Magento 2 vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Centra: A side‑by‑side comparison
Ecommerce has evolved. Gone are the days when a single platform could be good for everything. Modern original brands need agility, design freedom and scale to grow and reach their customers internationally.
Brands Love Us
You don't have to take our word for it. Our scores on G2 say it all! The popular product reviews platform is a valuable source of honest customer feedback.
| Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Magento | Centra | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meets Requirements | 8.6 | 8.4 | 9.1 |
| Ease of Use | 8.2 | 7.1 | 9.0 |
| Ease of Setup | 7.3 | 6.2 | 8.3 |
| Ease of Admin | 7.9 | 7.3 | 9.1 |
| Quality of Support | 8.2 | 7.0 | 9.1 |
| Ease of Doing Business With | 8.3 | 7.5 | 9.7 |
| Product Direction | 8.2 | 6.9 | 9.5 |
The evolution of commerce platforms
Running a fashion brand? Pick the right tool for the trade!
If you’re doing fashion and lifestyle on a monolithic ecommerce platform, you’re very likely limiting the growth potential of your brand. Today’s leading monolithic SaaS platforms don’t support the business logic and complexity of modern lifestyle commerce. They may be good for everything, but they fail to meet the needs of modern, dynamic fashion brands.
At a glance
While there are many ecommerce platforms on the market, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento are often mentioned as the top ones. However, when you look at how both platforms were built, which industries they serve best, and how they support growth, their shortcomings start to emerge – especially in how they solve the challenges of modern, global fashion ecommerce.
| Magento | Salesforce | Centra | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for... |
|
|
|
| Powerful vs. ease of use |
|
|
|
| Wholesale vs. direct-to- consumer |
|
|
|
| Single vs. multi-market |
|
|
|
| Custom design/dev vs. closed templates |
|
|
|
| Payment options |
|
|
|
| Hosting |
|
|
|
| Automatic updates vs versions |
|
|
|
| Licensing fees |
|
|
|
The 12 challenges of fashion commerce
To scale fast and grow internationally, dynamic fashion brands need a solution that enables it without imposing limitations in terms of design and development. These challenges include scalability, complexity, design freedom, internationalization, and suitability for selling fashion and lifestyle products.
Let’s look at how popular platforms solve these challenges, and how they stack up against Centra’s headless, fashion-centric approach to fashion ecommerce.
Challenge #1
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Ease of use and development
Modern brands need a platform that’s easy to launch and maintain, without the need for developers constantly babysitting the platform to make sure it works properly as the brand grows. Let’s have a look at how Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento and Centra compare in terms of ease of use and development agility.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra offers a clean, easy-to-use backend that is constantly developed and improved. The powerful admin interface is developed by a dedicated team of UI/UX experts to make the daily work of managing a brand as easy as possible while keeping up to date with changing conditions.
The guiding principle in Centra’s user interface design is to enable power users to do as much as possible, as fast as possible. Throughout the interface, this design principle becomes visible
Challenge #2
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Design freedom and flexibility
In terms of website design, the fashion industry has unique needs. Ambitious brands need the design freedom to build brand-authentic, pixel-perfect sites – without compromises or design limitations.
Design freedom means empowering editors with a full-scale modular CMS mixing content marketing and shop capabilities. Most popular ecommerce platforms don’t enable full freedom, limiting brands’ growth and flexibility.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra’s API-first approach caters to the needs of ambitious fashion brands. Many of Centra’s clients choose to work with a headless CMS as part of their front-end stack for a perfect mix of content marketing and advanced shop functionalities. The platform’s API coverage allows brands to elevate their front-end experiences without worrying about the restrictions commonly associated with popular monolithic ecommerce platforms.
Centra’s API-first approach caters to the needs of ambitious fashion brands. Many of Centra’s clients choose to work with a headless CMS as part of their front-end stack for a perfect mix of content marketing and advanced shop functionalities. The platform’s API coverage allows brands to elevate their front-end experiences without having to worry about the restrictions commonly associated with popular monolithic ecommerce platforms.
Challenge #2
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Multi‑store and internationalization
Offering a localized website and local payment methods can often increase conversion rates by over 10%. The best local shipping options can often add another 10% to that figure.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra’s native multi-store architecture allows for full management of core data locally and globally across different stores, supporting brands with global reach or aspirations to enter new markets.
Centra allows admin users to manage product management at a store level, a language level, or globally. Descriptions can be different for stores based on languages, while the same images can be used globally. The same principle applies across things like category management, promotions, customer management, etc.
Challenge #3
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Wholesale & B2B capabilities
Wholesale experience is a new competitive frontier for fashion brands. Shopify offers a product called wholesale, but it comes with fewer features than the B2B ordering apps that have been around for the past 10 years. If you want to move ahead with a wholesale strategy, it is clear you’ve outgrown Shopify. It will take weeks of development to make Shopify work as a wholesale website with the features you need.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, you also gain a fully digital wholesale platform out of the box to help your brand stand out from the competition. The built-in B2B portal for buyers, sales reps and agents, supports the full wholesale business logic for preorders and at-once orders.
Challenge #4
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Native features vs plugins
Plugins and extensions offer a convenient way of expanding the functionality of your ecommerce platform, but native integrations are cheaper in the long run.
If you do not have a dedicated developer, be prepared to pay extra to hire developers working on your site 24/7. If you only need a simple site, this won't apply to you, but then you also have no reason to use Magento when simpler, more stable products are available.
| Magento | Salesforce | Centra | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Features for fashion | ⛔ Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited) | ⛔ Additional features available through Salesforce AppExchange Apps and other integrations developed and maintained by third-party Salesforce partners. | ✅ Native |
There are four big problems with the app-based approach to achieving the basic functionality that all fashion brands need:
Apps or plugins are not equal to native functionality.
