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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.