Have you ever wondered what’s the difference between Magento Community and Magento Enterprise Edition?

Aren’t they both the same or don’t they do the same simple thing of building an e-commerce website?

If yes, then you’re in luck because we’re here today to talk exactly about that!

Unlike other blogs, we will try to keep it short and crisp.

So you will get all your answers in this short guide.

Before starting the Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition comparison, we are assuming that you have decided to choose Magento as your go-to e-commerce platform.

Hence, you’re somewhat acquainted with Magento pricing dynamics.

Some of the most common misconceptions we hear from our clients are not about which e-commerce platform to use instead, they are confused between Magento Community and Magento Enterprise.

Or whether Magento Enterprise is better for its online store or Magento Community?

Or what is the difference between Magento Commerce and Open-Source and the key features of Magento Community vs Magento Enterprise?

Let me start by stating that you need to understand that this debate is NOT about picking a WINNER between Magento Enterprise and Community editions.

It’s about assessing your needs and how different features of each edition can cater to your existing online store requirements.

Sometimes, the only difference merchants see between the two Magento versions is the cost.

However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t analyze the value of money against your e-commerce store requirements.

Without any further ado, let’s dive right in!

In this article, we answer one of the most important questions,

“Should I use Magento Enterprise or Community edition?“

… and give you a detailed comparison of the two editions so you can easily align your requirements.

Recently, Magento has renamed both of the platforms.

Magento Community Edition has been renamed as Magento Open Source.

And, Magento Enterprise Edition is dubbed as Magento Commerce.

Before starting with the real question, it’s better to understand the basics.

So, we’ll start off with some brief intros of the two.

Magento Community Edition is an open-source e-commerce platform that is absolutely free to download and install to create your online store.

It means that anyone can get the program’s code, free of charge.

Before we go into the specifics, you might want to check out a detailed article on Magento Pricing.

Third-party developers are welcome to customize it according to their requirements.

Many large and famous enterprises were initially launched on Magento Community Edition.

Since it’s free, Magento Open-Source edition is an ideal platform for small businesses to start out their online e-commerce journey.

The open-source nature of this edition means that you can have it have tons of features in it, including:

• Customization according to your requirements
• Add extra functionality using the countless extensions
• Add new plug-ins
• Get awesome themes for absolutely free!

And the best part? The customization will not cost even a single penny.

An Overview:

• Unique visitors per month = more than 1,000
• Orders per month = more than 100
• Turnover = more than €100,000
• Shop management FTE 0.5 – 2.0
• Implementation time = 6-8 weeks
• Implementation cost = €10,000 – €60,000
• Hosting costs = €150 – €300
• License cost = 0

Magento Enterprise Edition or Magento Commerce is the ultimate product of Adobe Magento.

It is a paid product designed for businesses that want to unleash the full potential Magento has to offer.

It is ideal for brands, profitable businesses, and running physical stores that are looking to expand their operations into the online space.

With Enterprise Edition, you get a complete round the clock, technical support from the Magento team.

Not only this, you get security updates, product upgrades, and tons of new features that are already included in the annual price you pay for your Magento Commerce license.

Here’s a brief table to give you an idea of the Magento Enterprise costs.

An Overview:

• Unique visitors per month = 50,000
• Orders per month = 500
• Turnover = €1,000,000
• Shop management FTE = more than 5.0
• Implementation time = 14-16 weeks
• Implementation cost = more than €50,000
• Hosting costs = €600 – €2,000
• License cost = $14,420

It goes without saying, both versions share a lot in common.

Both editions are open-source with identical core features.

This means that both the platforms are fully customizable and can have their functionalities upgraded by custom modules and/or extensions from the Magento Marketplace.

Users of both platforms get free access to Magento Connect.

Template customization is identical in both.

Both have the same core functionalities and complex architecture.

These include, but not limited to, Advanced ACL, content staging, SOLR search, and RMA functionality.

Both require somewhat of technical knowledge.

