Short answer. Abakion B2B Ecommerce and Dynamicweb Commerce Suite are both ecommerce solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, but they are not the same purchase. With Abakion B2B Ecommerce the logic runs in Business Central, and with Dynamicweb Commerce Suite it is maintained in two places.
Abakion B2B Ecommerce runs as an app inside Business Central and sells to logged-in customers, and the basket is written straight into the ERP as a sales quote. Dynamicweb Commerce Suite is a separate platform holding a content management system, a product information system and a storefront, connected to Business Central through its own plug-in unit, and it also covers open selling, editorial content and several brands or markets. So if you sell only to known customers and run Business Central online, Abakion B2B Ecommerce is the faster and cheaper fit. If you need an open web shop, real editorial content, several sites or Business Central on-premises, Dynamicweb Commerce Suite is the comprehensive and of course more expensive fit.
What is the actual difference between Abakion B2B Ecommerce and Dynamicweb?
The two solutions don't put the web shop in the same place, and almost everything else follows from that.
Abakion B2B Ecommerce is an app installed in Business Central, the storefront and a product information module, with the site itself hosted on Microsoft Azure as part of the subscription. When a customer adds an item to the basket, a sales quote is created in Business Central and the price is calculated there. So the basket is the quote rather than a copy of it.
Dynamicweb Commerce Suite is a separate platform holding a content management system, a product information system and a storefront in one installation. Its plug-in unit installs in Business Central and exposes a web service that the platform calls. Against Business Central online, that call is authenticated with OAuth 2.0 between services through an app registration in Entra ID, and the plug-in unit always exposes data as XML. Against on-premises, the same add-in is installed in the Business Central instance and reached through Dynamicweb's own connector service.
Dynamicweb has two integration modes, and the difference matters more than the technology does. Batch integration moves master data in portions on a schedule. Live integration calls Business Central while the page is being built, and it is what you use for prices, stock and for letting the ERP calculate discounts and freight on the order. The two are not an either or, because Dynamicweb's documentation states that a live integration requires a functioning batch integration to be in place. So the decision isn't whether to run both, it is how much of the shop depends on a live call, and that decision sets both the response time in the shop and the load on Business Central.
How do the two solutions compare on the points that decide it?
| Abakion B2B Ecommerce | Dynamicweb Commerce Suite | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the shop runs | App inside Business Central | Separate platform with a plug-in unit in Business Central |
| Sales model | Login-based selling only | Open selling and login-based portal |
| Basket document in Business Central | Sales quote, always | Sales order or quote, set in configuration |
| Where prices are calculated | Business Central, always | Business Central, if live integration is on |
| Bundles and campaigns | Business Central only | Composed in Dynamicweb |
| Content, SEO and several sites | Not included, no CMS | Included in the platform |
| Business Central deployment | Online only | Online and on-premises |
| Who maintains the setup after go-live | Abakion, standard setup | You, per-customer field mappings |
| Three-year cost and time, mid-sized | 120,000 to 400,000 euro, one to three weeks project | 120,000 to 400,000 euro, three to twelve months project |
| Best fit | Wholesalers and manufacturers selling to known customers on Business Central online | Companies selling both openly and to accounts, with editorial content and several markets |
How are customer-specific prices and discounts handled?
Both solutions let Business Central calculate the price, but they get there differently, and that difference shows up in what you maintain.
With Abakion B2B Ecommerce, the quote lives in Business Central, so there is no synchronization of prices between solutions. Customer-specific prices, agreed prices, tiered volume discounts, campaign prices, discount groups, customer-specific assortment and credit limit are all read and calculated by the ERP, because the document is already there. That removes the failure we see most often in older integrations, which is a flat price matrix of every customer against every item.
Dynamicweb Commerce Suite takes a different route since it is based on an integration. With live integration switched on, the customer's price is fetched from Business Central at the moment it is rendered. The cart itself can be sent to the ERP for calculation, and the integration has explicit settings for letting Business Central control discount calculation and shipping calculation. Tiered discounts, discount groups and line and invoice discounts therefore follow the setup in the ERP rather than a copy in the shop.
Bundles are the exception in Dynamicweb, and it is worth knowing. They are built as parts list products in Dynamicweb, not in Business Central, with their own price calculation setting for whether the bundle price is summed from the parts or fixed on the bundle. Dynamicweb also has its own discount and campaign engine. So a company can end up with pricing rules in two systems. That is a strength if you want an editorial campaign layer marketing can run without touching the ERP. It is a risk if nobody has decided what belongs where. In our catalogue that is exactly the difference between the two labels the solutions carry: the logic runs in Business Central for Abakion B2B Ecommerce, and it is set up in two places for Dynamicweb Commerce Suite.
Abakion B2B Ecommerce pays for that tidiness. There is no independent campaign layer in the shop, so a campaign is created in Business Central, and bundles rest on the ERP's own bills of material. If you sell bundle deals, ask for a demonstration rather than a yes.
Can both solutions run an open web shop with real content?
No. Abakion B2B Ecommerce is login-based selling only, and Dynamicweb Commerce Suite covers both sales models.
It is not a gap in Abakion B2B Ecommerce, it is simply a design focus on B2B. There is no content management system in the solution either. If your brand lives off its visual expression and its editorial content, it is not the tool.
