Elastic Path vs. Commercetools

Elastic Path Payments is a pre-integrated payments solution that is fully hosted, managed, and ready-to-go. Commercetools payment integrations require coding, hosting, and maintaining multiple services.

Elastic Path has a long list of security certifications, including SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, and is the only HIPAA ready API-first platform.

Elastic Path has a guaranteed response time of 100ms and clearly defined rate-limits. Commercetools has strict limits on how many products, variants, and other data storage is available, but provides no guidance on API volume – a large factor in decreased performance or noisy-neighbor issues.

• Elastic Path has three options for building frontends:
  • 1. Studio is our frontend-as-a-service product designed to empower business teams and digital agencies to rapidly build shoppable landing pages and storefronts with a non-code, component-based builder.  It includes 30+ instant-on integrations, data-driven personalization, and A/B testing. Studio can work with any commerce platform.
  • Composable Frontend is a modular & performant Next.js framework, pre-integrated with Elastic Path APIs & relevant third party technology, following commerce best practices.   With the Composable Frontend, developers can get started quickly and customize this framework per their unique requirements.  Composable Frontend is free. 
  • Build your own!  Since our backend products are completely headless brands have the flexibility to build their own frontend from scratch if they so choose. 
  • On the other hand, commercetools acquired Frontastic and renamed it commercetools Frontend.  Whereas Studio is a no-code product built for business users, commercetools frontend is for developers.  It does not offer low or no code tooling or a component-based frontend designer.  It can be integrated with any commerce services, though sales are highly coupled with Commercetools API. As a standalone product, it comes with additional costs.

Elastic Path allows for data management and non-core flows, while commercetools requires use of the API and developer involvement for day-to-day schema management. Additionally, Elastic Path has prebuilt and easy-to-use commerce technology, while Commercetools only supports a small portion of APIs from its Merchant Center.

Elastic Path has built-in bundle support, can handle a large number of pricing options, and allows for easy catalog publishing. Dynamic bundles enable merchandisers to quickly and easily create bundles that allow customers to pick and choose the items to be included in their bundle, along with specific bundle pricing that does not require a new pricebook. Commercetools has no bundle support out of the box. Instead, users must build, host, and maintain multiple applications through the commercetools bundle starter on GitHub.

Elastic Path’s Integrations Hub has “instant on” integrations for popular third-party commerce tools. Business users can turn on and set up an integration without a single line of code for these prebuilt and fully supported integrations. Commercetools only has a marketplace listing for integrations, and does not provide the actual code or support for them.

Elastic Path uses AWS by default and allows for tight integrations with an AWS environment, while commercetools uses Google by default and pushes customers toward that provider. Elastic Path supports standards like webhooks, allowing users to leverage any hosts, including IBM, Oracle, Alibaba, DigitalOcean, Vercel, and other providers. Commercetools events and API Extensions work only with AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Elastic Path and Commercetools both use MACH architectures. MACH stands for microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless.