Magento (Adobe Commerce) is one of the three most popular eCommerce platforms at present. Currently, Magento offers two versions which are Magento Open Source vs Adobe Commerce (formally called Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition). They both have the same core features of the Magento platform, but Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) has outstanding features beyond Magento Community Edition (CE).
Many widely-known companies are using the Magento platform to shape their websites. They belong to various industries from beverage, fashion, and electronics such as Coca Cola, Hermes, Nike, Canon, Samsung.
Retailers can go one step further and turn Magento into an omnichannel ecosystem, which helps them run and scale the business without limits.
Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition – Overview
Magento Community Edition (Magento 2 Open Source) is a free version of Magento. This version is suitable for small businesses, merchants can add various functionalities and download Magento extensions to reinforce their stores.
In contrast, Magento Enterprise Edition (Adobe Commerce) is the paid one. This version suits enterprise-level businesses when it offers many additional features beyond Magento CE such as high security, better performance, and enhanced scalability. To help you decide which version suits you best, we’ve created:
- A comparison between Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition in terms of cost, security, scalability, functionalities and marketing
- Suggestion on how to choose the best edition that suits you
Instead of manually scaling up your Magento store, consider using an automated tool for Magento upgrade. If you find Magento more suitable than your current platform, proper Magento migration could benefit you in many ways.
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Let’s begin!
Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition – Detailed Comparison
1. Cost
The difference that strikes the eye is the price. As mentioned above, the Magento Community is a free version, while Magento Enterprise requires a license fee. The license fee guarantees higher security for your Magento store and includes more built-in features that help better your business marketing performance, which in return generates more sales.
The license is based on a revenue model. In other words, the license cost of Magento Enterprise Edition depends on how much your store revenue is. The table below shows the cost of a license based on annual revenue:
| Revenue (USD) | License price (year) |
| 0 – <1 M | $22.000 |
| 1 – <5 M | $32.000 |
| 5 – <10 M | $49.000 |
| 10 – <25 M | $75.000 |
| 25 – <50M | $125.000 |
Source: graybox.co
The cost of a Magento EE license starts at $22,000.00 annually for merchants generating less than $1 million in revenue. The license fee will be growing in accordance with revenue, the more gross revenue you generate, the more you have to pay.
For store owners in the middle of the revenue from $5 to $25 million. Choosing the Magento EE version is quite reasonable.
But for businesses generating less than $5 million in revenue, if you look at the amount spent on licensing versus the revenue being generated by the site, you should consider choosing the Magento CE.
As you can see, the license fee of Magento EE is quite high, but it does not include hosting, domain, and other incurred costs. So the total cost when choosing Magento EE is added up. If you are an eCommerce business start-up, the CE edition is a suitable choice for you.
Although the hosting fee for Magento CE is lower than the EE version, you still need to pay a considerable amount of money for hosting only. There are various price ranges to choose from, based on the hosting you select. The more features, support, and security provided, the higher the cost, up to $1000+ per month. Magento merchants usually prefer Cloudways and BlueHost over other hosting providers in the market. If you are still wavering among Magento hosting providers, you can join this event to claim a 2-month FREE Cloudways hosting service to help you choose a suitable hosting provider.
2. Security
When it comes to security, Magento EE definitely prevailed over Magento CE.
Magento CE lacks credit card tokenization or advanced payment security which can be a problem because these features are required for secured transactions. The biggest problem with the free version is that it does not comply with PCI DSS security.
The PCI Security Standard is a global organization. It maintains, evolves, and promotes Payment Card Industry standards for the safety of cardholder data across the globe. You can read more information about the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
In contrast, the Magento EE version offers more robust security solutions. EE is “PCI compliant” and connected to the Magento Secure Payment Bridge, which takes care of handling card processing. It also offers multiple secured payment gateways like PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, CyberSource, WorldPay, and more. Other than that, Enterprise Edition has a regular scanning process, bug bounty programs, and external penetration testing.
Customers need security when using your service, and for large businesses, PCI security is a preeminent feature that should be used to increase reliability. So if you are seeking the top security for your website’s transactions, we recommend you should choose Magento EE.
3. Scalability
When choosing between Magento Community vs Enterprise Editions, you need to take into account the future business scale that you are orienting to. If you’re expecting that your business is going to grow rapidly, you should go with Magento Enterprise. This is because Magento EE comes with out-of-the-box features for a growing business.
Some of the EE highlight features are checkout speed and order management for online shops with large numbers of orders and transactions. Also, Magento EE hardware is capable of handling 3.5 million page views and 250,000 orders an hour. So if you have a large eCommerce site, there is a huge amount of traffic, Magento EE will be the optimal choice for you.
On the other hand, Magento CE is suitable for small businesses, simply because it is cheaper. If you have ~100,000 – 200,000 products, Magento CE could totally manage. However, if the products reach the number of over 400,000, you should probably hire Magento developers to help you.
Hence, to fully assess the scalability of the two editions, one should take into account all the features that CE and EE offer.
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4. Features
Both Magento Enterprise vs Community have the same core features but Magento EE provides more advanced ones. The table below shows the features of Magento Community vs Magento Enterprise Edition:
| Common features | Extra features | |
| Magento EE/Magento CE | Magento EE | |
| Improved SEO; | Customer Segmentation | Dynamic Rule Based Product Relations; |
| Site Management; | Persistent Shopping; | Automated Email Marketing Reminder; |
| Catalog Management; | Private Sales; | Gift Registry; |
| Catalog Browsing; | Gifting Options; | Rewards Points; |
| Product Browsing; | Store Credits; | Multiple Wish Lists; |
| Checkout, Payment and Shipping; | Add to Cart by SKU; | Return Management Authorization (RMA); |
| Order Management; | Content Management System; | Scheduled Import/Export Functionality; |
| Customer Accounts; | Backup and Rollback; | Staging, Merging and Rollback of Content; |
| Customer Service; | Customer Attribute Management; | Administrator Permission Roles on Website and Store Levels; |
| International Support; | Price and Promotion Permission | Logging of Administrator Actions; |
| Analytics and Reporting; | Category View and Purchase Permissions per Customer Group (Limited Catalog Access); | Order Archiving; |
| Mobile Commerce; | Elastic, Solr Search; | Configurable Order Tracking Widget; |
| Full Page Caching; | Support for Alternate Media Storage – CDN and Database; | PA-DSS Certification/Payment Bridge. |
| Native Device Applications; | Strong Data Encryption, Hashing and Key Management. | Product Relations; |
| Marketing, Promotions and Conversion Tools; | Targeted Promotions & Merchandising; | |
| Optimized Indexing. |
Source: amasty.com
Take a look around the table, as you can see, the types of features integrated into Magento EE platform are more diverse and outstanding than Magento CE. So let me show you some of the most important features that are only available in Magento EE.
Customer Segmentation – Create personalized shopping experiences
This feature allows store owners to show content and promotions to specific customers based on customer information such as an address, shopping cart contents, order history, etc. You can also target visitors based on viewed and added products to the cart.
Gifting Options
These gifting options are outstanding features of Magento EE. With the support of this additional product type, you can easily make and customize up to three kinds of gift cards (virtual, physical, and combined) with flexible pricing and design.
Besides, customers can buy those gift vouchers and give them to friends so that they can redeem the gift card for purchases. So, the Magento EE gift card feature is a marketing tactic to help you boost sales, especially on holidays.
Add to Cart by SKU
Customers who normally make big orders particularly enjoy quick shopping. Therefore, pay attention to this feature of Magento 2 EE. Purchasers can add several items to the cart by entering the SKU list in the available form. This saves consumers a lot of time by searching and going to individual product pages.
So, if you are pursuing a big business, opt for Magento EE. With such a variety of outstanding features, it certainly will not let you down.
5. Marketing
Both Magento Community vs Enterprise Edition is built with a certain amount of basic marketing features such as setting up alt tags, meta descriptions, and custom URLs. With the Magento CE version, if you want to increase the performance of marketing campaigns, you have to purchase marketing extensions from third-party apps.
However, the Enterprise Edition offers some built-in features like advanced content staging, sophisticated attribute-based customer segmentation, targeted content, abandoned cart reminder emails, etc.
So, when it comes to Marketing features of Magento Enterprise vs Community, Magento EE automatically becomes the winner. LitExtension suggest you choose the Magento EE version to make your marketing campaigns more effective.
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LitExtension provides a well-optimized Cart to Cart migration service that will help you transfer all your data accurately, painlessly with utmost security.Magento Community vs Enterprise – Which version is suitable for you?
Do you plan on growing? Think Enterprise.
Enterprise Edition is a good choice for you when:
- The store requires advanced marketing and promotion functionality (gift registration, multiple wish lists, rewards, discounts, special offers, gift cards, and private sales).
- You need more out-of-the-box functionality than what is available in Magento CE
- 24/7 Magento customer support is crucial for your online store.
- The store sells worldwide, using multiple currencies and languages.
- The site accepts different forms of payment (check & purchase orders, PayPal).
- Security solution like PCI is essential for you
So, will your e-commerce goals include rapid growth and scalability? Were you looking to join overseas markets? Are there plans for major site design customizations, such as substantial product improvements or additional layers of site security? Go with Magento EE, it does provide some great additional functionalities to meet your demand.
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Are you simply happy with a small business? Think Community.
Magento CE is a good choice for you when:
- You’re not planning to expand your online store in the future.
- The store sells only within one country, in local currency.
- You don’t need 24/7 support and have a developer team for your own.
Magento CE version is completely free to download and includes the same core features as its Enterprise equivalent. However, CE is built for a small eCommerce company whose website does not require all the outstanding extensive features. Smaller sites that will not require hefty modules or enhanced security should fair well with Community Edition.
FAQ
1. What is the main difference between Magento Community and Enterprise?
Generally, Magento Community is a free version like WooCommerce or OpenCart, while you have to pay for monthly license when using Magento Enterprise.
2. Why is Magento so expensive?
The bona fide reason for the high price of Magento is that only experts with highly skilled based can ensure the smooth operation for the enterprise-sized businesses.
Conclusion
After comparing Magento Community vs Enterprise (Magento Commerce or Adobe Commerce), we can conclude that Magento CE will perfectly meet the needs of small businesses while Magento EE will be more suitable for bigger ones due to its outstanding built-in features. Anyway, the decision is yours, please consider carefully before making a decision. We hope this article will be useful to help you choose the right version.
Finally, if you feel dissatisfied with your current shopping cart and wish to migrate to Magento store, LitExtension – #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert is always here to help you migrate data from source store to Magento store. Currently, we are also supporting migration from 200+ shopping carts. You can check whether your platform is supported for the automated migration in our list of supported carts here. If your platform is not on the list, contact our team via live chat to make a request.
LitExtension is designed for all users and requires no technical and programming skills. With three simple steps, all your data will be transferred completely, securely and quickly.
If you have any questions regarding Magento migration, the LitExtension team is always there to help you!
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