commercetools vs Elastic Path (2026): which should you pick?

commercetools

• Enterprises replatforming a large multi-market commerce stack
• Engineering teams that want to build their own storefront on APIs
• B2B sellers with account hierarchies and approval flows

Elastic Path

• Engineering teams building a custom storefront on commerce APIs
• B2B sellers needing accounts, price books and promotions
• Enterprises that want a vendor-hosted commerce backend

commercetools

• No prices are published; the pricing page sends buyers to sales and says pricing is order-based rather than based on sales volume.
• There is no built-in storefront theme editor; a team has to build or buy the front end, and Frontend is a separate product.
• Premium Support, advanced B2B APIs, checkout, HIPAA compliance and extra regions are listed as add-ons.
• The 60-day trial covers the core commerce APIs and Merchant Center, but not InStore, Frontend or agentic capabilities.

Elastic Path

• No prices could be read from the vendor's site here: the pages answered with a bot check, so pricing is recorded as unverified.
• It is a developer platform with no theme-based store builder, so a storefront has to be built or bought separately.
• Self-managed (self-hosted) commerce is documented separately from the hosted product, so confirm which one applies.

commercetools

Headless commerce APIs

Each capability, such as catalog, cart and order management, inventory, promotions and pricing, is exposed as its own versioned API that teams assemble into a custom storefront.

B2C, B2B and hybrid models

The page lists B2C, B2B, D2C, marketplaces and subscriptions as supported models. Business units, buyer roles, approval flows and quotes are sold as an Advanced B2B APIs add-on.

Merchant Center

A business tool for managing catalog and orders, included in the 60-day trial next to the APIs, with preloaded B2C or B2B sample data.

Connect hosting

Connect is a managed runtime for deploying custom integrations and back-office applications inside a commercetools environment, with templates to start from.

AI and agent commerce

AI Hub and AgenticLift are products for selling through ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, and the platform exposes MCP servers for agents. The trial excludes agentic capabilities.

InStore point of sale

A separate product that gives store staff the same catalog, cart and orders that serve the online shop. It is not part of the free trial.

Elastic Path

Commerce APIs

Documented APIs with OpenAPI specifications cover carts, checkout, orders, catalogs, products, payments and application keys.

Commerce Manager

A web-based interface for merchants to manage products, orders, customers, promotions, subscriptions, analytics and team permissions.

Price books and promotions

Price books define pricing, and both a standard promotions engine and a promotions builder are documented.

Accounts and organizations

Accounts and account members can log in to the store and create orders for their accounts, which suits B2B buying.

Single- and multi-location inventory

Inventory is documented for a single location or for several, alongside subscriptions and single sign-on settings.

Composer integration layer

Composer is described as commerce intelligence IPaaS, with a builder, an integrations hub and monitoring for connecting other systems.

commercetools

Pricing could not be confirmed. See commercetools.com.

Elastic Path

Pricing could not be confirmed. See elasticpath.com.