Because it was originally built on a monolithic architecture, Intershop scores relatively low for modularity/microservices. Intershop has made some efforts in recent years to increase its microservices offering, particularly by breaking down the monolithic platform into discrete services. However, this course of action has not yet been fully realized.

The Salesforce Solution is not based on a modular system/microservices. It’s a monolith that is making an effort to modernize its offerings—which doesn’t change the origins and nature of its core architecture.

Spryker’s architecture is based on a modular system/microservices, even though the products they offer focus on capabilities which are essentially bundles of microservices. Based on Gartner’s Packaged Business Capability (PBC) paradigm, this approach results in a less granular segmentation than microservices would offer, but reduces complexity and makes the deployment simpler. Services can be deployed independently and customized if needed.

Since 2016, Intershop has maintained a strategic partnership with Microsoft. In 2018, it began to pursue a cloud-first approach, and Intershop is now an integral player in the Microsoft Azure Cloud Solution portfolio. In late 2021, Intershop launched Intershop N, a cloud-based asset which marked the completion of the company’s technical cloud transformation initiative. Intershop’s digital commerce platform is available as a single-tenant hosted or multi-tenant SaaS / PaaS offering. Although Intershop has made many efforts towards a cloud-based approach in recent years, Intershop’s products are still not seamless and require implementation effort. Intershop is not versionless.

Salesforce offers a cloud-native solution. It mainly uses AWS and offers a very solid infrastructure. Updates can be done seamlessly for end-users, although there can be issues with elasticity, e.g. scalability.

Spryker started as a purely on-premise solution, but shifted entirely to a cloud-native approach. The Spryker Cloud Commerce OS is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution mainly deployed on AWS, but Azure and Google Cloud Platform are possible as well. Updates are automated for continuous deployment.

Intershop scores highest for headless, largely due to the fact that they meet modern industry standards in their headless approach. Intershop provides out-of-the-box solutions that are decoupled from their platform, including an Angular-based Progressive Web Application (PWA). They also offer strong multichannel or omnichannel solutions.

Salesforce is not headless; backend and frontend are not decoupled. Therefore, it allows you to work with a page designer solution, which is designed to give merchants more control over templates and content. It comes with a powerful AI-powered personalization feature and, thanks to the acquisition of the PWA service Mobify, it also delivers an out-of-the-box PWA platform. Salesforce does expose APIs and offers a headless CMS, but that didn’t change the underlying architecture of the core platform. It is still not microservice-based.

Spryker is a truly headless solution and optimized to be used in multi- and omnichannel setups. It provides a strong out-of-the-box frontend that lacks some personalization capabilities in Spryker’s own CMS, but the flexibility in terms of customizations and third party integrations is very high.