Dynamicweb Commerce Suite covers open selling with guest checkout and card payment, and a login-based portal with account hierarchies, approval flows and invoice payment, in the same platform. The content management system is not an afterthought, because a campaign page, an article series or a landing page per market is built in the same tool as the product catalogue. Search engine optimisation, several brands, several markets and product feeds are all part of the picture, and a marketing department can work without a developer for most of it.
Licensing follows that difference. Dynamicweb Commerce Suite includes several shops in the subscription and supports several Business Central companies against one shop. Abakion B2B Ecommerce is priced per web shop and assumes one Business Central company per shop, so if you run five companies, that is a question to settle before you compare the prices.
What happens to the order in Business Central?
With Abakion B2B Ecommerce the document is a sales quote, always, and with Dynamicweb Commerce Suite the document type is decided in the setup, so both a sales order and a sales quote are possible.
A quote is not a commitment, so there is a natural place for a salesperson or an approver to look at the order before it becomes one. Some companies want exactly that control. Others see an extra step to automate away, and it is worth knowing which you are before the demo.
There is one operational difference behind that. Because the Abakion basket writes directly into Business Central, there is no state where the order exists in the shop but not in the accounts, and no queue of failed transfers to watch. Dynamicweb keeps a log of every transfer and failed orders can be run again, which handles transient failures well, but an order that fails on a data error stays in the log until a person looks. So agree who that person is, and put a name on it.
Payment timing differs too. Abakion B2B Ecommerce collects at shipment, which is the normal B2B pattern. Dynamicweb Commerce Suite collects at checkout, which is what BTC needs.
On VAT, both solutions let Business Central decide it, and Abakion B2B Ecommerce supports Avalara AvaTax as an add-on if you need a dedicated tax engine. If you sell into several countries, that is a real difference from the solutions which decide VAT in the storefront.
Who maintains the integration after go-live?
Abakion maintains Abakion B2B Ecommerce, and you maintain the Dynamicweb configuration. Our comparison work classifies solutions by exactly that question, and the two land in different places.
Abakion B2B Ecommerce is a finished app driving the storefront from Business Central on a standard setup, so we keep it compatible with Business Central and we own the API side. Dynamicweb Commerce Suite is a flexible integration configured per customer.
That word "configured" is where the cost sits. Field mappings, endpoints and add-in instances are set up for your installation, and you own them afterwards, even though the plug-in unit itself is a released product with a version history. Business Central ships two releases a year, and the mappings are the item that needs attention when it does. Ask to have it written down who does that work and what it costs, because that is what separates a finished app from a configured framework.
Abakion B2B Ecommerce supports Business Central online only. Dynamicweb Commerce Suite supports both online and on-premises.
What does each solution cost?
Abakion B2B Ecommerce has public pricing and Dynamicweb Commerce Suite does not, which makes a direct comparison harder than it should be.
Abakion B2B Ecommerce has three tiers: 253 USD a month for under 100 active customers and 1,500 items, USD 553 a month for under 1,000 customers and 5,000 items, and USD 878 a month with no limits. The start-up project is a fixed price of USD 6,750. The tier limits are guidelines and they do not throttle.
Dynamicweb does not publish prices. A public listing on TrustRadius points to around USD 1,500 a month as an entry point, and it rises from there with features and scope. Implementation is time and materials rather than a fixed template.
Over three years, the Abakion solution lands between USD 9,000 and 30,000 and Dynamicweb lands between USD 120,000 and 400,000.
The gap is wide enough to be real, but it is not only a discount. Implementation runs one to three weeks for Abakion B2B Ecommerce and three to twelve months for Dynamicweb Commerce Suite, and the implementation project i far more complex: a content management system, a B2C shop, a campaign engine.
Which solution should you choose?
Choose Abakion B2B Ecommerce if you
- sell to known customers
- run Business Central online
- want prices calculated in one place
- want to be live inside a few weeks.
It costs less and it is faster to put up. The included product information module matters more than it sounds, because the item card in Business Central is thin, and filling that gap otherwise becomes a project of its own.
Choose Dynamicweb Commerce Suite if you:
- sell B2C to anonymous buyers as well as to accounts
- need real editorial content and search engine optimisation beside the catalogue
- run several brands, several web shops or several markets
- need several Business Central companies behind one shop
- run Business Central on-premises
Whichever way you lean, four things are worth asking of whoever is selling:
- how a basket with thirty lines behaves, demonstrated rather than described
- how many concurrent users the setup has been tested with, as a number
- who owns the field mappings and the configuration after go-live, with a name
- what happens at the two annual Business Central releases, written into the operating agreement
Product links
- Abakion B2B Ecommerce
- Abakion B2B Ecommerce on Microsoft AppSource
- Dynamicweb D365BC Integration Add-in on Microsoft Marketplace
Sources
- Business Central Cloud plug-in unit, Dynamicweb documentation
- Live integration, Dynamicweb documentation
- NAV and Business Central requests and responses, Dynamicweb documentation
- Products and parts lists, Dynamicweb documentation
- Ecommerce for Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamicweb
- Dynamicweb CMS pricing, TrustRadius
- B2B Ecommerce for Business Central, Abakion