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Magento 2 vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Centra: A side‑by‑side comparison

The ecommerce landscape has transformed. The era when a single solution could cater to all needs is over. Modern original brands require flexibility, creative freedom, and scalability to expand and engage their global audiences.

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Salesforce Commerce CloudMagento 2Centra
Meets requirements8.68.49.0
Ease of use8.27.29.0
Ease of setup7.36.28.5
Ease of admin7.97.49.1
Quality of support8.27.09.2
Ease of doing business With8.37.59.6
Product direction8.26.99.7

The evolution of commerce platforms

Past
Legacy platforms
Example: Magento
redEcommerce business logic coupled with CMS and front-end website
redBusiness logic and website customized by integrating directly with the platform’s source code
redDifficult to upgrade due to version and vendor lock-in. Significant cost to keep an installation running
Present
Monolithic SaaS platforms
Example: Salesforce Commerce Cloud
yellowEcommerce business logic coupled with CMS and front end on limited APIs
yellowLimited possibilities to extend the built-in business logic and functionality through apps
yellowLimited flexibility prevents rapid online business development and makes it hard to meet enterprise needs
Future
Composable SaaS platforms
greenPresentation layer fully decoupled from the ecommerce engine
greenOpen architecture, with data accessible through well-defined APIs
greenAPI “technical contract” between platform and implementation enables rapid low-cost development

Running a fashion brand? Pick the right tool for the trade!

If you're running a fashion and lifestyle brand on a monolithic ecommerce platform, it's highly probable that your brand's growth potential is being constrained. The leading monolithic SaaS platforms of today often fall short in handling modern lifestyle commerce’s business logic. While they might be adequate for a broad range of needs, they often fail to cater to the specific requirements of modern, forward-thinking fashion brands.

Salesforce commerce cloud vs magento vs Centra

A brief overview

While there are many ecommerce platforms on the market, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento 2 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.

