Comparison 2020: Magento Community Vs Enterprise Edition

By Litextension

Overview

Magento is one of the three most popular eCommerce platforms at present. Many widely-known companies are using Magento platform to shape their websites. They belong to various industries from beverage, fashion, and electronics such as Coca Cola, Hermes, Nike, Canon, Samsung.

Currently, Magento has two versions which are Magento Community vs Enterprise Editions. They both have the same core features of Magento platform, but Magento EE has outstanding features beyond Magento CE.

Magento Community Edition (Magento CE) is a free version of Magento. This version is suitable for small businesses, you can add various functionalities and download Magento extensions to boost your store.

In contrast, Magento Enterprise Edition (Magento EE) is the paid version of Magento. The Magento EE version offers many additional features beyond Magento CE such as high security, better performance, and enhanced scalability which are foundational to building professional businesses.

To help you decide which version suits you best, we’ve created this comparison between Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition which is based on 5 criteria that matter the most including cost, security, scalability, functionally, and marketing. Let’s begin!

Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition

1. Cost

The difference that strikes the eye is the price. As I have mentioned above, the Magento Community is a free version while Magento 2 Enterprise requires a license fee. License fee guarantees higher security for your Magento store and includes more built-in features that help better your business marketing performance, which in return generates more sales.

The license is based on a revenue model. In other words, the license cost of Magento Enterprise Edition depends on how much your store revenue is. The table below shows the cost of a license based on annual revenue:

Revenue (USD): 0 — <1 M >>>License price (year): $22.000

Revenue (USD): 1 — <5 M>>>License price (year): $32.000

Revenue (USD): 5 — <10 M>> License price (year): $49.000

Revenue (USD): 10 — <25 M>>License price (year): $75.000

Revenue (USD): 25 — <50M>> License price (year): $125.000

Source: graybox.co

The cost of a Magento EE license starts at $22,000.00 annually for merchants generating less than $1 million in revenue. The license fee will be growing following revenue, the more gross revenue you generate, the more you have to pay.

For store owners in the middle of the revenue from $5 to $25 million. Choosing the Magento EE version is quite reasonable. But for businesses generating less than $5 million in revenue, if you look at the amount spent on licensing versus the revenue being generated by the site, you should consider choosing the Magento CE.

As you can see, the license fee of Magento EE is quite high, but it does not include hosting, domain, and other incurred costs. So the total cost when choosing Magento EE is added up. If you are an eCommerce business start-up, the CE edition is a suitable choice for you.

2. Security

When it comes to security, Magento EE prevailed over Magento CE.

Magento CE lacks credit card tokenization or advanced payment security which can be a problem because these features are required for secured transactions. The biggest problem with the free version is that it does not comply with PCI DSS security.

The PCI Security Standard is a global organization. It maintains, evolves, and promotes Payment Card Industry standards for the safety of cardholder data across the globe. You can read more information about the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

In contrast, the Magento EE version offers more robust security solutions. EE is “PCI compliant” and connected to the Magento Secure Payment Bridge, which takes care of handling card processing. It also offers multiple secured payment gateways like PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, CyberSource, WorldPay, and more. Other than that, Enterprise edition has a regular scanning process, bug bounty programs, and external penetration testing.

Customers need security when using your service, and for large businesses, PCI security is a preeminent feature that should be used to increase reliability. So if you are seeking the top security for your website’s transactions, I recommend you use Magento EE.

3. Scalability

When choosing between Magento Community vs Enterprise editions, you need to take into account the future business scale that you are orienting to. If you’re expecting that your business is going to grow rapidly, you should go with Magento Enterprise. This is because Magento EE comes with out-of-the-box features for a growing business.

Some of the EE highlight features are checkout speed and order management for online shops with large numbers of orders and transactions. Also, Magento EE hardware is capable of handling 3.5 million page views and 250,000 orders an hour. So if you have a large eCommerce site, there is a huge amount of traffic, Magento EE will be the optimal choice for you.

On the other hand, Magento CE is suitable for small businesses, simply because it is cheaper. If you have ~100,000–200,000 products, Magento CE could manage. However, if the products reach the number of over 400,000, you should probably hire a developer to help you out.

Hence, to fully assess the scalability of the two editions, one should take into account all the features that CE và EE offer.

