Salesforce Commerce Cloud Alternatives: 2025 Guide

For many enterprise brands, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is less a growth engine and more a cost center. 

We’re not telling the story—the numbers are: four months to implement, 16 months to see ROI, and a cost perception that’s four-dollar-sign expensive. This is a burden for enterprises, and often out of reach for small businesses. 

Even giants like Mattel felt the strain, until they switched to Shopify. Mattel’s VP of Technology, Subramanian Kovilmadam, noted that Shopify’s traffic-based fees helped the company handle product surges without getting locked into high fixed costs.

If you're wondering whether to make the same move, this guide is for you. We’ll break down the best Salesforce Commerce Cloud alternatives in 2025—and show why Shopify consistently outperforms on cost, speed, and conversion.

Why are companies looking for alternatives to Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Enterprises on SFCC are running into the same obstacles: slower launches, higher costs, developer bottlenecks, and an innovation pace that can’t match modern commerce.

Even third-party reviewers are starting to call it out.

In its 2025 list of the best B2B ecommerce platforms, TechRepublic named Shopify Plus “the top recommended ecommerce platform,” billed as the best option for teams who need fast launches and a user-friendly interface.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud made the list too, but more for how it connects into Salesforce’s broader ecosystem than for its ability to drive commerce outcomes directly.

So how do the leading alternatives compare on cost, conversion, and speed?.

The cost problem

SFCC's revenue-based pricing creates a growth penalty: the more successful you become, the more you pay. 

Code Digital reports that the SFCC license cost, on average, is about 1%–3% of your revenue. And that’s just the starting point. On top of licensing, businesses absorb developer time, consultant hours, and third-party integrations—even if they’re already locked into Salesforce CRM or Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“You have to estimate three years worth of your business and buy essentially that much GMV upfront with an annual upfront fee all at once,” says David Cost, vice president of digital and ecommerce at Rainbow Shops.

The retailer had only three full-time engineers, but still managed to compete with Amazon, Walmart, and Shein—but not while running on SFCC.

“If you go under, they charge overages. If you buy too much, shame on you, you eat it.”

So Rainbow Shops replatformed. The move to Shopify resulted in an 80% reduction in platform fees, reframing their total cost of ownership (TCO). 

“With Shopify, not only is the fee 80% less expensive, we pay monthly for exactly what we use,” David says. “No more, no less. Shopify has to earn our business every month.”

The speed problem

On SFCC, every change requires a developer. That slows down launches, ties up resources, and makes it harder for teams to move quickly. Agencies that once built their business around Salesforce are shifting away as a result.

CQL, a leading enterprise commerce agency, now runs more than 80% of its total business on Shopify after working with both platforms for years. They've seen a 50%–75% reduction in implementation timelines compared to Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

“Gone are the days of 24-month [Salesforce] Commerce Cloud implementations. We can do things on Shopify in half or a quarter of the time that we used to on other platforms,” says Ryan Donahue, Shopify practice lead at CQL.

The growth problem

The platform's small partner ecosystem and integration difficulties limit businesses' ability to quickly enter new markets or branch into multiple sales channels. That lack of flexibility restricts growth at a time when enterprises need omnichannel reach.

Maze, a digital commerce agency, has seen this firsthand. “There hasn’t been a system—homegrown or commercial—that Maze couldn’t integrate with Shopify,” says CEO Vince Santo.

Meanwhile, integrating other Salesforce products often requires additional layers of system integration, even within the same Salesforce ecosystem.

That complexity creates a ceiling. Vince notes that many clients assumed alternative platforms couldn’t “meet their needs at the enterprise level,” a fear rooted in SFCC’s positioning—not Shopify’s capabilities.

Decor Steals ran into that same ceiling. After migrating from SFCC to Shopify in 2023, they’ve already unlocked more than 8% of revenue from new sales channels; experiments they couldn’t even test before switching.

The innovation problem

Testing new features on legacy platforms can feel slow, costly, and resource-intensive. That’s the rut NYDJ found itself in after a string of ownership changes left the denim brand boxed in by their old ecommerce setup. 

“One of the first projects I worked on at NYDJ was launching the Afterpay integration with our online store. With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it would have been a complex three-month, six-figure development,” shares Steve Morales, vice president of marketing.

“With Shopify Plus, we launched it by the end of the day.” 

Since then, NYDJ has moved fast on low-effort, high-impact wins, like plug-and-play apps for back-in-stock alerts, and cut their total cost of ownership by 65%. The shift to Shopify lowered barriers to innovation and gave the brand faster time to value.

How do the leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud alternatives compare?

When enterprise brands outgrow Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the top competitors they consider are: Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), BigCommerce, and Shopify.

Let’s break them down by total cost of ownership, conversion, and speed: three areas where platform choice has a direct impact on growth.

1. Total cost of ownership

TCO includes all the direct and indirect costs required to operate your platform: software licenses, implementation fees, development resources, third-party integrations, hosting, downtime, maintenance, and training.

This is the difference between what you think you’re paying—and what you’re actually paying.

According to research commissioned by Shopify from a leading independent consulting firm, competitors' TCO runs significantly higher than Shopify Plus across all major enterprise platforms. Salesforce carries the highest premium, but Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce also come with added expense from customization, integrations, and maintenance.

