Magento 2 (Adobe Commerce) vs Endora Commerce — which one to pick for B2B

When a distributor or a manufacturer starts looking for a B2B platform, Magento 2 makes the shortlist practically every time. And rightly so: it is a mature, proven system with a huge ecosystem, running sales for thousands of companies worldwide. Endora Commerce is something else: a modern platform written in TypeScript that lands in your own repository, with no licence fees and no lock-in.

The difference worth starting from is the point of origin. Magento began as a retail shop engine and got business-to-business selling later, as a separate B2B module bolted onto a model designed for an individual buyer.

Endora went the other way: the buyer is an organization, the price comes from a contract, and an order can be the outcome of a negotiation. Only on top of that model sits the B2C channel, where an individual customer quietly gets their own one-person organization. This is not an architectural footnote, because it comes back in every one of the four criteria below.

Both platforms have areas where they win outright. The point of this piece is to help you tell which side of that line you are on. Every criterion below therefore covers both Magento’s advantages and Endora’s, followed by concrete scenarios and a checklist.

The short version

If you only read three sentences: pick Magento when you need a market standard, ready-made building blocks and a replaceable vendor, especially if you run a large B2C operation alongside B2B. Pick Endora when business-to-business selling is your main business: prices are negotiated, processes are unusual, and the rollout should land in the tens of thousands rather than in a six-figure project with a licence on top. If you already run Magento with a team that knows it, you most likely should not migrate anywhere.

What each platform actually is

Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce

Magento 2 comes in two editions, and the distinction is decisive for B2B:

• Magento Open Source is the free edition, with no licence fee. It does not include the B2B module. Company accounts, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes and company credit have to be bought as extensions or written.
• Adobe Commerce is the commercial edition, where the B2B module is part of the licence, alongside Adobe’s own tooling (recommendations, Live Search, content staging). Adobe does not publish a price list. Public industry breakdowns put the range at roughly 22k USD a year at low revenue up to 125k USD and beyond at high revenue, with the cloud variant starting higher.

Technically, Magento 2 is a PHP application on MySQL/MariaDB with an EAV data model, OpenSearch for search, Varnish for full-page caching, an object cache (Valkey today) and RabbitMQ queues. Release 2.4.9 from May 2026 raised those requirements hard: PHP 8.4 or 8.5, MySQL 8.4 LTS or MariaDB 11.4, OpenSearch 3, Varnish 8, Valkey 8, RabbitMQ 4.2. On older infrastructure it simply will not start.

Endora Commerce

Endora Commerce is a B2B platform written in TypeScript: a Fastify backend with MikroORM and Zod contracts, a server-rendered Next.js storefront, and a React admin panel. Data lives in PostgreSQL, cache and queues in Redis, search in Meilisearch. Over 60 modules ship as standard: from catalog and price lists to KSeF e-invoicing, product feeds and an AI assistant in the admin panel.

It is not a B2B-only platform. B2C selling runs on the same installation and the same data model: registering an individual customer quietly creates a one-person organization, so orders, quote requests, invoices and addresses all follow exactly the same path as in B2B. There is no parallel, simplified mode that starts drifting from the rest after six months. B2C is switched on per sales channel: a purely B2B channel simply will not accept that registration.

The delivery model differs from Magento’s: you do not buy a licence, you get a platform rolled out around your processes, with the code in your own Git repository. The first working prototype takes four weeks, built with Spec-Driven Development supported by AI, and an average rollout lands in the region of PLN 60–80k.

Performance

This is the criterion where apples get compared to oranges most often, so let us split it into two separate questions.

The anonymous catalog

Here Magento with a warm Varnish cache is very hard to beat. A category page served from the full-page cache is effectively an answer from memory, with no PHP and no database involved. If your sales run on a public catalog with prices visible to everyone, a tuned Magento is very fast, and a decade’s worth of optimization playbooks exists for it.

Endora renders the storefront server-side in Next.js, with Core Web Vitals targets written directly into the platform requirements (LCP under 2.5 s, INP under 200 ms, CLS under 0.1) and search under 200 ms at the 95th percentile. Those are good numbers, but I am not going to pretend an empty cache beats Varnish on Magento’s home turf.

The catalog with company-specific prices

And here the picture flips, which happens to be everyday life in B2B.

