Magento Enterprise vs. Community: The Battle Ensues

Do you own or, are you creating an e-commerce website? Whenever you wish to carry out your eCommerce website plans on Magento platform, you come up with two versions of this platform: the enterprise version and, the community development version.

There’s always confusion on which one to use and, which one is more suitable for your operations. While the enterprise costs somewhere around 15k dollars, your community version comes for free. This is where the whole source to confusion lies. Should you go in for something that’s free or, should you invest that 15k dollars and, own the enterprise version.

Here’s a list of what the enterprise version possesses against what the community version provides and, what is more useful to your business. By the end of this, you should be relatively knowledgeable to figure out which is useful to your company.
It is very essential to understand what your Magento community platform offers.

Once, you have an idea what the free and the paid versions have to offer, it would be better for you to choose. The choice becomes easier with this knowledge.

Magento Community Edition Offerings
Magento community comes for free. This could be an advantage if you are considering buying this version. Let’s understand what are the other offerings made available with this free version.

• It’s free and open source. So, if you are tech savvy and, are absolutely fearless with regards to building your own feature or website while getting your hands dirty with the nitty-gritty, this works for you.
• Payments need to be made for the domain name and, hosting. No yearly charges for the Magento platform.
• You get a code level access with the community Magento platform. You can make changes in the code and, get the platform working as per your needs. Remember the code runs on your server and, hence only you can access the products, client information etc.
• The web services like API allows you to stay connected with other systems easily.
• The HTML5 theme is pre-integrated to your system with the community Magento thus making mobile integration easy for you. Isn’t it true that you have to be present on mobile as well.
• Extensibility is a feature that gives you wings and, it is available with community Magento as well. Extensions are important part of Magento. Yes, you get around 7,500 extensions with Magento.
• Themes, various default and non-default ones are available with Magento community.
• If you wish to view the store in a particular language, you can avail the multiple store view option. You can even build multiple stores using a single community platform.
• This community offering gives you flexible pricing option thus making bundle pricing, catalog pricing etc. options available for you.
• Built-in analytics helps you check on the statistics of your website.
• Payment gateways are pretty secure with the community option.
• Optimizing is easy and amazing with community offering.

Magento Enterprise Edition Offerings
Enterprise offers almost all of what is being offered by community edition. Here you can see what is it that enterprise offers beyond the community offerings for a better understanding.

• If you have a large variety of products, it is handled brilliantly by enterprise as compared to community.
• When it comes to re-indexing your catalog, enterprise works faster. The speed is almost 80% that of community.
• You can add new products and design to a live site with no downtime at all. In fact, you can enable these features without disturbing the live site.
• You can also find out where, how and when do your users interact with you using your site. These details are important from optimizing point of view.
• You can use STP designed for you using the enterprise version.
• Loyalty system is made available with the enterprise version. You can provide loyalty points to your consumer which can later be redeemed thus increasing the base of loyal customers.
• You can load your site quickly when full page caching is included and, this feature is available with Magento enterprise.
• Scalability is much better with enterprise which practically handles DNS, PHP, caching, memory. MySQL etc.
• Your checkout is faster with enterprise version. With the enterprise payment gateway option, now you won’t have room for errors either. So, payment is more secure and, faster with enterprise.
• You get the feature called assisted shopping with enterprise version. So, now there’s a personnel present to help you choose the products.
• Content Management System is an important feature which comes with enterprise version.

Now, that you are aware of the offerings from both Enterprise and Community Magento, the choice becomes easier. Now, you know which one is more useful to your organization and, can choose accordingly.