These aren’t marginal differences—they translate into thousands in annual savings and hundreds of hours of reclaimed time with Shopify. Even platforms that may look less expensive upfront often carry hidden costs in the form of custom development, ongoing integrations, and maintenance. Over time, those expenses add up and erode the return on investment.

Shopify Plus offers up to 36% lower TCO than major enterprise competitors.

💡Real-world example: MZ Wallace

When designers Monica Zwirner and Lucy Wallace Eustice founded MZ Wallace in New York’s SoHo in 2000, they had a simple goal: build durable, beautiful bags that could keep up with modern life.

As ecommerce sales took off, the brand moved to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, but quickly found the platform was complex and expensive to maintain. Development work dragged on, new features came with hefty price tags, and growth was slowed by tech debt.

"We were left with two choices: either migrate to Salesforce Commerce Cloud and absorb those implementation costs, or start fresh on another platform that’s easier, faster, and cheaper to customize," says Kevin Mogyoros, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. 

They chose Shopify Plus. Since replatforming, MZ Wallace has:

• Reduced its total cost of ownership by 64%
• Increased revenue by 22%
• Lifted ecommerce conversion by 40%

“We’re spending less and driving sales more efficiently,” Kevin says. “It’s the best of both worlds.”

2. Conversion

Conversion is directly tied to site performance. According to Backlinko’s analysis of over five million Google search results, the average page-loading speed for a first-page result is just 1.65 seconds. They also found that the average first-page result keeps users onsite for 2.5 minutes—long enough to build trust, guide the journey, and drive a purchase.

Other enterprise platforms often struggle to convert at the same rate, weighed down by slower checkout processes and less optimized site performance.

Shopify’s own data shows even a 0.5-second improvement in site speed can deliver a measurable lift in conversion rates. And when it comes to checkout performance, Shopify Checkout outperforms peers by up to 36% and by 15.2% on average. For enterprise brands, that means more completed purchases, higher customer lifetime value, and more predictable growth.

Platform	Average conversion rate	Shopify lift
Salesforce Commerce Cloud	1.98%	+36% (to 2.69%)
Adobe Commerce	2.16%	+5% (to 2.27%)
BigCommerce	2.07%	+12% (to 2.32%)

💡Real-world example: Alternative Brewing

When Australian coffee gear retailer Alternative Brewing launched in 2014, their only product was an AeroPress. Seven years later, with a full catalog of espresso machines and cold brew systems, the company had outgrown their platform. The old site needed constant development and was unstable during traffic spikes. 

After switching to Shopify, the change was immediate:

• 15% increase in average order value
• Faster page loads and checkout experience
• More refined segmentation and actionable customer insights

3. Site and server speed

While conversion rates measure what happens when customers reach checkout, speed performance reveals whether they'll stick around long enough to get there.

Two core metrics from Google shape this experience:

1. First Contentful Paint (FCP): This tells youhow quickly visitors see content appear on their screen, even before the page finishes loading completely. 
2. Time to First Byte (TTFB): This metric measures how quickly the server responds when someone tries to load your site. And it’s a big one—it tells you whether your tech stack is built to handle scale.

We recently analyzed public Google Core Web Vitals data from nearly 200,000 sites, across every major commerce platform and revenue band. Shopify leads the pack.

For enterprises, these differences aren’t trivial. Slower server response times mean frustrated customers, higher bounce rates, and lost revenue. Adobe Commerce stores are 3.4x slower on average, while Salesforce and BigCommerce also lag significantly behind. Shopify sites achieve an average server response time of 0.51 seconds, while other major platforms average 1.4 seconds; nearly three times the response time.

💡Real-world example: Ruggable

When Ruggable scaled to eight new international markets, they needed stability, speed, and launch agility. And a prerequisite for all these demands was performance.

“In 2023, we launched our headless website, partnered with Shopify’s checkout extensibility. We leverage Shopify’s APIs to make this happen,” says Daniel Graupensperger, director of product management.

“We’ve been thrilled at the reliability and site stability since launching, as well as the overall site speed.”

The results speak to infrastructure reliability when it matters most. While competitors crashed or crawled on Black Friday, Ruggable’s Shopify-powered site held strong with a rock-solid 100% uptime.

Shopify is the winning Salesforce alternative

Across cost, speed, and conversion, Shopify consistently outperforms Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, and BigCommerce. Storefronts on Shopify run faster across the board:

• 1.5x faster than Salesforce
• 2x faster than Adobe Commerce
• 1.4x faster than BigCommerce

And it’s not just about speed. While other platforms patch together commerce capabilities from various acquisitions, Shopify was purpose-built as a unified commerce platform. That means one back end, one customer view, and one place to manage everything from checkout to inventory, online and offline.

Behind the scenes, Shopify’s infrastructure keeps pace with demand. The platform can process up to 40,000 checkouts per minute while maintaining 99.9% uptime, thanks to over 300 global points of presence spanning 30+ countries. That’s the kind of performance that powers leading global brands not just during a flash sale, but every single day.

If you're looking for a Salesforce Commerce Cloud alternative, don't settle for incremental change.

Choose the platform built to simplify operations and accelerate growth at scale, and that’s already powering 10% of US ecommerce.