They are two of the industry’s leading ecommerce platforms, from two heavyweight companies. Hybris (SAP) and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) are both sophisticated and high end, but what separates them?
Whenever you’re choosing a platform, there are inevitably trade-offs to be made, and one platform will emerge a clear winner — for your specific business needs. If you have your own dev team or decide to work with a tech consultancy to do much of the heavy lifting, it’s still your own call to make.
So what are these differences?
Here’s a head up: pricing is everything. Whether you have the budget or not, or whether your budget has much stretchability, pricing is the door that allows you to enter into further consideration of the platforms.
Firstly, Hybris and Salesforce Commerce Cloud were designed and built with contrasting expectations. The pricing model for Hybris is a license fee, which costs around… (gulp)… $1 million. That’s no typo. And that sum certainly rules out the majority of ecommerce companies, whose budget would not even stretch to cover a quarter of the cost.
But Hybris knows this, because their platform was built specifically for companies with that large chunk set aside for licensing fees.
Compare this to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which costs you an upfront fee of around $150,000 to kickstart things. That’s still a 6-figure sum, but it opens up many more commerce companies to its platform.
Let’s now dig deeper into the platforms, and flesh out the technical differences. A key contrast can be identified in one of the platform names. As the “Cloud” in “Commerce Cloud ” strongly suggests, SFCC hosts the servers, and like any good host, ensures the maintenance and system admin so you don’t have to.
Hybris, in contrast, is hosted by your own servers, so you’ll need your own infrastructure as well as being able to manage and maintain it. That means if you’re expanding then you’ll need to scale up on your server farms and devops on your own initiative. If this infrastructure is already in place then Hybris can function smoothly.
A second technical difference revolves around customization. Hybris contains a very comprehensive system of customization that outrivals other ecommerce platforms, including Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Hybris is so customizable that it doesn’t even have a big dashboard, because straight from the starting line your developers have the freedom to build and expand your desired dashboard.
SF Commerce Cloud, on the other hand, has a built-in comprehensive dashboard that seemingly has an answer for any question. Do you want to create different user experiences for specific groups of customers? You can do that inside of SFCC. It’s only real limitation is your space for creativity. One caveat of such power is caution, because it is quite easy to click or press the wrong button and create problems.
Between the two leading ecommerce platforms, we’ve ironed out the key differences here. If you can budget for a 7-figure sum, and you have your own well-structured server farm, development team, and desire a deeply customized platform, then Hybris is your winner.
If you don’t want the hassle of hosting your own servers, and want plenty of features already part of the platform ready to go, then your best bet is Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