In Magento the full-page cache varies by customer group, among other things. Shared catalogs in Adobe Commerce B2B implement company pricing precisely through customer groups, so the more companies with their own terms, the more variants of the same page have to sit in cache, and the more often you land on a cold one.

On top of that come the pages that cannot be full-page cached at all: cart, checkout, negotiable quotes, order history. The result is familiar to anyone who has maintained a large B2B store on Magento: the averages look great, and customers still complain, because they land in the tail.

Endora does not have that problem structurally, because its performance does not rest on a full-page cache. The price is worked out by the pricing engine on every request: from the group price list, the individual contract, the quantity bracket and the time window, with deterministic resolution of overlapping rules. A quote fetched through the API runs through the same engine as the cart, so the figures match to the cent. Personalization is not an exception to the optimization here; it is the base case.

The hardware it takes to run

One concrete number from Endora: generating a product feed for 100,000 products produces a 38 MB file with peak memory use under 20 MB, because serialization streams. The platform demo runs on a catalog of over 120k SKUs.

A caveat: Magento has years of deployments at extreme scale behind it and well-mapped bottlenecks. Endora’s figures are architectural targets backed by tests and demo-scale evidence, not a decade of production Black Fridays. If your requirement is a documented B2C case peaking at tens of thousands of sessions per minute, Magento has those references and Endora does not.

Rollout and running cost

This is the criterion where the gap is widest and easiest to put a number on.

What it costs to go live

An average Endora Commerce rollout lands in the region of PLN 60–80k. That covers the workshop, configuring the platform around your processes and going live in production: no licence, no per-seat charges and no fee tied to revenue. The figure is indicative and usually does not include integrations with external systems: an ERP, WMS or OMS is quoted separately, once the workshop has settled what exactly syncs and in which direction.

On the Magento side, a comparable B2B scope looks different. An Adobe Commerce rollout is typically a six-figure project, with an annual revenue-based licence on top. The cheaper route, Magento Open Source, has no B2B module. Company accounts, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes and company credit have to be bought as extensions or built, so the licence saving comes back as a line in the rollout budget.

At an identical functional scope, the first-year difference is usually an order of magnitude rather than a few percent. For a company that wants to launch B2B selling and find out whether the channel pays for itself, that is often the difference between “we’re doing it” and “let’s revisit in two years”.

Licences

Magento Open Source costs nothing, but it has no B2B module. Company accounts, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes, requisition lists and company credit are bought as extensions or built. Adobe Commerce includes B2B, but brings an annual fee tied to revenue, which means as you grow, you pay more for the same software.

Endora has no licence fees and no per-seat or per-revenue charges. The code sits in your repository.

Total cost of ownership

The licence alone is usually the smaller part of the bill. Industry breakdowns estimate the full cost of owning Adobe Commerce at roughly two to three times the licence fee once hosting, development and extensions are counted in.

The “version upgrades” line deserves its own sentence, because in Magento it is a cost that catches people out. Release 2.4.9 hard-requires PHP 8.4 or 8.5, MySQL 8.4, OpenSearch 3, Varnish 8 and Valkey 8. Moving up a version therefore means migrating infrastructure and retesting every extension in the new environment at the same time. With a dozen plugins from different vendors, that is not an afternoon’s work.

A caveat on the other side: no licence fee does not make Endora free. That PLN 60–80k is a real expense and a starting point rather than a ceiling: integrations with external systems come on top, and development after launch costs too. You need a technology partner or your own TypeScript team. The difference is that the budget goes into developing your platform rather than renewing someone else’s licence, and that it does not grow automatically with your revenue.

Ease of extending the platform

The cleanest way to test this criterion is a single question: how long does it take to add a new order status and a “contract number” field on the order?

In Magento that is a developer’s job: a module, XML configuration, an attribute, possibly a data migration, tests, a deployment. Depending on the organization: anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, counting the queue at your vendor.

In Endora both are done in the admin panel. Order statuses and the transitions between them are configurable, with a business event attachable to every transition. Custom fields are added to orders, organizations, customers, categories, products and quote requests as data, with no database migration and no code deployment. The same goes for price lists, delivery methods, transactional email content and invoice templates, which are composed in the same Page Builder as CMS pages.

