Magento Enterprise or Magento Community edition? This is one of the most common questions that e-commerce owners face while deciding which platform to choose for their online business.
Well, we’re here to help! Magento is preferred by most online store owners because of the many attractive features it offers. Both its editions (Community and Enterprise) are powerful and open source. They both have some pros and cons. In order to choose one between the two, all you need to do is understand which one matches your business needs. And in order to help you with that, we’ve come up with a detailed comparison between the two. Scroll down.
Magento Community Edition
Are you a small business owner and want to experiment with an ecommerce site? Then Magento Community edition would be a perfect choice. This is a free, open-source ecommerce platform that you can download to build an online store. You can modify this in such a way that it meets your business needs. Also, if you want to enhance the functionality of your online store, you can make use of the Magento extension marketplace.
Magento Enterprise Edition
Do you want to have a huge online store and in need of more customizable options and advanced features? Then Magento Enterprise edition would be right for you. This is the premium paid version of Magento for those who think that the Community edition is not enough for them. This edition is fully backed by the Magento team. You can get complete support by email and phone.
Magento Community and Magento Enterprise Edition: The Difference
Security
When it comes to security, Magento Enterprise edition is a winner. It offers multiple secure payment gateways including Braintree, CyberSource, WorldPay, Authorize.net and more. In addition to this, it has a regular scanning process, external penetration testing and bug bounty programs.
Magento Community, on the other hand, doesn’t provide secured payment bridges or credit card tokenization. This free edition of Magento is not even PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant, which is a major drawback.
Cost
Magento Enterprise edition costs you about $22,000 per year (excluding the implementation charges), as it offers you security updates, advanced features, exclusive product enhancements and much more. Magento Community edition, on the other hand, is free.
Performance
If your online store is small, Magento Community edition would work fine for you. However, if you have a website with a huge number of products or high volumes of traffic, Magento Enterprise edition would be good for your business. It offers a higher ROI because of the support it provides for order management, checkout and product data, allowing the functional areas to be scaled independently.
Also, new Magento cloud service such as the Enterprise Cloud edition enables rapid deployment of completely customizable, scalable and secure web storefronts on a redundant, AWS-based hosting as well as managed services infrastructure, which is fully optimized for resilience and performance.
Functionality
Magento Enterprise and Community edition have the same core. However, the Enterprise version offers more advanced features. These include full-page caching for site performance, customer segmentation and personalization, enabling you to boost your conversion rates by dynamically displaying content as well as promotions.
You can offer reward points for product reviews, registration, purchases and other actions. By letting your customers add items to the cark by SKU, you can streamline re-ordering. With the paid version of Magento, you can get detailed search results for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by automatically adding structured data markup to product pages.
Scalability
In order to decide which one to choose between Magento Community and Enterprise edition, you first need to analyze what your future requirements would be. Planning on growing your business in the future and add a large variety of products? Then investing in the Enterprise version would be the right thing to do.
With this edition, you can scale up and down according to the traffic of your website. This paid version comes with some amazing features that are required for a growing business. Also, it can minimize as well as bundle JavaScript and compressing images.
Marketing
The product marketing style in Magento Enterprise and Community are quite different. If you go for Community edition, you will get only a few basic features to enhance the SEO of your store such as customizing the headings, URLs and meta tags.
On the contrary, with the Enterprise edition, you get your hands on some refined features such as sophisticated attribute based customer segmentation, abandoned cart reminder emails, targeted content, advanced content staging and much more.
Which One to Choose?
If you are a small business owner and want a basic e-commerce website, Magento Community edition would be a practical choice.
However, if you have a large business and planning to work on building your brand online, we would suggest you go for Magento Enterprise. Some of the advantages that Magento Enterprise has over Community edition include:
- Full page caching
- Larger catalog management
- Great tax calculation
- Quicker re-indexing as well as page loading time
- Social media integration
- Quicker checkout flow
- Integrated backup systems or easier roll-back
- Advanced marketing & segmentation
- Advanced site access rights & administrator roles
- Testing & QA
Digital Aptech Pvt. Ltd. is a renowned Magento development company with some of the best Magento developers. Want professional help in developing your Magento eCommerce website? Get in touch with us!
