Akeneo was founded in 2013 as an open-source PIM. Today, Akeneo is headquartered in Nantes, France, with offices worldwide including the USA, UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Australia. Akeneo employs over 250 members of staff and provides services to over 550 customers, including Shop.com, Midland Scientific, and Fossil.

Since its inception, Akeneo has been recognized on several occasions for a variety of accolades, including being named on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA list for 2017, and being recognized as a leader in product information management applications on an IDC Marketscape report in 2019.

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.

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.

Spryker offers a fully modular digital commerce platform for B2B and B2C, as well as Enterprise Marketplace capabilities. Spryker was founded in 2014 in Berlin, Germany, and raised over $130 million in a Series C funding, led by Silicon Valley-based TCV in December 2020. According to Gartner®, Spryker is the fastest growing vendor in the 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce.

Akeneo adopts and API-first approach. Akeneo’s website states that, as well as being high-performing, their containerized architecture follows industry standards and best practices. Akeneo offers extensive documentation on-site to guide customers through using APIs. As with their microservices, Akeneo’s App Store relies on APIs to connect to available extensions, and allows companies and clients to provide their own extensions via API. Both REST and Events APIs are utilized.

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.

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.

Spryker is an API first solution with an exceptionally high coverage of functions via APIs. The Spryker “GLUE API” adheres to all modern quality and security standards, and supports versioning as well as different output types. High-code customizations and low-code configuration are available.

Although Akeneo does not directly mention composability in their offering, it is clear through their implementation of several features, such as their App Store and scalability offered through their SaaS models, that a level of composability can be achieved. Their offering of many other pre-built integrations with vendors in a range of fields further adds to the ability to customize Akeneo’s platform.

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.

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.

The Spryker Cloud Commerce OS is a modular system following the best of breed approach with a decent-sized and rapidly growing ecosystem of partners. On a business level, Spryker’s App Composition Platform is particularly powerful, enabling one-click integration of technology partners. On a technical level, Spryker provides a considerable number of Software Development Kits (SDK) as building blocks to simplify the development of new integrations, as well as high-, low- and no-code customizations.