Akeneo vs Pimcore: How to manage your product data?

As an ecommerce company one of the most important challenges you will face is centralizing and managing your product data. Having accurate data that your marketing, sales, and analytics teams can access improves your bottom line, product onboarding speed, customer trust, customer experience, as well as your capacity for growth, amongst many other advantages.

PIM systems, or Product Information Management systems, are third party tools that are built to manage and transform all your product data in one central place. In practice these systems are supposed to be able to provide your customers with accurate product data, enabling you to edit, redistribute or remove data when needed. A PIM does this by gathering all available product data from diverse sources, via an API, and then transforming this disparate data into one cohesive dataset. This can in turn be distributed through several channels of communication and act as the central product information source.

Introducing Akeneo and Pimcore

Two popular PIM systems are Pimcore and Akeneo. Both are available in a paid, as well as open source form. Both are also based on the open source Symfony 4 PHP-framework. How you would choose between these two popular PIM systems can seem arbitrary, as they are similar at a glance. Both use API connections to integrate data from several channels.. Both can save you time and unnecessary investment through ease of use and easy data access. However there are significant differences between the two systems.

Akeneo vs Pimcore – PIM vs MDM

The first and most important distinction between the two platforms is that Pimcore, despite its name, is not only a Product Information Management system. Pimcore is an MDM system (Master Data Management.) MDM systems allow the user to manage more than product data, in fact one can gather and process client data, network data, financial data, price listings, distributors, partner data and more! As with a PIM system the management process is central. This makes Pimcore a PIM system the same way a fork is a utensil for spaghetti – while technically true it can be used for a range of other products.

In other words Pimcore is much more of an all in one solution, and can therefore be used in pretty much any aspect of your business when it comes to data management. As a PIM system in name and function Akeneo is much more focused, and the company has also put effort into streamlining its user experience to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible.

Akeneo vs Pimcore – Differences and similarities

Examining both Akeneo and Pimcore as PIM systems first reveals areas of strength and relative weakness for both systems:

Ties

● Functionality: Both systems have a comparable offering of basic PIM features.
● Price: Both offer a free and open source system. Both also offer a paid enterprise edition with a host of additional features.

Advantages of Akeneo

● Support Quality: By specializing in PIM Akeneo features more support as well as a better user environment for learning the PIM system.
● Quality of Life: More ready-to-use tools and functions for the PIM system.
● Data Salience: Akeneo has the advantage when it comes to data insights and data completeness, it also takes advantage of AI to provide insight reports. The AI, named ‘Franklin’ can also help fill product information and update information elements.
● Ease of use: Marketplace with ready to go extensions, providing a range of features makes this much more plug and play. Not as feature filled, meaning the tool is easier to pick up and play.

Advantages to Pimcore

● Tools: More advanced tools and options like a built in photo editor and extensive publishing and planning tools. You can also display your products in an e-catalogue that is generated for you.
● Support access: All Pimcore users have access to support, while Akeneo provides this only to users of its enterprise edition.
● Customization and flexibility: The huge range of features and components allow you to process the data in a variety of ways as well as set up more data management systems in a bespoke way.
● Feature set and scalability: Through also being an MDM Pimcore allows you to scale its use beyond only product information management. While this may not be a business need now, it may be useful to have the space to scale or widen the scope of your data management in one system in the future.

Pimcore or Akeneo?

As in most cases it depends on what you’re looking for in a product or data management system. In summary: are you looking for a PIM system, and do you want to set things up as soon as possible to get started? Then Akeneo will be a better option for you. The marketplace of extensions means you wont need to look far to get started and integrate it with your ecommerce system. It’s easily configured and fast to implement.

On the other hand if you’re starting a more complex project, and want to have the flexibility to explore a range of tools and data management processes then Pimcore is the more sensible choice. It’s also important to remember that by being an MDM Pimcore can centralize all your available data rather than your product data. Depending on your needs this can be more future proof. It will however require more work. Pimcore is a set of tools and a framework to build systems on. Unlike Akeneo, it is not an out of the box solution. This can work to your advantage however, as over time the components can be fully tailored to your needs and expanded upon where necessary.

Your PIM System and Hosting

The choice for Pimcore or Akeneo is up to you! Be sure to ask yourself what your current needs are, as well as what your future needs may be. In both cases however you need to arrange the hosting for your package of choice yourself. Having a good hosting partner for your PIM system is therefore an important factor in ensuring successful implementation. At Hypernode we offer fast and secure Akeneo and Pimcore optimized hosting. Want to learn more about hosting your PIM system? Check out our PIM hosting.