Both Magento Community and Enterprise Editions provide outstanding platforms for building your online businesses. Of course each organization has its own financial situation, marketing plan and technical capabilities. This short guide will help to quickly give you guidance on making a Magento Community vs Enterprise Comparison.

There are three areas we focus on when evaluating this decision:

Usually after a review of these three areas, it’s pretty obvious which version is the best fit. For more individualized Magento Community vs Enterprise comparison and evaluation for your business, give us a shout.

Let’s start here because 95% of Magento sites use Community Edition because free fits in everybody’s budget. On the other hand Enterprise Edition starts at $17,500 a year for licensing, and can be $50,000 a year. If you’re doing $20MM annually, think Enterprise Edition because it doesn’t pay to be pennywise pound foolish. If you’re selling $500K a year, think Community Edition. If you’re somewhere in between, read on!

Something important to know about features is that every feature in Magento Enterprise has been replicated by an extension for Magento Community Edition. So if the annual licensing fee for Enterprise Edition is out of your budget, don’t panic! By adding in extensions, you can get all the features you need, without the large budget. However, the caveat is that extensions are developed by independent developers, so they don’t always play together nicely. You’ll need a skilled developer (like Web 2 Market).

Magento Enterprise offers a number of advanced features not found in Community Edition. Here are short descriptions of each feature:

Admin Permissions

Enterprise Edition has roles, logging and access permissions. Roles and access permissions let the super user control who can view particular pages and who can make changes. Logging tracks who made changes to the data or configuration.

Categorize your customers for better targeted marketing efforts and offers.

Automated Email Messages

Abandoned baskets, requesting a product review and so forth.

5% off a customer’s next purchase, for example.

A more streamlined process in Enterprise Edition.

Recommendations based on what other customers have bought with the current product being viewed.

A more sophisticated interface to handle a larger number of customers.

Customers can choose between wrap options for gifts.

EE can track and apply credits for repeat customers.

Recipients can use these as payments of course.

Certification to the credit card industry’s standard.

Special prices and discounts through email and/or login using the Advanced Segmentation just described.

Manage and track returns from customers from within Magento.

You can revert to a previous version of content. For example, go back to yesterday’s About Us page.

Integrated Solr search. The search built into CE is pretty awful.

Built in multiple locations, with different tax zones, countries

The speed at which pages load on ecommerce sites is a complex, inter-related function of hardware, network, application code and user system. Off-the-shelf, Magento Enterprise Edition loads faster and scales better than Magento Community. Like features, a skilled development team can enable Community to run every bit as fast as Enterprise. We typically use Varnish caching to get client sites loading in under a second.

Full Page Caching – A built in caching system that creates a fully compiled version of most pages on the site for fast load times. Typically 1-2 seconds.
Fast Re-Indexing – Products need to be indexed by Magento when updates are performed. Magento Enterprise re-indexing is 80% faster than Magento Community. If you’ve got 50,000 products you’ll notice the difference.

When making a Magento Community vs Enterprise Comparison, remember to be forward looking. What will you need 3 years from now? Select the platform with the right combination of features, performance and budget. It’s obviously a complex decision. Want some guidance? Speak with one of our Magento Certified Solutions Specialists today!