Choosing the right platform is crucial for businesses teeming with unprecedented growth opportunities. This transition to all-things digital has urged the multi-chain retailers and large-scale businesses to step up their game, especially when it comes to making a strong online presence. The best way to do that is to identify a strong E-Commerce solution to grow your business. This is where the self-hosted open-source platform like Magento comes to the picture. Magento is undoubtedly the undisputed leader of the E-Commerce ecosystem that powers thousands of small and middle scale businesses including some of the top retailers around the world.
However, should you go with Magento Community Edition (CE) or the Enterprise Edition (EE) is a million dollar question that’s been troubling merchants for quite some time now. While both are self-hosted open-source platforms, the EE is more scalable than the CE, so provides better performance on almost all aspects. This article compares the two versions on many aspects, providing a clear insight into their offerings and features.
1. The Cost
The Community Edition is a free open-source version of Magento and any developer can modify its core code and add new plug-in modules to alter its functionality based on his or her requirements. It’s a feature-rich platform that provides small and medium scale businesses the perfect E-Commerce framework to expand their online presence in order to meet the basic commerce needs of their business. The Enterprise Edition, on the other hand, is the premium version of Magento that comes with a hefty $15,000 licensing fee. You also have to pay an additional fee for each additional server. However, because of its extensive palette of more advanced features, it’s popular among enterprise behemoths and E-Commerce giants.
2. Features
While both the E-Commerce platforms are self-hosted and have the same core, the advanced capabilities and features of the Enterprise Edition have made it the popular choice among the big players. While both the platforms have all the basic features of an E-Commerce solution, the Enterprise Edition has a lot under its sleeves such as 24/7 technical support by Magento professionals, RMA (Return Management Authorization), optimized indexing, promotion and price permission, advanced segmentation with targeted offers, staged merging, an enhanced and advanced catalog and CMS, and much more.
3. Performance
Big businesses buy the Enterprise Edition for more scalability and better performance, as the premium version offers more advanced features thereby increasing the performance on a long haul. The paid version of the Magento can run multiple databases for hassle-free and fast checkout, better order management, and product cataloging. And thanks to the new Enterprise Cloud, it dramatically speeds up deployment. Another popular feature called Full Page Caching in the EE allows for a smoother and faster shopping experience.
4. Shopping Experience
The Enterprise Edition is more of a customer-centric E-Commerce platform which is designed considering the needs of the customers to provide a pleasant shopping experience. It offers reward points for every purchase and also allows customers to create multiple wish lists for a custom tailored shopping. It also provides cart reminders, product cataloging, advanced filtering, content rollback, gift cards, and so much more so that every shopper could experience shopping like never before. Another great feature in the EE is elastic search which allows shoppers to find their favorite products faster and easier. Shopping experience is better in the paid version of Magento.
5. Security
One of the most important features that the Community Edition lack is credit card tokenization, which allows users to save their credit card information for future uses. The tokenization feature asks user to save his or her card for future purchase when the user wishes to pay via credit card, which eliminates the need of entering the card details every time allowing for a smooth and easy payment. This makes the CE more vulnerable to security concerns, plus it’s not PCI compliant either. The paid version provides unmatched security features for a safe shopping experience.
6. Rollback
Rollback support for the Community Edition is not fun and it’s not that simple either. Users have to go through a long hectic process like restoring previous data from the database backup the day before and checking if the hosting provider had kept the backup of that database version or not. You may also have to undo the changes made during the day, plus taking account of the customers and products and if everything goes fine, then you can rollback successfully. Rollback is quite easy and hassle-free in the Enterprise Edition. The EE is specially designed to handle large-scale development for high-end businesses.
| Magento Community Edition | Magento Enterprise Edition |
| It’s a free open-source platform where developers can contribute or modify core files. | It’s the premium version of the Magento which requires businesses to pay a hefty licensing fee of about $15,000, plus additional charge for implementation costs. |
| It’s not able to handle large scale development or websites with considerably high traffic. | It’s specially designed to handle high-end development for high-traffic E-Commerce websites. |
| It lacks Full Page Caching, owing to its slow OOTB, so response time is relatively slow. | It automatically saves a copy of the page you visited to the cache, which eventually improves response time. |
| It lacks credit card tokenization or advanced security options making the system vulnerable. | It saves the credit card information for future purchase for a smooth and easy payment while checking out. |
| It does not have the advanced features like RMA, assisted shopping, advanced segmentation, etc. | It offers an extensive palette of advanced features like 24/7 technical support, RMA, dynamic marketing, elastic search, Enterprise Cloud, etc. |
| Rollback is a long and hectic process in CE. | Rollback is considerably easy and hassle-free in EE. |
| It lacks professional support to help guide any business. | It provides round-the-clock customer support by Magento professionals. |
Summary
Both the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition are self-hosted with almost the same set of features and are open-source platforms of the Magento ecosystem, but with slightly different architecture. While the former is a free version of the Magento which obviously makes it a more practical choice among the small and medium scale businesses, the later is a premium version of the Magento with more advanced features. The Enterprise Edition has all the required features to grow a business and take it to the next level. The EE definitely outperforms its counterpart on various aspects such as scalability, security, performance, indexing, functionality, customer experience, and more. While the CE is great for small and medium businesses, the extensive range of features in the EE makes it a practical choice for enterprise behemoths and E-Commerce giants alike.