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Salesforce CCMagento 2Centra
Built for...
  • An industry-agnostic platform built for mid-size retailers and brands.
  • Many third-party apps are needed to get the core commerce features like variant handling, campaign features, and international sales.
  • Magento is a generic retailer-focused ecommerce product. Industry-specific adaptation needs to be added through customization, driving cost and complexity.
  • Geared for established or aspiring brands that need a flexible platform to achieve their global ambitions.
Powerful vs. ease of use
  • Powerful but complex.
  • Comprehensive and advanced customization involves setting up many parameters. This requires a significant setup effort to achieve and later maintain desired tailored customer experience. Salesforce comprehensive, and sometimes complex setup, typically requires significant support from third party salesforce experts.
  • Powerful but complex. Requires specific Magento programming skills to customize and maintain. Most programmers have difficulty learning Magento.
  • Centra is designed with the needs of business users in mind, rather than IT professionals. Its robust features make it a comfortable fit for seasoned ecommerce managers. And our top-tier support and onboarding ensure that users swiftly transition into power users.
Wholesale vs. direct-to-
consumer
  • B2B and B2C ecommerce for business customers and wholesale.
  • However, Salesforce's B2B is not built for specific needs of fashion and lifestyle buying.
  • Magento offers both B2B and B2C commerce; however, it lacks fashion-specific features.
  • With Centra, you can handle all channels from one platform — both Wholesale B2B and Direct-to-Consumer B2C.
Single vs. multi-market
  • Multiple markets are possible. Still, it involves comprehensive options and many parameters to set up markets.
  • Multiple markets is possible. However, administration is quite complex and not built to scale on product nor content level.
  • Centra enables multiple markets, multiple currencies, multiple languages, prices and size charts depending on the location.
  • You can have multiple storefronts with advanced internalization.
Localization
  • Salesforce enables localization so you can use different images, products, sizes, descriptions, etc.per market.
  • Magento 2 provides basic built-in tools for translation, but if you want comprehensive translation or localization, you'll need to do it manually or use additional extensions or apps from the Magento Marketplace.
  • With Centra, any information can be localized. You can serve any number of markets, languages, currencies, payment methods, price lists, warehouses, and users.
Promotions
  • Salesforce offers a promotion engine and supports various types of products, e.g. bundled products.
  • However, it requires significant effort and time to set it up.
  • Native support for promotions, gift cards, bundling, private sales and events.
  • Native support for bundles, advanced promotions, and discounts. High flexibility in terms of pricing, stock, discounts, inheriting of attributes, etc.
Payment options
  • Multiple payment options available.
  • Multiple payment options available.
  • Flexible payment options.
  • Centra offers 200+ leading payment methods through multiple PSPs, empowering brands to sell globally.
Omnichannel capabilities
  • Salesforce CC has some omnichannel capabilities. But, integrating the platform with other systems, such as CRM or ERP solutions, may require additional development effort and expertise. Order management is possible via paid add-on.
  • Magento 2 provides omnichannel capabilities, e.g. connecting social media, and third-party systems such as ERP.
  • With Centra, brands gain advanced omnichannel capabilities. It’s possible to connect Centra with marketplaces and ad networks via APIs. You can integrate Centra with different company systems.
Order management
  • Order management is a premium feature that costs extra. It has basic standard inventory tracking.
  • Magento 2 offers inventory and order management, store fulfillment and can manage multiple warehouses.
  • Centra offers an advanced order management system. It enables order viewing, and automation of many processes, and supports replenishment, overselling protection, return, and refunds.
Licensing fees
  • Salesforce comes with different modules that are priced separately and with different tiers.
  • There’s no hosting fees, but high fees for all modules (DTC + B2B + Order management + Support).
  • Salesforce CC may charge you a percentage fee of up to 3% GMV for DTC sales, up to 2% of GMV for B2B, and up to $0.5 per order for order management.
  • Fees for licenses, customization, hosting, updates and upgrades come on top of website development, creating a high and difficult to forecast total cost of ownership.
  • Centra comes at a single cost, with no transaction fees. The cost covers all necessary modules for a fashion and lifestyle brand, but you’re free to switch to your preferred providers if you wish.
  • Additional costs (not payable to Centra) would be for design and development of the on-brand website and the underlying CMS and payment solutions.

The 13 challenges of fashion commerce

Fashion brands looking to scale rapidly and grow globally need an ecommerce platform that enables them to do so without limiting their design and development capabilities. These brands face multiple hurdles, which include scalability, complexity, design freedom, internationalization, and suitability for selling fashion and lifestyle products.

Check out how well-known platforms such as Magento 2 and Salesforce Commerce Cloud address these issues, and how Centra's headless, fashion-focused approach stacks up.

Salesforce commerce cloud vs magento vs Centra

Challenge #1

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 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

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Design freedom and flexibility

When it comes to web design, fashion brands have distinct requirements. Modern ambitious brands want to build on-brand, flawless sites – without design compromises or limitations.

Design freedom means editors can work with robust modular CMS blending content marketing and shopping functionalities. The majority of popular ecommerce platforms don't offer complete freedom, restricting brands’ potential 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. 

Salesforce commerce cloud vs magento vs Centra architecture and features

Challenge #3

Salesforce CC vs Magento vs Centra: Multi‑market and localization

A successful international sales strategy starts with localization. Different regions have different prices. What works in one may not work in another. It's not just about language, it's about payment methods and currencies too. Even varying climate zones make certain items sell differently in different places.

Holidays, seasonality, and trends vary from country to country and can create different sales spikes, such as Singles' Day in China, a popular online shopping holiday, and Les Soldes in France, a nationwide retail sales period. Similarly, even aspects as seemingly universal as clothing sizes can vary across geographies.

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 enables admin users to handle product management at various levels - individual stores, specific languages, or on a global scale. It allows for language-specific descriptions while using the same images universally. The same approach works for promotions, category management, and customer management.

