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The e-commerce business continues to be a promising market and has been seeing more and more companies increasing their sales through online channels.
The first step toward e-commerce business for any company is to choose its platform. And among the e-commerce platforms for businesses, Magento is one of the most popular choices.
Currently, there are two versions of Magento – Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition. Although they share the same core features to serve the basics of operating an online business, the Enterprise Edition comes with more out-of-the-box tools.
Choosing the Magento version for your e-commerce store depends on a number of aspects, from your business objectives, resources, target segments to markets and scalability. To select the suitable edition for your Magento-based store, it’s crucial to look at what the Community and Enterprise Editions can offer in the long run.
Recently Magento team has renamed its products:
- Magento 2 Community Edition was named Magento 2 Open Source.
- Magento 2 Enterprise Edition was named Magento 2 Commerce.
Magento Community Edition
Magento Community Edition (CE) is an open-source e-commerce software and free to download. It serves as a basic and useful solution for when businesses first setting up their online stores.
Magento Enterprise Edition
Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) has the same core functional files as the CE. However, Magento EE provides more features for better performance, high security and scalability.
Depending on your company size, budgets and other factors to choose which one is more suitable:
Magento Community vs Enterprise?
Let’s dive into details:
Costs
The first aspect that makes both versions vastly different is their pricing. While the CE can be installed for free, you’d be charged for the EE.
The license cost for the EE isn’t a small number, it starts from $22,000 per year. Magento EE license cost is based on a revenue model – how much you’ll pay depends on how much you earn.
Here is the pricing plan for the EE:
| Revenue (USD) | License fee (per year) |
| < 1M | $22,000 |
| 1 – < 5M | $32,000 |
| 5 – < 10M | $49,000 |
| 10 – < 25M | $75,000 |
| 25 – < 50M | $125,000 |
*The cost includes additional facilities and support services in Magento EE.
If you’re a start-up or small business, then the Community Edition would make a better choice for its free license and sufficient features for online e-commerce. Note that you can make up for the missing features with third-party extensions. There are more than 5000 Magento extensions available, free or paid.
On the other hand, the Enterprise Edition, while costing quite some money, is excellent for mid-large companies with its various features.
Scalability
Magento platform is built with a business’s scalability in mind, so both versions can handle well a large number of traffic and products. But of course, the numbers of products that the EE can deal with would be larger than the EC.
Generally, Magento CE works well when the product ranges somewhere from 100,000 – 200,000. However, if the number of products exceeds this, meaning you are a med-large company, then you’ll need Magento EE to manage large numbers of orders.
Security
When comparing the security of the two editions, Magento EE is the clear winner.
Magento EE complies with the PCI Security Standards, while also offers various secured payment gateways like PayPal, Authorize.net and more. Because the CE lacks credit card tokenization or advanced payment security, there is a huge risk of leaking customer personal data, bugs and malicious attacking.
Features
Magento CE and EE both cover a handful of features to support e-commerce businesses. While the core features are similar, Magento EE has more advanced tools to fit the business’s requirements.
The table below shows the similarities and differences in features of the Community and Enterprise Editions:
| Features | Community Edition | Enterprise Edition |
| Code-level access | √ | √ |
| Web service API | √ | √ |
| Integrated Checkout, Payment, and Shipping | √ | √ |
| Global Selling | √ | √ |
| Flexible Couponing and Promotions | √ | √ |
| Catalog management | √ | √ |
| Full page caching | √ | √ |
| Multiple stores | √ | √ |
| Mobile optimized shopping | √ | √ |
| Integrated Checkout, Payment & Shipping | √ | √ |
| B2B Functionality | √ | |
| Business Intelligent Dashboards | √ | |
| Technical support (by Magento team) | √ | |
| WYSIWYG Page Builder | √ | |
| Enhanced tax calculation | √ | |
| Visual Merchandising | √ | |
| Content Staging & Preview | √ | |
| Administrator Permission Roles on Website and Store Levels | √ | |
| Customer loyalty tools | √ | |
| Advanced marketing and segmentation | √ | |
| Enhanced security | √ | |
| PCI Compliant | √ | |
| Elastic, Solr search | √ |
Conclusion
Magento CE can completely meet the needs of start-ups and small businesses, selling in one country with local currency and may not need 24/7 support from Magento.
Magento EE with its advanced features would be more suitable for medium and large enterprises, selling worldwide in multi-languages and currencies and handling complex projects. And because of their large scale, they require high security and Magento customer support.
Choosing a Magento edition isn’t a task to be taken lightly. At the end of the day, it is according to your requirements as a business to conclude which one is more fit for you.
