Magento Community v. Magento Enterprise


Magento, one of the e-commerce industry's most popular shopping cart platforms currently comes in two major license types. While they are used to offer more options, including Magento Go and Magento Professional, they have evolved to focus on solely on their Community and Enterprise editions.

*This is a guest blog post from our partners at Rand Marketing. 

There are many similarities and many differences between the two. Magento Community is free software, while Magento Enterprise comes with an annual license fee starting at approximately $18,000 per year. While migrating between the two will require an extensive migration and re-platforming (in essence a rebuild), by volume, most businesses start with Community, and many never switch to Enterprise. However, a business with a lot of web traffic or sales, or a large enough product catalog among other metrics may be enticed to purchase some of the out-of-the-box improvements in Magento Enterprise. We find that typically if a business is on track to do $1,000,000+ in online sales, Enterprise is much more likely going to be a topic of conversation. If a business is on track for less than $500,000 in online sales, the expense is likely to be stifling. Those funds could be better invested in marketing and other growth to get to the point where Enterprise makes sense.


There are some extra expenses to keep in mind as well. With Enterprise, you’re likely to pay higher rates for Magento Extensions (ie. Add-ons, Modules, Plugins, Apps). They will be sold to fewer stores on average, so extension developers need to recoup their costs from fewer businesses. They also know that they can demand a higher price in the market. The same will go for Magento Optimized hosting and many SaaS platforms, which will also anticipate a bigger footprint, and more demand on their resources.
This of course begs the question, What do you get with Enterprise that you don’t get with Community? For starters, you get many additional features/modules, such as:
  • Enhanced caching and indexing to improve site performance
  • Advanced customer segments, targeting, and shopping personalization
  • Additional customer attribute fields
  • Price and discount rules based upon customer segments
  • Drag and drop visual merchandising within categories
  • Better search functionality with Solr Search
  • Automated abandoned cart and wishlist emails
  • Automation of up-sells, cross-sells, and related products
  • Enhanced management of static pages with Page Versioning
  • A Reward-Point Loyalty Program
  • The ability to sell and redeem gift cards
  • Google Tag Manager support
  • Support for CyberSource and WorldPay
  • Private sales
  • Store credits
  • Add to cart by SKU
  • Gift registries and multiple wishlists
  • Gift wrapping options for shoppers
  • Order tracking without logging in
  • A Return Management System (RMA) for products purchased online
  • Restrict access to view or purchase particular items by customer group
  • Import/export automation
  • Order archiving
  • More control of Administrator Roles, and logging of Administrator Updates
  • Better support for large numbers of concurrent Admin users
  • Staging, merging, & rollback of content
  • Enhanced options for hosting scalability and performance
  • Quick check of database corruption status and various settings
  • Magento’s PCI Compliant Payment Bridge
  • Additional enhancements to encryption and login security
  • A Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK)
  • Limited indemnification from Patent or Copyright Infringement lawsuits
If you need or want some of these features, do you absolutely need Magento’s Enterprise edition? Luckily, the answer is generally “No”. Most of these features can be added to a Magento Community website by adding a Magento Extension, or utilizing a SaaS (software as a service) system. In many cases, you can get more robust feature sets from extensions than the modules that come with Magento Enterprise. There are certainly cases where we’ve seen clients have us deactivate or otherwise ignore Enterprise modules and install add-ons to meet their more specific needs.
It’s also worth noting that some Enterprise features can creep into Community over time. While it behooves the Magento team to keep a healthy number of extras available in the “deluxe” version of their platform, they continue to add more to Enterprise, and as they do, some things may become available in Community, helping to keep Community the very competitive platform that it is when compared with other systems like WooCommerce, Prestashop, and other open source e-commerce platforms.
There is also a service component to Magento Enterprise. With Enterprise, the Magento team offers some limited customer support on the overall platform. Knowing that the developers of the platform are standing behind you can bring peace of mind, but it won’t replace having experienced developers to help as well. The Magento team will not be familiar with the extensions and customizations of your particular website, and therefore will typically be able to provide very limited support for the individual code conflicts and errors that you could experience.
Still not sure which edition is right for you? The experts at RandMarketing.com can help to assess your needs, and recommend the solution that’s right for you.
- Robert Rand

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