Magento delivers a flexible, robust eCommerce platform that is used by 200,000 web stores. Magento is highly customizable, built for scalability and designed by marketers and website owners, making it a leader in the eCommerce ecosystem. There are three versions of Magento—Enterprise, Go, and Community each boasting quality service with its own unique features. At Logicbroker, we see a majority of our clients implementing either Community or Enterprise. The recurring questions we encounter are “what is the difference between Enterprise and Community” and “what version is right for me.” Both Community and Enterprise versions are on premise. Magento Go is the only hosted solution Magento offers. This blog, Magento Community vs. Enterprise Edition, will give a simple breakdown of the features of both versions and conclude with recommendations of when to implement Community and when to implement Enterprise.
Target: Magento Enterprise is targeted towards mid to large sized businesses with revenues exceeding $15 million and over $25,000 unique visitors each month, while Community is “perfect if you’re a developer or tech-savvy merchant” (magento.com) with yearly revenue under $50 million and less than 50,000 unique visitors each month.
Price: The most obvious difference between Magento Community and Enterprise is price. Community is a free solution, while the current starting rate for Enterprise is $15,500 (the premium version starts at $49,990). However, you get what you pay for as Enterprise boasts many wonderful features Community does not, which we will explore later.
Security: The Community Edition lacks credit card tokenization and highly secured payment bridges. Enterprise has more powerful security options.
Support: Users of Magento Enterprise enjoy full support, warranties, indemnification and code-level access. Community offers no support.
B2c vs. B2B: Choosing to sell business to business, business to consumer, or both will have an impact on which solution would best suit you. Magento Community works great for selling B2C, but requires third party add-ons for B2B. Enterprise has full capabilities for both B2B and B2C.
Performance: For store owners that have a large number of products (over 20,000) on their site, the speed associated with the Enterprise version will be beneficial. Enterprise also boasts the capability to re-index catalogs 80% faster than Community. Enterprise also has a built in full page caching feature which helps pages load in one to two seconds. There are plugins for Community to enable full page caching, but some hosting providers do not support it.
So which edition of Magento is right for you? Well, it really depends on where you see your business going. Community is an excellent platform and affordable (free!). Community users have access to numerous third party apps to increase is capabilities, but it is possible that too many apps will conflict with one another. For businesses that need advanced marketing and segmentation tools, PCI compliant code base, full page caching, and the capability to handle a large number of products, Enterprise would be the better solution. Also, if you plan on making your business to the next level, starting with Enterprise would be beneficial. It has capabilities for customer segmentation with targeting offerings. Both Community and Enterprise are equipped with SEO tools, but Community requires the function to be configured “out of the box.” For those who are just starting out, beginning with Community and then eventually migrating to Enterprise is an option. Both versions are great platforms and you cannot go wrong with either one. What it boils down to is picking the platform that best aligns with your individual business needs.