As we’ve already mentioned before, Magento Community Edition is a free platform.

On the other hand, you have to pay an annual fee for the Magento Enterprise version.

For more details or for a quick revise, you can view the pricing table above for Magento Enterprise.

From a security standpoint, the Magento Community Edition isn’t PCI compliant.

To overcome this, you will need to do the following:

• Fill out PCI paperwork by yourself.
• Implement PCI policies on your own.
• Document your PCI technicalities
• Use a payment gateway that can communicate with an API by redirecting it to PayPal or HTTPS.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t provide credit card tokenization service which is a requirement for financial institutions.

On the other hand, Enterprise Edtion provides PA-DSS security features and is also PCI compliant.

In terms of performance, Magento Community Edition is great for small business owners, while Magento Enterprise will benefit large enterprises the most because of higher costs.

The performance of Magento Community Edition is sufficient enough for small businesses if their database is also small.

Fewer product listings = more performance.

However, the performance of both of the platforms can be increased or enhanced by installing the third-party extensions.

You CAN increase the performance but, installing third-party extensions can become costly for some businesses.

If additional costs weren’t an issue at all, then why would any business go for the free version in the first place?

Combined together, both of the Magento platforms have a total market share of approximately 30%.

Rest 70% of the market share is dominated by three big giants; Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

Although Magento Enterprise does provide you with tons of exciting and useful features, yet it only holds around 5% of the total e-commerce platforms market share

While Magento Community Edition, owing to its “free” aspect, holds around 25% of the market share, which is comparatively enough to make its mark in the online world.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Magento Open-Source, you will have the following features at your disposal:

• Free to install with no yearly license fee. You just have to pay for the domain name, hosting and a professional Magento developer to set up your site and maintain it.
• Magento Community Edition’s functionality can be extended using the thousands of extensions available on the Magento marketplace.
• Allows API integrations to communicate with various databases, internet marketing tools, and more.
• Choose from different Magento themes as per your design and layout requirements.
• It allows for mobile commerce and is responsive to different devices out-of-the-box. However, some design changes might alter the responsiveness of your website.
• A major feature and advantage over other e-commerce platforms are that it allows creating ‘multi-stores’ with a common backend admin panel. For instance: you can manage two different brands with different products with a single backend admin panel.
• It offers a persistent shopping cart feature which means that the Magento’s cart functionality will track the items added to the cart by potential customers and remembers it until they revisit the site for up to a year!
• It allows merchants to create pricing rules that allow for discounts, coupons, variable shipping rates, etc.
• Various pricing rules for specific customers, catalogue and shopping cart also come built-in. We, at RLTSquare, teach our clients how they can effectively increase their revenue by using these pricing strategies within Magento.
• It provides you with standard reports including sales, revenue, best-selling products, etc.
• Layered navigation allows for various filters on the category page where the visitors can filter products by size, colour, etc.
• Restrict your site to take orders from a specific country only or enable it to take orders from anywhere in the world.
• Set various shipping options for international users, using USPS, UPS, DHL or FedEx.
• For collecting payments, you can configure authorize net or process payments via Paypal.
• You also get countless product configurations for your products.
• It also lets you create up-sells, cross-sells, and display related products on your store. However, unless you used an extension from the Magento Marketplace, these features will have to be set up manually for each product.
• This Magento version also lets you configure basic SEO settings like setting up an XML Sitemap, meta titles, and descriptions. For more advanced stuff, you need to have an expert configure the SEO settings to maximize your organic reach.
• Like most other eCommerce platforms, you can change/update customer information and order statuses to manage your delivery.

This was an overview of the features you get when you choose to install the Magento Community Edition.

For most merchants, the Magento Community will be enough for their existing requirements.

However, if you operate on a large scale then you’d probably need to go with the Magento Enterprise option.

Let us now list down the features of Magento Enterprise to show you why it can be a better option than Magento Community Edition.

