7 OroCommerce Alternatives in 2024: Expert Review & Comparisons

Ranked third for the B2B Digital Commerce Use Case, OroCommerce has become one of the most popular solutions in 2023, standing in one row with Adobe, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. With 0.01% market share in the CRM market only, it still wins great attention and earns up to $7M a year. Many people know about OroCommerce websites and marketplaces and trust them. But does it really satisfy all the needs of modern ecommerce?

In this article, Virto Commerce experts will share their findings and insights on OroCommerce and its competitors based on a thorough investigation of the market. Those looking for the perfect ecommerce platform or marketplace creation will find the answers to their questions on which technologies are really used in OroCommerce, why its architecture could be better, and how its approaches affect the learning curve and adoption time of the new users. We will also discuss the pricing and the options available, so that you can make the most informed decision. Let’s begin.

OroCommerce is a digital commerce platform for those searching for their own B2B ecommerce solution. It enables its users to build Oro CRM and works as a good B2B marketplace solution. Headquartered in LA, USA, the company spreads its offices in the US, UK, Poland, Ukraine, France and Germany and offers it solutions to B2B users all over the world. Oro Inc. offers its users a one-stop SaaS platform for main B2B tasks.

Founded back in 2012 by former Magento employees, the solution quickly became one of the most popular ones. It works with at least 38 implementation partners and over 35 technology partners. Today, it is recognized by Gartner and IDC, and is believed to be a good option for B2B companies. Let’s see if the capabilities of the solution are really worth it.

OroCommerce is a solution designed to help mid-market and enterprise businesses grow. Both manufacturers and retailers can use it because of its extensive features. Let's look at the main ones.

To manage access for all your buyers and customers, there are account management features, access control, and the ability to control and limit roles and permissions. All of this provides good personalization for both catalog management and other actions and features.

A few words about ecommerce personalization. The solution offers multiple specified price lists, shopping lists, and webstores, which enable you to work with multiple customers simultaneously, providing each with personalized features.

As for internal operations, the platform offers segmentation, simple content management and more. There are marketing features as well: the platform provides SEO capabilities, inventory management, quotes, orders and more.

The platform is based on the Symfony framework and Doctrine ORM with pre-integrated Oro CRM. The framework is easy to use and offers modularity, but the learning curve is steep.

In general, the solution looks good. Now let's break it down into real pros and cons.

• Real CRM. Oro ecommerce offers a full-function CRM module natively tailored for ecommerce. This makes building Oro CRM easy and provides a fast start.
• Focused on B2B. The solution offers many useful capabilities for B2B sellers, from B2B stores to granular permissions.
• Flexibility. Though SaaS and not the best headless ecommerce platform (all the elements are still connected while being able to work together), the solution can be accommodated to the needs of the user.

• Good for mid-sized businesses. For enterprises, the solution is not powerful enough to handle thousands of orders. It doesn't offer enough features and speed to grow when needed.
• While trying to be open source and modern, the solution is still monolithic and difficult for developers to use. Development is lengthy and expensive.
• The learning curve is long because the technology stack includes many specific languages. For a junior developer, it can take a year or more to understand how the system works.
• Since OroCommerce focuses its efforts on the SMB and mass market, they do not offer good technical support. Together with the previous point, this could be a massive drawback for those who need their own solution and want to build it quickly.

Today, the platform has more than 11,000 independent customers, 33% of whom are from the United States. Most of them are mid-sized companies, manufacturers, wholesalers or distributors, including SCHNEEBERGER Group and Saltworks.

As we mentioned earlier, mid-market to small enterprises are the perfect customers for OroCommerce, as they are well suited to business agility, experience and people-led differentiation strategies, but not very well suited to large enterprises, as they cannot support high quality and huge loads at the same time.

Without further explanation, the solution offers an annual tiered subscription fee based on GMV and administrative users. It doesn't offer a free version, but users can try a free trial (Community Edition) for a short period of time. The final price is available upon request and is not publicly disclosed.

The solution is available in two pricing options: Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). The difference is big: most of the useful B2B features come in the EE. However, it is well suited for medium-sized companies.

The Enterprise Edition is suited for mid-sized businesses and comes with a comprehensive set of advanced B2B features. The pricing for the Enterprise Edition is structured around several factors:

1. Gross Merchandise Value: This is the total value of merchandise sold through the eCommerce site over a specified period.
2. OroCloud Hosting: The cost of OroCloud, which is optimized for OroCommerce operations, varies based on customer-specific requirements.

