Reaction Commerce Vs. Spree Commerce: Which Would Rule ?

Read Time 7 min

Adapting to the market’s changes is a must for thriving in the business world. A significant amount of digital resource allocation, especially e-Commerce, can help you tap the previously undiscovered opportunities. Once you decide to create a marketplace for your business with an eCommerce platform, you must identify and choose the best development solution. This article will enlighten you about Reaction Commerce vs. Spree Commerce by evaluating various aspects that greatly influence the decision.

These two eCommerce platforms being way apart in functionality, aim to create the best solution for eCommerce. Moving ahead in this article, let’s help you look into each intricate detail of both platforms to ease your confusion of choosing the best among both.

Reaction Commerce: Overview

Reaction Commerce, now known as Mailchimp open commerce, is an open-source platform, API first modular commerce stack powered by meteor.js. Within a short period since its launch, it has been garnering more and more people’s attention because of its high level of customization ability. The story behind the evolution of Reaction Commerce is quite interesting. The developers observed that most eCommerce firms were growing out of their in-use ready-made platforms. Moreover, to go with the flow of technological change, eCommerce businesses used to engage in a tiresome process- the need to switch from an old platform to a brand new one.

As per Sara Hicks (Co-founder, CEO- Reaction Commerce): Ecommerce technology is still evolving and has a long way to go. In the past few years with Reaction eCommerce development, they have tried to provide a platform that evolves according to the industry and inspires further change.

Some standard features of Reaction Commerce:

Order management
Product and inventory management
Notifications
Advanced search option
Customer profiles
Discounts
Universal tags
Customized themes

If you feel intrigued knowing Reaction Commerce’s features, let’s get to know Reaction Commerce better in this quest Reaction Commerce vs. Spree Commerce.

Why is Reaction important for online marketplaces?

The Prime objective of Reaction commerce is to be a conversion-first platform that provides ultra-fast processing. Since Reaction Commerce offers product load, promotions, and pricing with app updates or page reload, it draws users’ attention and brings them close to the purchasing stage without time lag. The Reaction Commerce is a single-page app, loads the entire shop in the background whenever someone visits it for the first time. With data being locally available, the pages open at lightning speed to the users every time. When users visit a website, they select filters, choose products, add on a cart, etc. As Reaction Commerce uses event-driven language Javascript, it tracks all these events and updates them.

Advantages of Reaction Commerce

The objective of Reaction Commerce is to provide a flexible system that will grow together with your business, trends, and technologies. Let’s have a look at various advantages Reaction Commerce delivers:

Includes Leading framework and technologies

The use of flexible frameworks and technologies in Reaction Commerce makes it quite popular, garnering the support of a large open-source community. Reaction Commerce development includes various powerful technologies, including JavaScript, node.js, npm, React, and MongoDB. Also, with the use of NoSQL databases, it provides scalability with handling large data columns. Reaction Commerce platform attracts thousands of people across the globe due to its modern and flexible approach. This technology is among the favorites of Github’s top eCommerce open source projects that ensure constant development.

Constant support and detailed documentation

Reaction Commerce provides real-time support, which helps in getting quick resolutions to queries. Not only that, it also offers detailed documentation with different guides, forums, and tutorials for immediate support in case of any challenges.

100% customizable

Another major benefit that Reaction Commerce provides is its flexibility according to your business requirements. Being completely open-source, it allows anyone to download its codebase and further extension. Reaction Commerce is favorite for developing scalable marketplaces with a supportive community and modern technologies at its disperse.

Real-time analytics

Being built on the Meteor framework, React Commerce platform transmits and updates information in a millisecond whenever a client requests it from the server.

SEO optimized

Reaction Commerce handles SEO very well with the adoption of the following tools:

Iron-router conducts both server and client-side routing and sets proper titles for each document/URL.
Kadira flow router provides client-side routing only.
Kadira Dockhead adds meta-objects.
Prerender.io allows your javascript website to be crawled by search engines.

Reaction Commerce integrations

Reaction Commerce integrates with the following services:

Challenges to Reaction Commerce

Processing intense applications

When you aim to create powerful applications that require heavy processing, Reaction Commerce falls short due to the language used i.e., Meteor.js. As this framework is single-threaded, it becomes hard for faster multiprocessing.

Framework Maturity

As Reaction commerce is relatively new to other frameworks, it doesn’t consist much of plugins or themes. Moreover, due to the same reason of being quite young, the developer community is still not formed at a larger scale. Coming to the other contender in this Reaction Commerce vs. Spree Commerce article, let’s have an all-around look at Spree Commerce.