There are things that simply can’t be achieved by apps, as they can’t access specific data. Business logic that needs to be interconnected is turned into silos – the app needed for managing the product catalog doesn’t speak to the app used to manage inventory.
With Centra, fashion brands get a highly integrated feature set that covers all core needs, out of the box.
Apps raise security and stability concerns
Each app is basically another website inside the ecommerce admin, which means you depend on many third-party developers to keep their sites up and running well, and keep the data secure.
Apps cost extra
Monolithic platforms might look cheap to start with, but with all the apps, payment transaction fees, FX markups, and costs per storefront, the cost can go very high.
Apps lead to a cumbersome user interface
Because the apps are siloed, non-native extensions, they are managed from different parts of the user interface. Simple processes that are achieved with a few simple clicks in Centra need multiple steps in multiple apps with Shopify.
Monolithic platforms like Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud direct you to apps in their marketplace even when it should be something natively offered by the platform.
Why brand migrate to Centra
Launching on Centra, original fashion brands get all the features they need, integrated in a tight package.
Challenge #5
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Performance, scalability and stability impact on SEO and conversion
A faster store means better SEO and more sales – it's common knowledge today. Because most SEO is happening on the front end, ambitious ecommerce stores need a decoupled architecture to gain fuller control of the SEO aspects of the website.
Also, most sales in fashion commerce happen on mobile devices, which makes mobile SEO and performance super important for brands.
Why brands migrate to Centra
If your store runs slow, it is a telling sign to upgrade your setup to Centra – a future-proof headless platform built for speed and growth.
Challenge #6
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Support
We’ll make sure you get up to speed quickly, and our support hotline is always available to answer any questions.
Centra’s support is first in class, known for its reliability and availability.
Challenge #7
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Architecture
Website speed impacts the entire digital strategy, from visibility (SEO and SEM), through traffic, the user experience, and ultimately conversions and revenue. This directly results from Google’s growing focus on speed. Stores running on bloated monolithic commerce platforms with customized themes and lots of extensions lack the speed you need to rank high in SERP.
| Salesforce | Magento | Centra | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fully headless, composable and API-first architecture | 🟡 | 🟡 | ✅ |
You can build a headless store on top of a monolithic commerce platform but you’ll miss out on the tooling that made you choose the platform in the first place. At the same time, you will also lose most of the benefits generally associated with headless like the low price and minimal developer support. You will basically end up paying as much or more than a true headless ecommerce setup – while not getting all the benefits.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Fully headless, composable and API-first architecture offers some performance and growth benefits that are impossible to achieve with a monolithic platform like Shopify Plus or Magento.
Challenge #8
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Cost of ownership
The total cost of development and maintenance, as well as hosting and other fees like payment processing, may exceed the initially projected cost of launching on a legacy monolithic or generic headless platform.
Because Adobe Magento Commerce pricing is negotiable, you will need to contact them directly and provide your detailed business information to get the exact pricing plan for your ecommerce store. The charges include:
Platform fee: Magento’s license fee is an annual up-front fee based on merchants’ Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and company size. As a result, the pricing for Magento varies widely. Licensing starts at about $22,000 per year.
Development cost: Average Magento Commerce Edition build cost varies between $100,000 and $500,000, and can also be much higher.
Hosting: Hosting service is not included in Magento’s platform charge. You may consider selecting third-party hosting services that cost about $1,000/month. Another choice is Magento 2 Commerce Cloud Hosting, about $3,333 per month for both hosting and platform fee combined.
The price of hosting for Magento Commerce from a third-party provider, the fee, $1,000 is just the minimum recommended rate. Depending on your store traffic, you need to choose a fitting plat at a reliable hosting company.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With many features offered out of the box, Centra significantly reduces the long-term cost of maintaining the platform and ensuring its good performance in peak sale periods. Since there are no hidden costs and no third-party integrations needed, Centra is the most affordable e-commerce platform of the three.
Challenge #9
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Analytics and reporting
Commerce needs reports to give you the means to review your store's recent activity, get insight into your visitors, analyze your online store speed, and analyze your store's transactions.
Centra is your complete digital control room, giving you analytics and reporting modules for a detailed overview of your business performance.
Challenge #10
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Bundling, promotions and upselling features
Centra has impressive features supporting trading and marketing activity.
Challenge #11
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Suitability for fashion and lifestyle products
Most popular monolithic platforms don’t support the business logic and complexity of fashion lifestyle commerce. They are good if you want to launch fast without paying much but then hold back your growth by not offering core, fashion-specific functionalities.
Why brands migrate to Centra
Centra is built for original fashion and lifestyle brands and supports complex lifestyle products. Centra makes handling styles, colors, and sizes, different product displays, collections and drops easy.
Supported by Centra, fashion brands can focus on growing their fan base and global expansion rather than on maintaining complex technology. The features and roadmap are 100% designed for the needs of brands with global ambitions and no retailers influence the prioritization of features.
Challenge #12
Shopify Plus vs Magento vs Centra: Omnichannel capabilities
Brands want to sell to consumers and retailers across channels, countries and marketplaces to scale globally. Here is how the platforms compare in terms of omnichannel capabilities enabling a boost to a brand’s growth.
Why brands migrate to Centra
With Centra, you can sell through distributors, agents, resellers, marketplaces and their own direct‑to‑consumer websites – all from a single platform.
You’re in good company
International fashion brands choose Centra as the only platform that fully understands the needs and complex business logic of fashion commerce.
Join the vanguard of original brands that scale fast and expand on new markets without the limitations imposed by their legacy ecommerce platforms. Centra have a very impressive portfolio of brands using their platform, including Nudie Jeans, Sandqvist, ETON, iDeal of Sweden and Norse Projects – with some of these being on the platform right from the start.
