Disparities Between Magento’s Community and Enterprise Editions

One of the biggest concerns of eCommerce businesses while developing a key website using Magento is deciding upon which version to deploy, Magento’s Community Edition or its Enterprise Edition. While the former one is an open-source platform, available for free and most suitable for small-sized sites, the latter one is a premium paid edition appropriate for business giants to create large-sized stores. While many out-of-the-box features are bagged by the bigger online shops built by Enterprise edition, community edition as a state-of-the-art platform brings all the all the basic features for startups and small businesses.

Presented below an in-detail compare and contrast of the two widely used Magento’s versions.

Potentiality in performance

While most developers predict that being a free edition, Community version cannot meet up all the expectations of businesses except the basic ones, it is much faster in performance. Even some of the features of Enterprise edition can be integrated using extensions to the free version. But for businesses that want extra modules to incorporate some advanced features in their sites, they need to buy the paid Enterprise version.

Inbuilt Functionalities

Even though both the editions of Magento are built on the same foundation, the Enterprise version brings more advanced features for eCommerce sites. Enhanced content management system, customer segmentation, return handling, price promotion, advanced catalog management system and few other functionalities, that help in crafting customized online stores.

Security

While Community edition does not support exclusively secured payment bridges, the premium edition does that. Moreover, the free edition is not PCI compliant which is a major concern. However, Enterprise edition comes with robust security features including PA-DSS payment bridge that is necessary to cater to safety requirements in the eCommerce industry.

B2B and B2C

While both editions are applicable for building sites to sell products to the consumers. However, if retailers want to transact with other businesses instead of consumers, there are limitations to that. Either they have to integrate 3rd party add-ons if they are using Community version, or can use the Enterprise edition which inherently built for supporting B2B as well as B2C transactions.

Support

eCommerce owners using Community edition are not backed by the support team of Magento and hence their sites are built with no warranties. On the hand, being a premium version, the Enterprise edition offers its users all kinds of technical support, solutions to the problems and also guarantees them.

Closing thoughts

Choosing between Magento’s two edition is a difficult task and one needs to be specific about what they want exactly on their site. While Community edition is likely to be the good platform for startup stores, requiring leaner investments, if anyone seeks to tap larger audiences with more powerful stores and upgraded features, Enterprise edition is the correct platform to pitch in.

Author bio: Jonathan is a technology innovator and adroit developer who specialised in Magento Development in Sydney based popular web development company, PHPProgrammers.

Jonathan Paul is a senior technology expert at Php Programmer and has over 25 years of experience in developing websites.