Challenge #4

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Wholesale

Many well-known ecommerce platforms, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento 2, may not fully meet the needs of brands seeking a comprehensive wholesale experience. Their wholesale offering is limited to creating a separate store with distinct pricing and invoice payment options. Therefore, brands aiming to enhance their wholesale strategy require a platform tailored to the needs of wholesale buyers.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra gives you an integrated digital wholesale platform right from the start. It's tailored to the buying processes and flows unique to the fashion industry, especially for wholesalers. With Centra, you get all the features you need to support fashion business logic, like seasonal preorders, collections, delivery windows, and more.

Challenge #5

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Native features vs plugins

Add-ons and plugins can boost your online store's features, but choosing a platform with built-in tools can save money in the long run. If you're running a simple site, you might not need this, and you wouldn't need a complex platform like Salesforce CC or Magento 2 when there are simpler options available.

Salesforce CC and Magento 2 are designed to serve many types of businesses. But for fashion and lifestyle brands, this wide focus means they might need to use many apps or create custom solutions to get the basic features they need for their industry.

Also, there are four big problems that fashion brands often run into when they use apps to get these basic features:

  1. 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. 

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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 monolithic platforms.

Monolithic platforms direct you to apps in their marketplace even when it should be something natively offered by the platform.

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Magento 2Salesforce Commerce CloudCentra
Features for fashionThrough 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

Why brand migrate to Centra

Launching on Centra, fashion brands get all the features they need in one neat package. While having many apps might seem good at first, it can often lead to a messy experience and problems with how things run. Centra's strong API lets it work smoothly with top-notch services, getting rid of the need for extra apps and scattered data.

Challenge #6

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Performance, scalability and stability impact on SEO and conversion

Site speed is an essential component of brands’ digital strategy, as it affects visibility, traffic, and user experience. However, stores built with too many extensions and customized themes tend to be slow which makes it difficult for them to appear high in search engine results pages (SERP). Stores running on bloated monolithic commerce platforms with customized themes and lots of extensions lack the speed you need to rank high in SERP. 

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 low price and minimal developer support. You will end up paying as much or more than a true headless ecommerce setup – while not getting all the benefits. 

Since most sales take place on mobile devices, mobile SEO and performance matter a great deal to fashion brands. 

For all these reasons, ambitious brands are choosing decoupled architectures to improve SEO for their websites. 

An ecommerce agency called Limesharp recently tested how fast it takes to add items to a cart on popular platforms. Centra, for example, delivers high performance with an average add-to-cart time of 125ms, other platforms run slower, for example: 

• Shopify: 490ms 

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud: 525ms

• Adobe Commerce Cloud: 915ms

• SAP Hybris: 1.7 seconds

For optimal performance, the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) time, a key measure of website responsiveness, should ideally be 200ms. INP is a relatively new metric introduced by Google as part of its Core Web Vitals suite. These metrics evaluate the quality of a user's experience on a webpage, focusing on elements such as responsiveness and user engagement.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra is a modern headless ecommerce platform, designed with a focus on rapid performance and the ability to grow. The underlying technology of such headless platforms allows them to expand horizontally, effectively managing virtually any load while maintaining exceptional response times.

Challenge #7

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Support

Aside from features and capabilities, fast and responsive support plays a crucial role in determining how quickly brands can set up and operate their stores.

Why brands migrate to Centra 

With Centra, brands can rely on experienced, high-touch support from migration and implementation through to onboarding and post-launch optimizations

Challenge #8

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Cost of ownership

The total cost of ownership (TCO) is a way to figure out how much an investment really costs. It includes the initial costs and the costs of running and maintaining an ecommerce platform over three to five years. Operating costs, which are the costs of running the platform, make up a big part of the TCO, usually between 40% and 60%. So, it's important to think about these costs from the start to make sure you stay within your budget.

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

Salesforce commerce cloud vs magento vs Centra cost of ownership

Because Magento 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:

  1. 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.

