Best of Breed vs. Best of Suite – Characteristics, Advantages, and Disadvantages

There are ecommerce solutions that provide only basic functionality such as a shopping cart and checkout flow. And then there are large ecommerce “suites” that include everything from product management to pricing and campaign modules.

With a Best of Suite solution, you choose a comprehensive platform that offers a suite of features to support your needs. In most cases, you won’t end up using all the available features, which often leads to some degree of “wasted” investment when opting for a full-suite platform.

A Best of Breed solution, on the other hand, is built from independent modules—you choose the best product management module, the best payment module, the best CMS (if your site includes content), the best ERP system, and combine these “Best of Breed” technologies into your final solution.

But when should you choose one model over the other?

The large suites (e.g., BigCommerce or commercetools) typically entice you with statements like “the last commerce platform you’ll ever need” and “all features bundled into a streamlined package!” Naturally, when you choose a comprehensive ecommerce suite, it’s in the hope that the first statement is true!

A Best of Suite solution is suited for companies that know their needs and can accept that their ecommerce platform may be difficult to customize.

A Best of Suite ecommerce solution typically includes:

• Shopping cart

• Checkout

• Pricing management

• Product management

• Order management

• Campaign and discount modules

• Inventory and shipping management

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These platforms are especially appealing because they allow for quick and efficient implementation and launch—particularly for new ecommerce solutions. All features are standardized to a certain extent, allowing you to “just” focus on enriching product data, designing the front-end, managing pricing, and maybe even some degree of CRM-related magic.

By building your ecommerce platform on one of the large suite solutions, you can often save time and money on, for example, integrations and configuring multiple different technologies with different logics, since the system contains most of what you need. However, this also turns out to be the weakness of Best of Suite platforms.

Risks with the large platforms

The risk when choosing this type of platform is that you often end up in a vendor “lock-in,” effectively making it impossible to swap out any component of the system. This is because these systems are not readily open—or easily made open—to communicate with other systems (e.g., your ERP or CRM systems).

In the worst case, this means you may have to scrap your entire platform (and with it, all the knowledge and workflows around it) in favor of a NEW platform that can deliver the functionality and customization options that fit your needs.

Your business might also evolve, or processes and requirements might change over time. Perhaps you introduce more advanced processes in your ERP system that make managing prices, discount groups, etc., in your ecommerce setup redundant. This risks leaving you with a solution that does far more than you actually need—and you will almost certainly pay for that surplus functionality.

With a Best of Suite ecommerce platform, you get a lot of features bundled into a standardized package. On the other hand, you risk being locked into an ecosystem that, over time, cannot be adapted to your needs without a lot of effort and “force” (which, by the way, only increases maintenance costs and error rates).

Why choose a Best of Suite platform

If you know your own needs well enough and have a strategic roadmap you trust, a Best of Suite solution can make a lot of sense. You can get up and running quickly with a robust, standardized platform.

If you rely on special integrations to your ERP system, your PIM system, and your CRM platform, you should at least remember to do your due diligence when considering your choice of ecommerce suite.

In some cases, you as a customer are offered the possibility to add “Apps” on top of your ecommerce suite, which can make sense if you’re okay with these integrations—handling complex and personal data—being a “black box” from a code perspective.

In natural continuation of the risks associated with the Best of Suite approach, the strengths of the Best of Breed approach naturally come into play.

Unlike Best of Suite solutions, Best of Breed solutions typically offer greater flexibility in the choice of technologies and services, giving you more freedom in building your ecommerce platform.

However, this freedom comes at a cost, making this approach not the ideal starting point for every ecommerce project.

Best of Breed solutions are built—true to the name—with independent technologies, each of which “masters” the function it is designed to handle. For product management, the PIM system will typically be part of the solution. For business-critical data, an ERP system is used. And for marketing and sales, a CRM platform is incorporated.

To build a complete ecommerce platform, you only need the following functions:

• Shopping cart

• Checkout (including payment gateway and acquiring agreement)

Unlike the Best of Suite solution, the Best of Breed approach gives you the opportunity to choose the technologies that best fit your business. This also naturally opens the door to thinking headless, microservices, APIs, and cloud into your setup.

The Best of Breed approach ensures, among other things, greater flexibility than the Best of Suite model, since the individual systems can be swapped out and updated independently over time.

Challenges with the Best of Breed approach

While the Best of Suite solution excels at offering a standardized package that makes it easier to get started building your ecommerce platform, Best of Breed solutions add complexity to the project.

When you select individual technologies based on their strengths within their respective niches, you cannot necessarily expect these technologies to work seamlessly together from the start.

The typical solution is to connect your Best of Breed technologies via APIs that expose the systems’ data to each other and to the ecommerce frontend. This gives you great freedom to customize and upgrade your system landscape but naturally requires maintaining a number of integrations.

Although this adds complexity during the platform’s development, it can often reduce operational complexity, since you only need to update the parts of the solution that need it most. In a well-designed architecture, all your technologies are independent, so you rarely experience the entire system being affected when a single technology is updated.

The typical Best of Breed solution usually ends up being a combination of several existing technologies and platforms. Every agency has its own technologies, methods, and processes when building this type of solution, which makes it difficult to provide concrete examples of specific Best of Breed technologies.

Why choose Best of Breed

If you are highly ambitious about your ecommerce efforts, the Best of Breed solution is without a doubt the most exciting starting point.

Here you have the opportunity to focus precisely on the areas that best fit your business and bring into play the technologies that give your platform the strongest value proposition.

However, with the Best of Breed approach, you must always keep in mind the extra layer of complexity that is automatically added, especially during the development phase. All systems need to communicate, and what might be a simple configuration in an ecommerce suite becomes a larger or smaller project in itself when building a custom ecommerce setup.

On the other hand, the solution is usually more flexible and therefore future-proof, which can ultimately save you a lot of time and money—and help strengthen your competitive edge in the market, since you are never limited by the technology.

There are many factors to consider when choosing IT solutions. Every technical decision will undoubtedly impact your organization, your processes, and your ability to scale your business. This naturally applies when selecting an ecommerce platform as well.

Of course, there is no single “right” model or choice. The best platform choice depends on your business and the market you operate in.

A comprehensive platform is optimal for some companies

For some businesses, it makes the most sense to have one unified product and accept the limitations that may come with such a Best of Suite solution. As mentioned, the starting point for choosing this type of solution is to select the platform that best matches your functional needs and budget.

Any reputable consultancy with the right skills and ethics will make you aware, before starting the project, of the potential “lock-in” that could pose risks to your scalability and flexibility in the long run.

Other companies will benefit most from choosing an ecommerce platform that primarily handles a few central functions in the buying journey, such as the shopping cart and checkout. Perhaps your company already has a PIM solution, a CRM system, and an ERP system, which therefore don’t need to be part of the ecommerce platform.

This approach gives you the freedom to combine Best of Breed solutions that, taken together, create the most robust and scalable platform for your business.