Magento’s advantage here is different but just as real: it is the market standard and the vendor is replaceable. Magento developers can be hired or contracted in any larger city, the documentation is extensive and public, and an agency can be swapped without rewriting the platform. Endora hands you the code, but you will not find a team that knows this platform inside out from the first job ad. That is a real risk, and it belongs in the decision. It is softened by the fact that the code is ordinary TypeScript with Zod contracts and documentation rather than a bespoke framework, but not removed entirely.

One thing worth adding that Magento does not have: the Endora admin panel ships with an AI assistant. You open the command palette and describe in plain language what should happen. The assistant shows the plan and executes it after your confirmation, within your permissions and with an entry in the audit log. Bulk operations nobody wants to click through get done in one sentence.

There is a number behind that, because “fast” on its own means nothing: a less complex module takes 1-3 days in Endora, a larger one up to a week. That excludes integrations with an ERP, WMS, CRM, PIM or OMS: those are always heavily bespoke, and writing one takes up to two weeks. This is not an advantage over open code as such, because there you can write whatever you want too. It is an advantage of the starting point: you add a module to a working B2B platform instead of first building the thing that is meant to be extended.

Integrations with external systems

In B2B this is usually the deciding criterion, because the platform is almost never the source of truth. The ERP is, and next to it the CRM, the WMS and increasingly an OMS.

Where Magento wins

The number of ready-made connectors. The Magento marketplace holds thousands of extensions, including a mature Polish set: connectors for Comarch ERP Optima and XL, Subiekt, Baselinker, plus integrations with Allegro, InPost, DPD, DHL and the rest of the market. If your list of systems overlaps with the popular set, Magento genuinely lets you buy building blocks instead of commissioning code. That advantage cannot be recreated quickly.

On top of that comes a rich API layer: REST, GraphQL, an asynchronous bulk API and message queues, plus years of experience from integrators who have already done it somewhere else.

Where Endora wins

A shorter list of ready-made pieces, but a stronger contract and the important things natively.

The key part is that the list is not closed, and does not need to be. Endora’s integration layer is generic: there is no roster of “supported ERPs”, there is a documented contract (a partner API, signed webhooks and encrypted provider configurations). That means any ERP, CRM, WMS or OMS is wired up as an adapter module, whether it is Comarch, SAP, IFS, a bespoke system written in-house twenty years ago, or a platform nobody has heard of yet. The adapter registers itself with the platform, gets its own settings and permissions, and the core stays untouched. It is the same path the Stripe, PayU and tpay adapters came down.

The specifics this layer rests on:

• Comarch ERP Optima and Subiekt GT have adapters as standard: item records, stock, prices and sales documents.
• KSeF in the platform core: invoices and corrections in the FA(3) format sent through a durable queue, the KSeF number on the document, the official receipt downloadable and a verification QR code on the PDF. In Magento it is a third-party extension or a bespoke integration, and with e-invoicing mandatory in Poland in 2026, that is not a detail.
• A partner API with a live OpenAPI document, generated from contracts in the code, so the integrator is not working from an outdated PDF.
• API keys pinned to an organization and a channel: the integration sees exactly that company’s prices and limits, and can do no more than its own buyer. There is no parameter that bypasses the rules.
• Idempotent orders: a repeated request returns the same order, never a second one. That holds for concurrent repeats too.
• Webhooks signed with HMAC-SHA-256, up to eight attempts with growing back-off, and a separate view of failed deliveries with manual retry.
• Bulk pricing: one request prices up to 200 lines for a specific organization, guaranteed to match the cart.
• Credentials encrypted with AES-256-GCM, tested on save, masked on read and redacted in the audit log.

The difference in philosophy is this: with Magento you more often buy an integration, with Endora you more often write it, but as an adapter module, without forking the core and inside your own repository.

If your ERP is a popular one, the advantage sits with Magento. If it is bespoke, dated or heavily modified, which is common in Polish manufacturing, the advantage shifts to Endora. You are writing code either way, just in a cleaner place and without the risk that the next platform upgrade falls out with somebody else’s plugin.

There is one more difference that only shows up in B2B: Endora’s integration contract understands what an organization is. An API key pinned to a company sees its price list, its credit limit and its assortment. A distributor’s ordering portal or an integration with a customer’s system therefore runs on exactly the same terms as that customer’s own buyer, with no separate permission logic built on the integrator’s side.

