's skew more towards open source merchants in the US tended to skew a little bit more towards the paid edition. And say what you will about it, a lot of it came down to compliance and legal protections. And basically, open source products all have a disclaimer in them that hey, you use this at your own risk. It's as is somebody Sue's you because they think that your website infringes on their copyright, well, sorry. Whereas the paid editions of Magento, and of Adobe commerce and Adobe commerce cloud, you have a contract with Adobe, you don't just have a nice little license agreement from volunteers, basically saying you're on your own. So you have a contract, you have certain resting expectations for Adobe support for they're kind of vouching for the code, things like that.

Darin Newbold  11:29  
That's interesting. Okay. All right. Well, let's, let's keep moving forward. Here. We'll get off of the pricing and scalability, let's, let's talk about user experience. And the customization. I can only imagine that I mean, you already said, I can customize virtually anything with open source, how's that play out for the user experience in the differences between the two. So I'd

Joshua Warren  11:48  
say the biggest difference on user experience and the customization is if you're using a lot of other Adobe tools, and we'll get into this even in the integration section, if you are using Adobe Experience Manager, and you're using a lot of those other tools, Adobe analytics, Adobe, pretty other things. Yeah. So outside of the Commerce world, all the other wonderful stuff Adobe has, those are typically going to play a lot nicer and easier with commerce cloud than they are with Magento. Open source. Now, Adobe will sell you Experience Manager lets you use Experience Manager with open source with really any platform if you want to. But the use case that is basically best supported is if you're combining those two together.

Darin Newbold  12:35  
Gotcha. And then is it a similar type of situation when you start integrating third party tools and extensions. Now typically,

Joshua Warren  12:42  
typically, any third party tool or extension that is going to work with Adobe commerce cloud is going to work with Magento open source. Sometimes, some developers and some services like working with commerce cloud more than with open source, just because it's the exact same environment every time you know what you're gonna get. Whereas with Magento, open source, so way back in the day, I was involved in some Magento extensions. And it was always kind of frustrating dealing with some of those extension users for support, because some of them might have it on a $5 month hosting plan. Some of them might have it on a server that they set up themselves. You know, there's always the one support ticket getting opened by the guy that was running under Windows, and you're like, How'd you even get this to run under Windows? Where is Adobe commerce cloud, you kind of know what you're gonna get. So that's where, while it's typically pretty similar, there's a few things that will target just one or the other platform.

Darin Newbold  13:40  
Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. So, but still with an open source? What about and you already talked about this a little bit in the pricing piece about support? But what about security? So security and support options between the two?

Joshua Warren  13:52  
Yeah, so I really appreciate and I'm blanking on his name right now. Sorry, if you see this, but there's an Adobe employee that does a really good job of presentation, a lot of the different magenta and Adobe events. That basically explains that. Just because you're using a specific software package and a specific version of a specific software package doesn't mean you are aren't PCI compliant. Basically, it gives you the possibility of being PCI compliant. There's other things you might need to do. But I will say that typically, PCI compliance can be easier to achieve on Adobe commerce cloud, if you can kind of shorten the burden, basically, of all the things that make you jump through in that process than if you're hosting it yourself with Magento open source.

Darin Newbold  14:39  
Okay, is there any other security concerns beyond PCI compliance that

Joshua Warren  14:44  
Magento or Adobe and Magento the way they work together? They do a good job of security patches that are released for Adobe commerce cloud are also released for Magento open source. Kind of the advantage especially if you're, you're trying to host Magento open source years. So if you're not working with the host that does a lot of Magento sites, you may not know what the new exploits are that new security issues are. Whereas Adobe with commerce cloud, they host so many Adobe commerce sites, they usually know about the newest exploits first. And if there's a way to fix that, like the firewall level, they'll get that done right away.

Darin Newbold  15:18  
Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. Well, let's kind of wrap this up. We had the cage match here between Magento open source and Adobe commerce cloud. What's the verdict? As you see it? Yeah, well, I

Joshua Warren  15:31  
would say so especially for us based business. And you're looking at these options, I would say that if you're a larger company, you're a company that kind of wants that that level of compliance and a relationship with a big company like Adobe, Adobe commerce cloud definitely comes out ahead. If you're a smaller company, if you're a company that likes to kind of do it yourself, or if you have a tech team, and you really want to get in there and own and control every single piece of this from start to finish than Magento open source can work really well.

Darin Newbold  16:02  
Gotcha. Well, it seems like as with most things, in the great answer to the question, the ultimate question is, what's the best e commerce platform? And the short answer is? Well, it depends. And it really does depend on your business, and your unique needs and goals and what you have and where you're at. And so each merchant is going to have to kind of do their own evaluation and really kind of see what makes sense. One final thought that I had here just to add to this, How hard are what is what's the lift? What might it be if I wanted to go from a Magento open source to Adobe commerce cloud, or in the crazy way, vice versa? Now, I

Joshua Warren  16:43  
don't think we're allowed to ask that second question. Okay. We're getting skipped out? No, only answer both. Because they are based on the same kind of core code base, it is possible to move in either direction, it is much simpler to go from Magento open source to Adobe commerce cloud than the opposite direction. And a lot of that depends on how well besides built if it's a well built Magento open source site, it can be relatively easy to basically it's not quite a copy paste, but it's close. However, it's not well written. There have been sites that I've looked at and evaluated and basically said, Hey, you're, you're using to start from scratch or from scratch. And then on the basically the downgrade. Going from commerce cloud to open source. There's an even better chance, especially if you had been using a lot of those Adobe commerce only features, there's a better chance you're gonna end up starting from scratch. Gotcha.

Darin Newbold  17:41  
All right. Well, that gives you the good the bad, the ugly, if you will on Adobe commerce, cloud and Magento open source. We hope you have enjoyed our episode today. Please continue to tune in and find out what's happening in Commerce Today. Take care, have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai