For most store owners, the only difference between Magento Community Edition and Enterprise Edition is the cost. It’s definitely an important factor, but you need to think about the value and not just the price. You can prevent various potential challenges by figuring out which edition covers your business needs and goals better.
What is Magento Community Edition?
Magento Community Edition is an open-source ecommerce platform, free of charge. It means that anyone can get a program code for free and it’s open for editing to third-party developers. It may become a perfect solution for someone who owns a small to medium business. You just need to download the program and you can immediately start working with it. Users are free to make adjustments to the software to meet their specific business requirements.
What is Magento Enterprise Edition?
Magento EE is an exclusive paid version of Magento with premium features. It will perfectly fit the needs of medium to enterprise-level businesses. It is a great solution for shops that need scalability, extra features, and more customizable options.
To develop your project on Magento Enterprise Edition, you should create an account in Magento and purchase a license. After purchasing the license, you’ll need to enter the code and only then you can start working on Magento EE.
Magento 2 Community vs Enterprise Comparison
So let’s compare Magento Community vs Enterprise edition starting with the price.
This is what most retail companies look at when they are trying to make a choice between two versions. Magento Community Edition is free of charge. Magento 2 enterprise edition price is fairly high and ranges from $22,000.00 to $125,000.00 per year (you pay for advanced features). Higher costs come with additional functionalities your business might need while growing and scaling.
If your business is scalable and you have a lot of online transactions, EE is the best choice for you.
If you are a business that aspires to grow and expect huge website traffic volumes, then EE is the best solution for your company. One of the main differences between Magento Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) is that the second delivers performance and scales right out-of-the-box to support fast-growing businesses. Secondly, it usually achieves higher SERP ranks and becomes more visible in search results.
The speed of the checkout process in EE is also impressive — <2 seconds on average (by using caching or minification). It includes the possibility to divide database into Sales, Checkout and Order Management for online shops with large numbers of orders and transactions. Thus, Enterprise Edition hardware is able to handle 3.5M page views and 250,000 orders per hour.
If you don’t need 24/7 support, choose CE.
The main difference is that Magento 2 Enterprise Edition guarantees 24/7 technical support that will resolve all technical problems that may occur with your online shop. There will also be an account manager from the Magento team to help you anytime you need support. You also can be sure about security support. The team of experts scan the platform often and enhance Magento core security with special bug bounty programs.
Magento Community Edition has no support at all.
If security is crucial for your retail business, EE will work best.
Magento Enterprise Edition offers more robust security solutions. EE is “PCI compliant” and linked to the Magento Secure Payment Bridge, which takes care of handling card processing. PCI stands for Payment Card Industry. PCI is a set of security standards designed to protect card data, handle payment data, approve financial transactions through a secure environment.
Magento Community Edition doesn’t have highly secure payment bridges, and it’s “Not PCI compliant.” This may cause some problems since these features are required by the banks.
If your business requires rich merchandising functionalities and effective management, EE is a great option for your company.
Magento 2 EE provides rich merchandising functionality. Simplified drag-and-drop interface and it’s easy to set sorting rules for specific categories made it much easier to navigate the website. There is also Content Staging and Preview available for EE. Such capabilities enable merchants to do some tasks without involving Magento developers.
Unlike the Community Edition, Magento Enterprise for B2B is developed to meet the requirements of Magento merchants whose customeMagento Enterprise Reward points system.rs are mainly companies with many customers. It helps B2B companies reach the most difficult business goals as it offers rich, built-in B2B functionality.
If your store sells only in one country and doesn’t need multiple languages, and currencies, you should choose CE.
Community Edition doesn’t support multiple languages and currencies. So if you’re a company that works only in one region, there’s no need to choose EE. EE is essential for those companies that work internationally. There’s a multiple language pack ready to use straight out of the box in EE.
If building long-lasting relationships with customers and gaining their loyalty is one of your top priorities, choose EE.
For such, aim Magento 2 EE offers variable tools: Magento Enterprise reward points system, gift registry, multiple wish lists, in-store credits.
So Community edition will perfectly fill the needs of small businesses, but Enterprise edition will be more suitable for large businesses with high turnovers. All in all, it’s up to you to decide which edition will meet all of your requirements.
Previously published at https://elogic.co/blog/magento-community-vs-enterprise-edition-comparison/.