Composable doesn’t have to be complicated.

The promise of composable commerce was about flexibility, speed, and delivering real business value. However, in pursuing a myriad of SaaS solutions, many organizations have ended up with something far from agile. Instead of composable commerce bringing faster time-to-market, for many it's burdened them with a labyrinth of integrations, spiraling costs, and fragmented experiences.

The legacy view of a Platform was one of a monolith - a single platform that had all the component parts integrated together. Broadleaf’s legacy solution is monolithic, and it still runs great for our active clients who update their core dependencies (like Java and Spring), keep security up-to-date, and develop their own features or integrations on top of the platform.

Anyone who has run a monolithic application for a while, though, can attest to the platform bringing on “technical debt” over time. Invariably, a business has prioritized quick releases over well-designed code, has insufficient or missing documentation, skipped testing leading to quality issues, and faced technology obsolescence in different parts of the platform. Enter composable thinking and leverage Microservices, where replacing component parts of a monolithic application keeps innovation moving without having to have a long pause for a “big bang” migration.

Composable Microservices allow companies to migrate and innovate iteratively.

In migrating off of legacy solutions, however, many enterprises now find themselves bogged down in a tangle of microservices, juggling a dozen vendors, each with their own Admin (backoffice) management interface, and constantly firefighting integration issues. What once felt like a future-proof solution has become an operational liability for some. At Broadleaf, our own rearchitecture from a monolithic to a Microservice-based application resulted in over 30 different Microservices, but they all still have a single Administrative interface.

When does Composability become a burden?

In chasing SaaS-based composability, there are now too many companies leveraging too many tools. Coming from a monolithic platform, the average online store already has to determine their payment processor (PSP), email solution provider (ESP), tax provider, and fulfillment options, not to mention optional but beneficial services like risk mitigation, address validation, marketing automation, and a myriad of infrastructure and analytics tooling. Enter composable SaaS, and now there are decisions around content management (CMS), product management (PIM), browse and search, pricing, offers and promos, inventory management, order management, and last but certainly not least, cart and checkout. All storing data separately. All with separate Admin interfaces. All require separate licensing and support costs.

Digital Merchandisers now have ALL the logins.

At Broadleaf, we’ve focused on minimizing these hidden cost traps and business process inefficiencies by delivering modular capabilities that don’t require you to rebuild the plumbing every time you add something new.

It's time to shift the conversation from abstract ideals to grounded, business-first outcomes. While MACH architecture offers important principles, the real question is: How do we build commerce ecosystems that deliver value today and remain adaptable tomorrow?

Not every tool marketed as "best of breed" is best for your business. There’s a tendency to overindex on market hype, choosing trendy solutions without a clear ROI or operational fit. True composability isn’t about collecting the flashiest tech; it’s about curating the right mix of tools that align with your business objectives and capacity to manage them effectively. Broadleaf is built to give you flexibility with discernment, so you can say no to unnecessary complexity and yes to meaningful impact.

What does pragmatic Composability look like?

At Broadleaf, we believe in a saner, more sustainable path, one that embraces MACH principles but is not enslaved by them, balances modularity with meaningful defaults, and empowers business and tech teams alike.

Our platform is built on APIs and microservices, but with out-of-the-box connections that reduce time to value. You can replace system parts, but not because you have to. We support decoupled frontends without forcing every customer to reinvent the wheel. The platform is designed to scale but without unnecessary complexity.

Our customers aren’t chasing buzzwords. They’re delivering results.

We recommend the strangler pattern for organizations looking to evolve their architecture: a phased approach that replaces legacy functionality over time. Instead of tearing out your entire monolith in one go, you can identify a single domain to modernize, build new services around your existing systems, and gradually route traffic to the new services as they stabilize. This minimizes risk, allows you to prove ROI early, and keeps your teams focused on outcomes.

Whether launching a new brand site, modernizing promotions, or integrating with modern search and personalization tools, Broadleaf supports migration strategies that match your goals and constraints.

Technology is only part of the equation. The real differentiator is usability. We believe commerce platforms should empower business users, not just developers. That’s why Broadleaf offers unified admin experiences across tools, configurable workflows, contextual editing and previewing, and seamless integration of promotions, content, and catalog data. Composable doesn’t mean scattered. Our tooling brings the ecosystem together so teams can work faster, launch campaigns quicker, and adapt in real time.

Fully composable stacks often involve dozens of vendors, each with security protocols, audit trails, and data handling policies. The operational burden of maintaining compliance across this sprawl can be immense. Broadleaf simplifies this by reducing the surface area and offering centralized governance controls.

Composable commerce isn’t going anywhere, but the industry needs to evolve beyond the extremes. It’s not about abandoning MACH; it’s about maturing it.

Let’s stop building commerce stacks that look good in theory but break down in practice. Let’s stop confusing modularity with complexity. Let’s create systems that drive business outcomes, empower teams, and scale sustainably. Let’s make composable commerce... sane.