Firstly, Magento Enterprise includes all the Magento Community features plus the following:

• It is much faster if you have a large catalogue with a significantly improved re-indexation rate for products. Any changes in, let’s say the product prices, are reflected instantly on the front-end, unlike the Community Edition.
• It also introduces full-page caching that results in improved load times for our client’s websites with a significant quantity of products to as low as 2 seconds.
• Clients who have done accidental changes in Magento Community find it hard and costly to revert it to the previous version. Luckily, this is quite easy with Magento Enterprise as you can revert back to a specific time or date.
• The architecture of Magento Enterprise makes scalability of your website easier.
• Magento Enterprise makes it easy to calculate taxes for brands and businesses operating in different states and products having complex tax rules applied to them.
• Magento Enterprise has a faster checkout process than Magento Community, which leads to a higher conversion rate.
• You can also set up advanced administrator roles in Magento Enterprise for each site so that a user doesn’t have access to other areas of the site. Moreover, you can also log any users’ actions on the backend panel of your site.
• You can create advanced customer segments with the easy-to-manage customer attributes within Magento Enterprise. This feature has been exclusively put for merchants so they can have access to more customer data.
• These customer segments allow for advanced marketing tactics to be implemented as well. For instance, you can give free-shipping to frequent customers or a discount to first-time visitors or you even show related items to customers who’ve purchased from you recently.
• Capable of Geo-targeting. This means that the Enterprise Edition can deliver content based on the user’s geographical location, order history, frequency data, and cart contents.
• Not only that, but you can also host private sales just to a selected group of customers within the Enterprise dashboard.
• It offers complete PCI compliance for securely collecting payments on their eCommerce website.
• This Edition also has a built-in gift registry that is ideal for businesses in certain niches.
• Loyalty and gift points come integrated into the code base with Enterprise Edition. Although this is achievable with certain extensions in Magento Community Edition, Enterprise Edition provides you with more options with zero customization.
• Magento Enterprise has streamlined the process for order refunds.
• If you want a SOLR search built-in your Magento store, then you can opt for Enterprise. The SOLR search helps in retaining potential buyers as, without the search function, buyers can get frustrated about not finding what they’re looking for.
• You can send abandoned cart emails, purchase emails, and much more. Although this can be achieved using extensions with the Community Edition, they sometimes conflict with other systems.
• With Enterprise, you can create custom landing pages for your segmented audience or your email sequence which can be excluded from the site hierarchy and search results.
• While the up-sells and the cross-sells were manual in Community Edition, Enterprise completely automates the process by dynamically recommending similar products.
• This Edition also makes customer-assisted shopping possible. Let’s say your customer is having a problem with their cart, the customer support reps can visit the cart for the customer from the backend and resolve their problems
• It comes with technical support in some areas like Enterprise installation, usage issues, configuration, and bug fixes. For other areas, RLTSquare is always ready to provide support and bring your Magento store up-to-date.
• You can create dynamically generated coupon discounts for customers and even tie them to banners ads displayed throughout your site.

Bottom line…

If you are just starting out, Magento Community is probably the most feasible option for you.

However, if you are an established brand or you run a highly profitable eCommerce store, then Magento Enterprise can equip your store with advanced functionalities that will boost your revenue.

Though we strongly recommend using the Commerce Edition to experience advanced e-commerce features, we are aware of the fact that license fees may be a big concern for you.

It cannot be emphasized enough that keeping your business goals in front of you is crucial while taking this decision.

For some businesses which have a marketing team in place to make use of the advanced marketing features, Magento Enterprise is a no-brainer.

Other than that, RLTSquare as Magento partners, advise our clients how they can unleash the full power of Magento Commerce to boost their revenue.

Otherwise, you can always opt for the Magento Community Edition to start with and build your brand from there.

Unless you have huge sales volumes, Magento Community could be the better option.

RLTSquare enjoys solving challenges for clients who opt for either Magento Community or Magento Enterprise Edition.

You can contact us today with your specific business requirements and one of our Magento consultants will get back to you with a solution that’s ideal for your current and future needs.