Spree Commerce: Overview

Spree Commerce is a Ruby on Rails-based open-source platform that enables highly customizable and fully featured websites. Its free code allows developers to create unique online marketplaces of any complexity. Spree commerce enables multiple functions like payment gateway authorization, shopping cart gem, etc., resulting in its widespread popularity since 2007. This technology platform is a favorite for creating fast, reliable, and scalable eCommerce stores.

Why is Spree important for online marketplaces?

The rich functionality provided by Spree commerce makes it a significant choice by the eCommerce firms especially. As it covers a functional storefront module, it enables developers with a mobile-friendly and responsive build. The progressive front end of this platform is easily customizable, and frequent updates are available. Even having a poor or weak mobile connection does not affect the efficiency of the eCommerce solution developed by Spree Commerce.

Another prominent feature known as elastic search in Spree commerce helps users sort out or filter product listing and aids users in searching at a lightning-fast speed irrespective of the number of users accessing the URL at the same time.

Spree Commerce also entails the following features:

Wish lists
Different payment methods
Omnichannel capacities
Content management modules
Product personalization
Options for subscription

Advantages of Spree commerce

Highly scalable

Scalability is the number of requests your web application can handle in a specific time, and Spree commerce is the pioneer of that. It is a highly robust framework that can handle massive traffic without any delay in response time. It supports over 30,000 products meeting several industry benchmarks. Since Spree commerce can handle large amounts of traffic better than other development platforms, it can simultaneously serve many user requests.

Fast development

Spree commerce is faster to develop than other competitors as it requires 10 times less coding for web development for creating an eCommerce store. Numerous community contributors constantly keep on adding new features and extensions, saving a lot of additional costs. With the help of Spree Commerce, you can create an eCommerce website at a fantastic pace that results in a lesser time to market. Being based on Ruby on Rails, it covers all the core functionalities making it special for eCommerce firms who want speedy and quality development for their marketplace.

Easy order processing

Spree commerce web development provides multiple payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, eWay, and many more, making order management easy.

This web development platform offers additional dashboard features like a quick order management system, payment methods monitoring, sorting of products that enable super-simple functionality for better control.

Minimal Cost

Spree commerce is entirely free to download. Irrespective of the business’s size, be it small scale or multinational, you don’t incur license fee costs, and you have complete freedom to use Spree for commercial purposes. Adding to the perks, Spree commerce provides many free-of-cost expansions supporting additional features like multi-domain support and blogging. You can also download several custom themes and apply them to your Spree commerce-based website.

Challenges to Spree commerce

Heavy Coding

Spree Commerce, a web development platform, requires you to hire Ruby on Rails developers. As the language involves heavy coding, it gets difficult to find efficient developers, and the development has a proportional impact on project cost.

Limited themes

It gets difficult to create unique web solutions with Spree Commerce as it contains only a handful of themes, and many times you need to create a website from scratch due to limited additional offerings.

Custom Development

Having custom development in Spree commerce can be a strenuous task as many times, even adding a standard functionality doesn’t have RubyGem and requires custom building by developers. This results in additional time and increases website coding. Now, as we have discussed the features, advantages, and disadvantages of both of the competitors in this Reaction Commerce vs. Spree Commerce article, you would have a better idea about both web development solutions. It is imperative to evaluate both the solutions on your requirements as well for a sound decision. To help your further, let’s find out the answer to

When to choose Reaction Commerce?

You should go with the Reaction commerce option if:

You want to switch to another platform as the Reaction commerce team provides multiple migration paths from Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce.
You want to develop your website with advanced functionalities, as Reaction Commerce provides full customization.
You want to avail real-time analytics of users to improve your business functioning.

When to choose Spree Commerce?

You must choose Spree commerce if:

You are striving to expand your business and need a web development solution that provides optimum scalability.
You want to create an exclusive and efficient eCommerce platform.
You want the solution with less time to market at an affordable cost.

Wrapping up

It is quite understandable that no one eCommerce development platform encompasses all the crucial factors for every business. There is always a tradeoff between flexibility, simplicity, user interface, cost, and customization. Ensure to tick the essential checklist of features, advantages, and disadvantages before opting for any of the two web development platforms above. Moreover, you should also consider your technical skills. Whether you are a large corporation or small-scale startup, creating a filter of your requirements and the benefits and drawbacks of both the platforms can only help you find the preeminent web development solution out of Reaction commerce and Spree commerce.