4. Features

Both Magento Community vs Enterprise have the same core features but Magento EE provides more advanced ones. The table below shows the features of Magento Community vs Magento Enterprise Edition:

Common features Extra features( Magento EE and Magento CE): Improved SEO; Site Management; Catalog Management; Catalog Browsing, Product Browsing, Checkout, Payment and Shipping, Order Management; Customer Accounts; Customer Service; International Support; Analytics and Reporting; Mobile Commerce; Full Page Caching; Native Device Applications; Marketing, Promotions and Conversion Tools; Optimized Indexing.

Extra features of Magento EE: Customer Segmentation, Targeted Promotions & Merchandising; Dynamic Rule-Based Product Relations; Persistent Shopping; Automated Email Marketing Reminder; Private Sales; Gift Registry; Gifting Options; Rewards Points; Store Credits; Multiple Wish Lists; Add to Cart by SKU; Return Management Authorization (RMA); Content Management System; Scheduled Import/Export Functionality; Backup and Rollback; Staging, Merging and Rollback of Content; Customer Attribute Management; Administrator Permission Roles on Website and Store Levels; Price and Promotion Permission; Logging of Administrator Actions; Category View and Purchase Permissions per Customer Group (Limited Catalog Access); Order Archiving; Elastic, Solr Search; Configurable Order Tracking Widget; Support for Alternate Media Storage — CDN and Database; PA-DSS Certification/Payment Bridge; Strong Data Encryption, Hashing and Key Management.

Source: amasty.com

Take a look around the table, as you can see, the types of features integrated into Magento EE platform are more diverse and outstanding than Magento CE. So let me show you some of the most important features that are only available in Magento EE.

• Customer Segmentation — Create personalized shopping experiences

This feature allows store owners to show content and promotions to specific customers based on customer information such as an address, shopping cart contents, order history, etc. You can also target visitors based on viewed and added products to the cart.

• Gifting Options

These gifting options are outstanding features of Magento EE. With the support of this additional product type, you can easily make and customize up to three kinds of gift cards (virtual, physical, and combined) with flexible pricing and design. Besides, customers can buy those gift vouchers and give them to friends so that they can redeem the gift card for purchases. So, the Magento EE gift card feature is a marketing tactic to help you boost sales, especially on holidays.

• Add to Cart by SKU

Customers who normally make big orders particularly enjoy quick shopping. Therefore, pay attention to this feature of Magento 2 EE. Purchasers can add several items to the cart by entering the SKU list in the available form. This saves consumers a lot of time searching and going to individual product pages. So, if you are pursuing a big business, opt for Magento EE. With such a variety of outstanding features, it certainly will not let you down.

5. Marketing

Both Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition are built with a certain amount of basic marketing features such as setting up alt tags, meta descriptions, and custom URLs. With Magento CE version, if you want to increase performance of marketing campaigns, you have to purchase marketing extensions from third-party apps.

However, the Enterprise edition offers some built-in features like advanced content staging, sophisticated attribute-based customer segmentation, targeted content, abandoned cart reminder emails, etc.

So, when it comes to Marketing features of Magento Community vs Enterprise edition, Magento EE automatically becomes the winner. I suggest you choose the Magento EE version to make your marketing campaigns more effective.

Magento Community vs Enterprise — Which version is suitable for you?

Do you plan on growing? Think Enterprise.

Enterprise Edition is a good choice for you when:

• The store requires advanced marketing and promotion functionality (gift registration, multiple wish lists, rewards, discounts, special offers, gift cards, and private sales).
• You need more out-of-the-box functionality than what is available in Magento CE
• 24/7 Magento customer support is crucial for your online store.
• The store sells worldwide, using multiple currencies and languages.
• The site accepts different forms of payment (check & purchase orders, PayPal).
• Security solution like PCI is essential for you

So, will your e-commerce goals include rapid growth and scalability? Were you looking to join overseas markets? Are there plans for major site design customizations, such as substantial product improvements or additional layers of site security? Go with Magento EE, it does provide some great additional functionalities to meet your demand.

Are you simply happy with a small business? Think Community.

Magento CE is a good choice for you when:

• You’re not planning to expand your online store in the future.
• The store sells only within one country, in local currency.
• You don’t need 24/7 support and have a developer team for your own.

Magento CE version is completely free to download and includes the same core features as its Enterprise equivalent. However, CE is built for a small e-commerce company whose website does not require all the outstanding extensive features. Smaller sites that will not require hefty modules or enhanced security should fair well with Community Edition.

Conclusion

After comparing Magento Community vs Enterprise, we can conclude that Magento CE will perfectly meet the needs of small businesses while Magento EE will be more suitable for bigger ones due to its outstanding built-in features. Anyway, the decision is yours, please consider carefully before making a decision. I hope this article will be useful to help you choose the right version.

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