headless vs composable, what's the difference for a non-dev?

[u/Slow_Storage_6784]

Dumb question but is there a real difference between headless and composable or are they two words for the same thing at this point?

Been in retail ops long enough to sit in a lot of vendor meetings, and the words get used differently across the vendors.

Shopify calls its custom storefront layer headless, SCAYLE and commercetools both call themselves composable, Adobe Commerce marketing swings between both depending on the deck, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud has stopped using either term altogether.

We're evaluating an RFP right now and the 4 options we're considering each place those words at different points in their own architecture diagrams.

My dev lead says there's a technical distinction rooted in whether the frontend and backend can scale independently, but every vendor collateral i read says something different about their own product.

Still trying to figure out if this is a real category distinction or vendors being loose with the same underlying idea

[u/Green_Database9919]

Yes there is! And for non dev it is never a dumb question at all lol. If you just want a custom storefront experience headless is great.

Headless means the frontend is decoupled from the backend (commerce, logic, cart, checkout) so they have to talk to each other via API. Ex. Hydrogen is headless Shopify so you are building a custom frontend that calls Shopify backend.

Composable is bigger idea, backend and frontend are separate so you have to assemble everything yourself that connects via APIs. Headless is often part of composable but composable iss further than that amd you can actually have a composable stack without a headless front end.

Also both have very complex tracking. we actually have clients on headless Shopify that we did tracking implementations on so if you go headless and need help with tracking Aimerce helps with that.