Both the Community and potentially other editions of OroCommerce are available under an open-source license, allowing users to modify and distribute the software.

The business value of OroCommerce is quite high, although some reviews suggest that the solution is more expensive than others and that small businesses may not be able to afford its support over time.

Now that we know the strengths and weaknesses of the popular solution, let's see the main competitors of OroCommerce, according to the IDC report and popular B2B enterprise software review sites. Here they are:

1. Commercetools
2. Bigcommerce
3. Vtex
4. Shopify
5. Kibo
6. Magento (Adobe)
7. Virto Сommerce

The main criteria to consider when comparing all these solutions are the ability to innovate, i.e. add new features and create a unique customer experience, a simple and easy to learn architecture and tech stack, B2B capabilities, and API readiness. In reality, there are many more things to consider. To save you time, we have prepared a comparison of OroCommerce to all these solutions. Let's dive into the details.

What are the main differences between OroCommerce and Commercetools? Both solutions adopt a modern API-first and composable ecommerce approach. However, the tech stack is completely different: while Commercetools is based on simple popular technologies, Oro prefers Symphony, — a very flexible but hard to learn technology.

Both offer a SaaS model, though Commercetools is a bit more affordable in terms of the B2B ecommerce TCO. One common detail is that the solutions fit both mid-sized companies and early enterprises, though big enterprises need more.

While Commercetools offers strong support, Oro’s support is a bit slow. Though both focus on B2B, Commercetools is more B2C-oriented than Oro.

Generally speaking, both solutions are too heavy for small businesses and too weak for large enterprises, though really good for the middle segment.

Both OroCommerce and BigCommerce are excellent for mid-sized companies and early-stage enterprises. When comparing Oro Commerce to BigCommerce, the choice might hinge on specific technological preferences and support needs.

Bigcommerce is more B2C-oriented compared to Oro, which makes it ideal for those who haven’t decided on their journey yet.

Both operate as SaaS and share the same challenge: while they cannot handle complex B2B, it can take an eternity to change anything in the solution when the new features and capabilities are needed for greater extensibility.

Vtex is a strong competitor in terms of modularity. It is a composable ecommerce solution. Vtex can expand faster and easier but does not support many essential B2B features.

If you are looking for a cheaper and more B2C focused solution, Vtex is an option for you as it provides all the integration capabilities and many ecommerce features right out of the box.

However, in terms of B2B sales, OroCommerce still wins as it can provide a highly customized solution.

Shopify is often seen as a competitor to OroCommerce only because Oro also fits SMBs. However, Shopify is a small, mostly retail and B2C oriented solution, so it doesn't make much sense to compare them.

If you are looking for something not too expensive and simple, do not need B2B features and just try ecommerce instead of instant growth, try Shopify.

Both solutions are deeply B2B-oriented, though KIBO focuses on both models. Kibo is a more user-friendly solution, while OroCommerce supports more built-in B2B features.

Generally speaking, OroCommerce is better suited for complex B2B businesses compared to Kibo. The last one might be preferred by businesses looking for a versatile platform that supports both B2B and B2C, offering a balance between customization and ease of use.

OroCommerce wins here due to the only fact that Magento is a very old, monolithic solution compared to others selected here. With its big name and great support, it is still not good enough for those who need high extensibility.

Although OroCommerce is not too extensible either, the choice here clearly depends on your needs: Magento offers more B2B options out of the box, while Oro is much more ready for market changes.

Also, both solutions are difficult to customize and require deep technical knowledge.

Comparing OroCommerce and Virto, you can see many similar characteristics such as high modularity and cloud-nativeness. However, the real differences start with the tech stack: while OroCommerce works with a very complex Symphony, Virto Сommerce offers a widespread .NET framework that enables developers to use open libraries and easily rebuild the solution if needed.

Another point is that Virto Commerce is much more extensible and always ready for innovation. Even large enterprises (which is not possible in the case of Oro) can grow quickly when needed, with not too many expenses along the way.

Virto Commerce is the only PaaS solution on the list, which means that when you buy it, you get out-of-the-box functionality and can quickly build anything else you need without additional payments or extra work from the vendor. Although Oro Commerce positions itself as an open source and headless ecommerce platform, if you compare the architecture of the two platforms, you'll see that Virto's modules are completely independent, while Oro tries to decouple them but doesn't always succeed.

Virto Commerce is a native B2B solution which means always excellent B2B features with no challenges. And even if you are planning to build your own marketplace or several multivendor marketplaces, Virto Commerce B2B Marketplaces Guide can help you.