Magento Community vs. Magento Enterprise Edition – What is the Difference

We always recommend Magento as an e-commerce platform for anybody looking to start a website that will be sales oriented. It is basically an all in one sales solution. With that said, it is important to know that there are two options available to anybody looking to get started with Magento; Magento Community (Free) and […]

By Joel Holtzman

We always recommend Magento as an e-commerce platform for anybody looking to start a website that will be sales oriented. It is basically an all in one sales solution. With that said, it is important to know that there are two options available to anybody looking to get started with Magento; Magento Community (Free) and Magento Enterprise ($14,420 USD/yr as of November 1, 2012). This leads to the most important question; which Magento version is right for you?

Magento offers a wide range of benefits from being compatible with multiple payment providers such as Authorize.net and Paypal as well as working with shipping modules such as UPS, USPS and Fedex.

Moreover, Magento allows you to focus on running your online store without having to have a technical background. Outside of shipping and payment processing, Magento can handle many tasks for you, such as generating coupons, offering a email marketing right in the admin through newsletters, and allowing you to offer wish lists to your customers. Here are then some of the differences between Magento Community and Magento Enterprise Edition.

Magento Community – Free

If you are looking to get started with an e-commerce website and are on a smaller budget, Magento Community version is just right for you. It can be set up pretty easy and it is flexible for web developers and web designers to work with should you wish to implement custom functions and your own web design.

The free edition also includes many features that you may find useful that can create repeat business for you such as the ability to follow up with customers via newsletter, creating discounts for customers with coupons and allowing customers to create a wish list that they can continually update. Best of all, should you need to customize certain features, or add new functionality, you can find a wide assortment of solutions that are inexpensive such as gift wrap modules, more advanced gift certificate management and even gift registries.

The investment you would make in any future development or modules will still be far less than the development of an e-commerce system from scratch. With that said, some people need something more powerful system out of the box. This is where Magento Enterprise comes in.

Magento Enterprise – $14,420/Year License

If money is not an object and you want to get started with a serious e-commerce solution than Magento Enterprise is a proven solution available to you. It comes with everything that Magento Community offers as well as the following benefits:

Free Professional Customer Support

Whereas the community edition does not come with professional support, only a message board, the enterprise version offers professional report for businesses and their tech support team to ensure everything runs smoothly.

If you need help with your Magento store, call 845-656-3000 or Contact us here »

Full Page Caching

For a website receiving thousands upon thousands of visits per hour, it is important to reduce load on the server including the database. This is where full page caching comes in. Imagine you visit a standard Magento page. What you see is a standard html output of that page but, in order for that page to be generated, Magento is built to communicate with the database, find the products and information to display, and display it to you in real time. The process of doing all of this takes time and, should there be many visitors, can bring a server to its knees.

Full page caching solves this issue by storing that html data ahead of time so when people visit the website they can view the html output instantly, instead of waiting for the website to communicate with the database and process the most recent updated version of their information or product list. Through full page caching you will see remarkable savings in page load speed and server usage. Here is one demonstration that tested both the free version of Magento and Magento Enterprise.

Built In Modules

Modules such as private sales, wholesale, gift registries and much more come loaded with Magento Enterprise because the point of Magento Enterprise is to give you the most sophisticated sales experience that works right out of the box. It is designed for larger websites with big volume and is even used by companies such as Nike and Viso as seen on the Magento Enterprise home page.

So as you can see, Magento Enterprise is built for the website that expects to receive a lot of traffic and wants to get the most out of the online sales experience. From targeted sales promotions you can offer customer groups to advanced caching mechanisms that can handle a lot of concurrent visits, Magento Enterprise will work out of the box for you if you wish to take your business to another level.

This article superficially touches the differences between the Magento Community and Magento Enterprise Edition. To learn more about Magento Enterprise, click here and see for yourself all that it has to offer. You can view a comparison between the free version and the enterprise version and see which is right for you.

To sum it up, Magento Community is a good starting point that doesn’t require a big investment right of the bat. By choosing Magento Community you’ll generally spend les than the yearly fee of Magento Enterprise, provided that you have found a company who knows how to configure Magento for your products and style the design to match your brand. For companies that have a big volume of online sales, but don’t have an experienced and reliable Magento company to work with, choosing Magento Enterprise, that comes with full support from the Magento team, is the right way to go.

Magento Development Lead