  2. Development cost: Average Magento Edition build cost varies between $100,000 and $500,000, and can also be much higher.

  3. 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 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

By providing many features out of the box, Centra cuts your long-term maintenance costs and makes sure your platform works during peak times. You won't need to worry about time-consuming maintenance or the need for additional third-party integrations. Centra has a low cost of ownership with no hidden costs.

Challenge #9

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Analytics and reporting

Brands need to monitor their business performance, making it a must to have analytics and reporting capabilities built in to their ecommerce platform. This allows brands to spot growth opportunities, optimize inventory management, improve fulfillment processes, and make informed decisions to meet customer demands effectively.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra is your complete digital control room, giving you analytics and reporting modules for a detailed overview of your business performance.

Challenge #10

Salesforce CC vs Magento vs Centra: Bundling, promotions and upselling features

Many top ecommerce platforms offer capabilities such as bundling, promotions, and upselling. However, the way these features are implemented and their user-friendliness can greatly differ among platforms. Let's see how Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento 2, and Centra perform in these areas.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra has a complete set of features for trading and also supporting brands in marketing efforts. Centra’s robust voucher engine integrates seamlessly with your CRM system, so you can segment your customers and offer targeted promotions.

Challenge #11

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Suitability for fashion and lifestyle products

Despite their popularity, many monolithic platforms aren't equipped to handle the demands of fashion and lifestyle commerce. While these platforms can be fast to launch, their lack of fundamental features tailored to the fashion industry makes it hard for fashion brands to scale their business and expand on a global scale.

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Magento 2Salesforce Commerce CloudCentra
Features for fashionThrough apps/extensions Through apps/extensions and native integrations (limited)Native

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra, designed for fashion and lifestyle brands, supports complex lifestyle products. A simple interface makes it easy to manage styles, colors, sizes, product displays, collections, and drops.

The platform balances setup simplicity and flexibility. Its product model, created especially for multi-dimensional fashion products, makes the setup process a breeze. 

On top of that, Centra's features and development plan are completely tailored to brands with global ambitions. With Centra, fashion brands can focus on growing their fan base and expanding globally, rather than grappling with complex technology.

Challenge #12

Salesforce CC vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Omnichannel capabilities

The omnichannel functionalities allow brands to engage with their customers wherever they are, be it online stores, social media, or physical outlets. This strategy not only enhances customer interaction but also drives sales and fosters customer loyalty, helping brands to expand on a global scale

Lets’ dig into the ways various Salesforce CC, Magento 2 and Centra manage omnichannel integration.

Why brands migrate to Centra

With Centra, fashion brands can sync up and integrate their online and offline channels, enabling customers to shop and engage with the brand across various touchpoints. Centra equips brands with the tools and features to create a consistent, personalized customer experience, from in-store purchases to online orders and mobile browsing. 

Centra goes beyond traditional channels by connecting popular marketplaces, enabling brands to expand their reach and tap into new customer segments.

Challenge #13

Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Magento 2 vs Centra: Order management

Order management is vital for ecommerce brands, especially with geographically diverse customers and numerous sales channels. As customers demand faster and more flexible delivery, brands seek improved order management methods. Traditional ecommerce platforms often lack the needed flexibility and scalability, but flexible headless platforms offer advanced features like distributed order management (DOM) and overselling protection.

Why brands migrate to Centra

Centra comes equipped with robust built-in functionalities for distributed order management. It offers tools that automate processes for order routing, division, shipping, forecasting, and inventory management.

Moreover, Centra seamlessly integrates with any external tool you utilize. This allows you to  offer your customers the experience they desire, including flexible, more sustainable delivery and return options across all channels. This leads to quick delivery for customers and less money needed upfront for brands.

You’re in good company

Global 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 have grown fast and conquered new markets without limitations. Trust Centra’s impressive portfolio of brands: Nudie Jeans, Sandqvist, Eton, IDEAL OF SWEDEN, and Norse Projects – some of whom have been on the platform from the very beginning.

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