Magento Community vs. Enterprise Edition — Which E-commerce Platform Is Right For Your Company?

There are a lot of factors to consider while choosing the right ecommerce platform. But you must first choose the one that best fits your business goals and company’s needs.

If we look at Google Trends, Magento is the most popular ecommerce platform available in the world. It is a powerful, opensource ecommerce eco-system which is chosen by one out of four businesses today. The success of this robust platform can be attributed to its flexibility, functionality, extensive features and its two versions — Magento Community, and Magento Enterprise.

It’s not easy to compare, it’s a tough decision unless you really know all the versions inside and out.

What am I really paying for with Magento Enterprise? Can’t I just get the same functionality with extensions on the free Community version? Which version is right for my business? Should I use Community (CE) or Enterprise Edition (EE)?

We are here to help you make decision. In this post, we will focus on the key differences between Magento community and Enterprise cloud edition, so that you can decide which one makes more sense for your business needs and goals.

Key Differences Between Magento Community and Enterprise Edition

1. Cost
The Magento’s Community Edition (CE) is free of charge while the Enterprise Edition (EE) costs up to $15,550 a year, but the latter offers a variety of features not included in the free edition. Hence, making it sense for your business depending on the stage it stands.

2. Performance and Scalability

The CE is faster for a site with few modules. The business which needs more modules might need to purchase an EE. Although some features can be added to the free Edition by using 3rd party extensions, the performance is much better with the paid edition.

EE can grow with your business without any limits. There is an extensive support from Magento’s EE for running multiple databases which can be used for checkout, order management, products, etc. With the paid version, you have the option to deploy your software through the new Enterprise Cloud, which dramatically increases the speed of deployment. Moreover, EE also supports faster inventory updates making your website’s performance during checkout more efficient. Another main benefit of EE is Full Page Caching which allows smoother shopping experience on your site. Additionally, creating an Apple IOS app can now be done faster with EE as it gives the ability to leverage sample code to use.

3. Security

The free version doesn’t offer highly secured payment gateways or credit card tokenization which might become a problem because these features are required by the credit card companies and the banks. The biggest problem with CE is that it is “Not PCI compliant”.

On the contrary, Enterprise Edition provides powerful security features and deals best with the situation.

4. Additional Management Tools

The EE provides full support of advanced permissions which helps admin to control and view specific actions carried out by individual admin users on your site. The next effective management tool from EE is RMA which gives customers the power to initiate the return process on a pre-defined set of rules. RMA allows control over the configuration of everything in the return process from reasons for returning a product to resolution options. The entire refund and return process becomes automated with RMA as it includes sending step-by-step return instructions to the customer. Next, EE uses the tool Google Tag Manager which grants marketers the ability to add and update website tags. Without the need to edit your website’s code, tags such as conversion tracking and site analytics can be altered.

5. Magento Support

Magento has a huge community of certified developers and Magento experts. The support team, as well as community forums are the best sources of helpful resources which will guide your business in getting the most of the Magento.

Not only professional Magento support, EE also consists of diagnostic tools which help for a deeper analysis of your website’s different aspects such as key database tables, installed extensions, and modified core files. This is very helpful to quickly identify the potential problems.

6. Digital Marketing, Merchandising, and Search

This is another major difference between Magento’s Community and Enterprise edition. This feature of EE benefits both your customers and your company for business marketing, merchandising, and searching. The paid version of Magento uses advanced content staging, sophisticated attribute based customer segmentation, targeted content, abandoned cart reminder emails and many more features.

You can freely alter almost any aspect of your website and the pages and products it entails with EE. You can also initiate custom catalogs based on different customer groups. Another important feature is Elastic search that helps your customers to quickly locate the product they’re searching. In order to make things run even smoother on your site, a customer is able to sort products as they wish and narrow down results based on the set filters like the size, color, price, etc.

7. Increased Customer Loyalty

Any company’s top priority is its customers, and gaining their loyalty. To aid in this process, Magento’s Enterprise Edition provides a variety of features. First, there is a rewards program that grants points based on a customer’s actions that can be redeemed for things such as store credit. The next big thing is physical or virtual cards that you can set minimum/maximum limits on as well as specified amounts. Then comes an important benefit — EE allows the use of private sales with the ‘Invite a Friend’ option. EE also allows customers to create wishlists and gift registries for different events such as holidays, birthdays, or weddings. With improved gift options, EE helps your customers select different gift messages and/or gift wrappings for any product they order.

Take your pick: Enterprise or Community edition?

Choosing the right platform from the two versions could make or break your company, this is why it is crucial to consider both, your company and its business needs. If you’re a small company which doesn’t need advanced features or upgraded performance capabilities offered by Magento Enterprise, then the Community Edition will likely suit you. However, if you’re chasing a larger audience, EE will allow you to better reach specific segments and grant you much more flexibility in how you do so.

News Source: Krish TechnoLabs