B2B: where Endora Commerce genuinely stands out

Let me start with what there is no point hiding: Adobe Commerce has a very complete B2B module. Company accounts with roles, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes, requisition lists, quick order, company credit and multi-level purchase-order approval, all hardened over years of deployments. Endora does not win here on the length of the feature list, because the list is similar.

It wins on something else: in Magento, B2B is a layer laid over a retail model; in Endora it is the model. That sounds like an academic distinction right up until you start paying for it. And you pay for it in the cache, in permissions, in integrations and in every unusual commercial rule, because each of those places has to handle an exception to the assumption that “a buyer is a person paying a list price”.

Five things that make a practical difference:

1. The sales channel as a first-class dimension. Storefront, marketplace, distributor portal, mobile app and POS are separate channels of the same installation. Products, prices, promotions, content, settings, analytics and the search index all hold separate values per channel. A distributor portal is not a second rollout or a cloned shop — it is an entry on the channel list.

2. An organization hierarchy that inherits commercial terms. Headquarters and branches form a tree: order visibility flows downwards, while the price list and credit limit are inherited from the nearest ancestor. A company with twenty branches does not need twenty parallel configurations.

3. Quote requests as a full negotiation loop in the core. The customer submits a request, the sales rep quotes with lead times and validity terms, both sides can revise the terms, and an accepted quote becomes an order without re-keying a single line. Add to that the none price-display mode, which hides every price element and routes purchase intent into a quote request (for the range you never sell from a price list on principle).

4. The realities of wholesale ordering handled head-on. Packaging units (pallets, cartons, shrink-packs) with unit conversion carried into the order and the quote. A credit limit reserved atomically at order placement and released once the invoice is paid. Cart import from CSV or Excel with variant resolution. One-click buy for customers with a complete set of default preferences. Returns and complaints with RMA numbering, reverse logistics and corrective invoices.

5. B2C without a second system and without compromising B2B. An individual customer gets a one-person organization behind the scenes, so they use the same order path, the same invoices and the same admin panel as companies. There is no parallel, simplified retail mode to maintain alongside the main one. It matters just as much in the other direction: adding a retail channel does not require softening the B2B model, because B2C is the special case here, not the foundation B2B has to be stretched over.

There is also something a feature list does not show: every sensitive operation lands in the audit log with the state before and after the change. A sales rep can also step into the customer’s context (impersonation) to see their prices through their eyes, with a visible banner and an audit entry.

Where Magento has the edge within B2B itself: multi-level purchase-order approval with threshold rules is more developed in Adobe Commerce. Endora has a simpler mechanism: cart approval enabled per organization, with a full submit-for-approval path and a decision carrying a reason. For most companies that is enough; for corporate procurement with several value thresholds and multiple approval levels, Magento is closer to a ready-made answer.

When Magento 2 is the better choice

1. You already run Magento with a team that knows it. Replatforming without a clear business reason is one of the most expensive ways to achieve nothing. If the platform works and the problems can be solved by optimization or a new frontend, stay.

2. You also sell B2C at scale. Several brands, several countries, a dozen currencies, seasonal peaks, a public catalog with prices for everyone. That is the environment Magento was developed for over a decade, with references to match.

3. Your integration list overlaps with the popular set. Comarch, Baselinker, Allegro, InPost, DPD, a mainstream payment gateway. Buying five ready connectors is faster and cheaper than commissioning five adapters.

4. You need a corporate purchasing process. Multi-level purchase-order approvals with threshold rules, elaborate shared catalogs, a formal approval process on the buyer’s side.

5. The purchasing requirement reads “global vendor and certified partners”. Procurement in a large organization often has that written in. Adobe brings a contract, an SLA, a partner network across countries and an ecosystem (Experience Manager, Analytics, recommendations).

6. You want an easily replaceable vendor. The Magento agency market is deep. Changing partners is a tender, not a platform rewrite.

When Endora Commerce is the better choice

1. Every company has its own prices with you. Group price lists, individual contracts, quantity brackets, overlapping promotions. This is the scenario where Magento’s full-page cache stops helping and where Endora treats the problem as its base case.

2. Sales run through negotiation, not through the cart. Quote requests are the main path, not an add-on. Part of the range shows no price at all.

