Magento is the leading E-commerce platform as for today. According to the numerous reports, since 2008, it managed to gain a bit more than
25% of the operating Alexa Top 1M E-commerce sites. Woo Commerce and other alternatives are still falling behind. Most of the stores in the top 100K prefer Magento. If you also choose Magento instead of OpenCart, PrestaShop, or any other platform, it’s about time to think of the two available versions of this platform. Only by matching your business goals with the features of both Magento Community and Magento Enterprise Edition, you will be able to find the most appropriate solution for your online store. So, what is the best way to increase your performance and profitability with Magento? With the help of this unbiased article, we would like to help you with your choice.
The Question of Price
Unlike Enterprise, Magento Community is absolutely free of charge. Not only you save your money at the initial stage, but all further modifications and up-grades are also free. Yearly license fees are excluded. You will also spend less cost on hosting when choosing Community version.
Installation and Further Usage
Except for everything’s free, it is extremely easy to work with Community edition. It requires a minimum of efforts and skills. It is very flexible: the developers have to come up with own design and maintain custom functions.
Target Users
Community is mostly preferred by the developers and tech-savvy merchants who do not fear building and maintaining a site receiving a full control of it. But despite you can get the same by choosing EE, Community still requires less investments; your business size also matters. Mid and large-size businesses that want to implement large-scale projects or wish to expand their online sales will enjoy the powerful system just like Magento Enterprise.
Unlike Enterprise, Community offers full capabilities only for business-to-consumer (B2C) while it requires 3d party add-ons for business-to-business (B2B).
Built-in Modules and Features
As far as Magento Enterprise is focused on the increased sales experience, its users receive such modules as the private sales, wholesale, and gift registries. That’s why famous large-scale companies like Nike and Viso prefer using Enterprise, as it is stated on the home page of this edition. Thus, Magento Enterprise provides more opportunities for obtaining greater amount of traffic than Community. It is easy to guess that EE also has more advanced features. For instance, the customer segmentation with targeted offers, minimum advertised price, return management authorization, and more.
Professional Support
Being free of charge, Magento Community Edition cannot suggest a professional support of its users. Despite Enterprise version is not free, it provides all users with free expert customer support that includes business reports along with technical support to let your store operate smoothly.
Except for full support, EE users are also entirely warranted and have a code-level access.
Page Caching and Overall Speed
Once again, only Enterprise Edition is capable of loading the page quickly with a full caching. A full caching takes only up to two seconds to load a page. It works this way: HTML data is stored ahead of time so that it can be viewed instantly by your customers. Through complete page caching Enterprise edition offers, you can observe remarkable savings in page load speed and server usage. In case you offer a wide range of products or services, only Magento Enterprise can handle huge catalogs. In addition, it re-indexes the catalog much faster than Community. Speed matters when you have thousands of products. In case of Community, it may take 10-20 minutes to complete all the processes every time a new product is added.
Admin Panel
Enterprise stands for advanced admin roles and access permissions. It is possible to assign an administrator to one site forbidding an access to other areas. In addition, you can create a log to control who attends the site and makes any changes. Tracking the actions of others will prevent your business from facing risks connected with information confidentiality.
Average Magento Project Results
When trying to solve a Magento Community vs. Enterprise dilemma, you might take a look at the numbers to estimate the effectiveness of each edition. As statistics received from the stores that apply various versions of Magento show, Enterprise Edition is used to run more powerful stores. So, it makes sense to switch to the Enterprise or select it from the beginning if you run a large-scale business with vast commercial plans. However, it takes more time to develop a worthy Enterprise-based store.
CMS Function
Enterprise edition obviously wins in terms of a more robust content management system for standard pages. It gives more options related to performance to speed up the shopping experience. It will prevent you from the customers’ decision to abandon their carts because of the long-lasting load.
What’s in Common?
Of course, both Magento Community Edition and Enterprise possess a lot of similar features. For instance, they both have Magento core features, web services application programming interface (API), open source development model, and ecosystem that includes Magento Connect.
Conclusion
On the whole, we should say that both editions of the Magento platform were built with marketing,
SEO, reporting and the customer in mind first. While Magento Community is considered a more practical choice, it would be hard to survive the harsh market competition for those who run a large-scale store without changing to Magento Enterprise. It all depends on whether you are planning to launch a small start-up or bring your business to a new level.
Still not sure what to choose?
