Adobe Commerce was built on Magento and thus has a long history and widespread use in the market. The open-source version of the platform continues to exist under the name Magento 2. The managed enterprise version of Magento is now part of the Adobe Experience Cloud and can be combined with the various Adobe services.

BigCommerce is an Open SaaS e-commerce platform for B2B and B2C retailers. Founded in 2009 in Sydney, Australia, BigCommerce is currently headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA. As of August 2020, BigCommerce is a NASDAQ-listed company. BigCommerce offers four pricing plans; Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise. In order to fully assess its capabilities, this evaluation is based on their Enterprise plan.

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Malmo, Sweden, inriver has celebrated many milestones since their inception. Today, they have over 600 customers and 300 employees worldwide. Inriver offices are located in major global cities, including Chicago, Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Stockholm, and Manila.

Their technological developments over the years have also been recognized, with Microsoft Azure awarding inriver Partner of the Year in 2019.

Salesforce offers companies feature-packed solutions with a focus on powerful AI. While they offer a comprehensive e-commerce solution with their Commerce Cloud, they still have some catching up to do when it comes to some of the interfaces. For example, microservices are being introduced, but are not yet ubiquitous.

Headquartered in Boston, USA, Salsify has grown from strength to strength since its inception in 2012. Securing a Series F funding round in April 2022, Salsify’s total funding to date amounts to $452.6 million. Overall Salsify has had 12 investors, including Permira and TPG.

Focusing largely on allowing their customers to gain success on the “digital shelf”, Forrester’s Q2 2021 PIM Wave named Salsify a leader and a “visionary and fast mover in the PIM space and commerce.”

SAP Commerce Cloud, formerly known as SAP Hybris Commerce, is the latest e-commerce solution of the German software giant SAP. SAP Commerce Cloud was built mainly for large enterprises with advanced B2B, B2C, and B2B2C use cases. It has a large global customer base, and can be used to build end-to-end omnichannel commerce experiences.

Formerly known as Gladson, over the years, Chicago-based Syndigo has bolstered its positioning in the PIM landscape through various acquisitions. These included acquiring Edgenet, Kwikee, and, in one of the more recent incorporations, Riversand, which has equipped Syndigo with even more powerful product data and content management solutions.

Syndigo was a new entrant in the 2021 Forrester Wave. Syndigo operates globally and serves more than 1,750 retailers and distributors along with over 12,000 manufacturers. Their clients operate in a wide variety of markets, including health and beauty, automtovie, apparel, groceries, and home improvements.

Adobe Commerce generally offers the Magento web API framework, but it does not follow an API first approach. Magento built an online shop system with inseparable GUI, and the API layer was added later, which is inevitably represented in the architecture. Technically, these APIs follow most, but not all, modern industry standards.

APIs via BigCommerce cover most use cases, but don’t offer full customizability. There are some areas where BigCommerce does not offer API coverage; however, because it is an Open SaaS platform, API coverage is fairly extensive.

Inriver is not API first, but includes APIs in some cases. Inriver’s community webpages include documents for developers in relation to their REST API, which launched in 2019, however, their documentation is more limited than that of other providers.

With Salesforce, pre-configured API connections to 3rd party apps (e.g. ERP systems, inventory systems, accounting systems etc.) are not available. Due to their acquisition of the API platform Mulesoft and their very own tech infrastructure, Salesforce offers several APIs. Most are REST standard.

Salsify’s website offers a comprehensive API (Salsify Supplier Experience Management API Documentation) and webhook guide (Salsify Product Experience Management Developer Hub). Salsify supports both REST & GraphQL APIs. Salsify’s in-house team works directly with retailers to guide the creations of APIs. Some of the API integrations Salsify offers includes Accenture, Adobe, and Walmart.

SAP Commerce Cloud is not an API-first solution — only newly-added features follow an API-first approach. Overall, the API coverage for business functionalities is quite extensive, but back-office APIs are very limited. In terms of the quality of existing APIs, SAP follows several modern standards like REST or OAuth 2.0 for authorization, and their documentation is comprehensive. Customization requires a great deal of effort as ​​no API configuration features are available.

Syndigo’s API connections have improved greatly in recent years, with the vendor offering various exposed RESTful APIs which enable efficient connections and data management. Syndigo’s APIs utilize HTTPs requests, JSON structure, and queries using Postman application.

Adobe or Magento Commerce is a monolithic platform that is deployed with all the features included, not just the ones required. It is not possible to decompose included features. The main possibilities for extension and customization are through third-party integrations from the large Adobe ecosystem, or through custom solutions, which are inevitably high-code developments requiring considerable resources.

Although some aspects of the BigCommerce platform lend themselves well to scalability, composability is not something that was originally built into BigCommerce’s offering.

Although several blog posts from inriver show the provider’s understanding of composability and its importance in businesses of the future, the vendor itself does not mention much on its site regarding its own steps towards composability. However, their integrations and cloud native services are clearly a step towards creating a composable product.

For functionality beyond standard integrations, additional coding is required. All customizations must be done in collaboration with existing features e.g. those delivered by salesforce.

Offering several customizable options, Salsify is, to a degree, a composable platform. Salisfy themselves, however, do not refer to themselves as composable, nor refer to many of their features as composable, specifically.

SAP Commerce Cloud does not offer a central extension layer that exists outside of the core applications. New application features cannot be deployed independently of the core application, which significantly limits composability. However, SAP Commerce Cloud offers some practical options for extension. As part of the SAP Customer Experience suite, powerful out-of-the box integrations with other SAP products like Customer Data Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud are available. Additionally, the Extension Factory was introduced in 2019 to simplify the development of extensions. As for high-code customizations, the possibilities are extensive.

Syndigo offers a strong ecosystem and various software partners. This has been corroborated in various reports from analyst groups such as Forrester. However Syndigo would benefit from partnering with a broader set of retailers and building out more “close the loop” analytics. Syndigo is still catching up to peers in areas such as governance and support and integrations. Syndigo customer’s can utilize its integrated Content Experience Hub, which allows them to publish sydicate, manages, and audit content across the world’s largest trading network of brands and recipients.