3. You work in a Polish context. Comarch ERP Optima or Subiekt GT in the background, mandatory KSeF e-invoicing, PayU and tpay at checkout, invoices with your own numbering. All of that is native in Endora rather than a stack of plugins from different vendors, each on its own release cycle.

4. The rollout budget is a real constraint. An indicative PLN 60–80k with no licence, plus integrations quoted separately, is a different shelf from a six-figure Adobe Commerce project with an annual fee tied to revenue. As you grow, you pay for infrastructure and development rather than a higher licence tier. The code is in your repository, with no lock-in.

5. Your processes are unusual. Selling in pallets and cartons, a branch hierarchy with inherited terms, your own order lifecycle, extra fields that come out of contracts. In Endora most of that is admin configuration rather than a ticket to your vendor and a wait for the next release.

6. You are launching a distributor portal or several channels at once. Separate range, prices and content per channel from one admin panel, plus API keys pinned to an organization and a channel for integration traffic.

7. You want to validate the idea quickly before signing off a large budget. A workshop, three weeks of build, and a clickable prototype on your own data after four weeks, and then a joint decision on the full rollout.

8. Your team works in TypeScript and wants to develop the platform itself. One language from the database to the interface, contracts shared between backend and frontend, an ordinary monorepo in your own GitLab.

9. You run a system nobody supports off the shelf. A bespoke ERP, an ageing WMS, an OMS assembled from several tools, or a CRM with heavily reworked logic. Endora’s integration layer does not assume a particular product on the other side. You write the adapter once, in your own repository, and you do not depend on somebody maintaining a plugin through the next major version.

10. You sell to companies but want a retail channel too. B2C runs on the same installation and the same data model, switched on per sales channel. You need no second system and no simplification of the B2B model to make room for an individual customer.

What Endora Commerce does not have

This section is here so the piece can be used to make a decision, not just to feel convinced.

• An extension marketplace. There is no ready plugin to buy for 300 euros. Every unusual feature is development work.
• A deep market of specialists. Endora is developed with a partner or your own TypeScript team, which has to learn the platform. Magento’s advantage here cannot be argued away.
• A decade of references at extreme scale. If your requirement is a documented case on the level of Europe’s largest stores, Magento has one.
• Full API integrations with marketplaces. Allegro, Amazon and eBay are served today by downloadable feed templates, not two-way marketplace API integration.
• The Adobe ecosystem. No Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics or Adobe Target. Endora integrates with Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager, Meta Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
• Multi-level purchase-order approval to the degree Adobe Commerce has it.

A short checklist

Answer these questions. The results usually line up on one side.

1. Are prices negotiated company by company, or does one price list cover most customers?
2. Do you also sell B2C at scale, with seasonal peaks?
3. How many of your systems have a ready Magento connector, and how many would need writing in either scenario?
4. Are KSeF, Comarch or Subiekt hard requirements for you?
5. What is your budget to go live: closer to the tens of thousands, or closer to a six-figure project with an annual licence?
6. Do you have an IT team that will develop the platform, or does everything go through an external vendor?
7. Is owning the code a requirement for you, or just a nice extra?
8. How unusual is your order process: does it fit the standard, or does it have steps nobody else has?

A majority of “negotiated prices”, “Polish systems”, “unusual process”, “limited rollout budget” and “we want to own the code” points to Endora. A majority of “large B2C”, “popular integrations”, “corporate procurement” and “we need a standard and a replaceable vendor” points to Magento.

In summary

Magento 2 and Endora Commerce solve the same problem from opposite ends. Magento gives you a mature standard with an enormous ecosystem, and you pay for it with a licence, heavy infrastructure and the cost of every major upgrade. Endora gives you a platform designed around business-to-business selling (with B2C as an extra channel rather than the starting point), shaped to your processes, with no licence fees, the code in your hands and a rollout budget in the tens of thousands. You pay for that with the platform’s youth and a narrower market of specialists.

If you sell on negotiated prices, work with a Polish ERP, have unusual processes and do not want to pay for software as a share of revenue, it is worth testing Endora on your own data. The admin panel and storefront run online, so the fastest route is to click through the demo yourself or book a free workshop where we walk through your processes and systems and put a number on the first rollout, integrations included.

And if this comparison points to Magento being the better fit — we will say so plainly. A failed rollout is not a good reference for anyone.