Should you choose Magento Enterprise or Community?

Magento is one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available in the market today. It provides an incredible amount of flexibility and customisations to suit almost any business. A big part of this flexibility is the fact that it is available in two different editions: Enterprise and Community.

Magento Community is the free and open source edition of Magento. It is able to be downloaded by anyone, and can be changed in any way that you like (assuming you have the relevant coding skills).

The main benefit of this edition is the most obvious – it�s free! But this is also responsible for the main downside – it is not as feature rich as the Enterprise edition. As a result, Community is more suited for small businesses.

Enterprise, on the other hand, has a wide variety of features and customisations that can be implemented to suit your business, and which are not available in the Community edition.

These features are mostly focused on the marketing and customer engagement aspects, as well as data security and performance.

So what are the main differences between the two?

• Cost. This is probably the most obvious difference. The Community edition is free, whereas the Enterprise edition is a paid platform (including a yearly licence fee).

• Functionality. The biggest question to ask yourself when trying to decide between the two is whether your business actually needs the additional functionality that comes with the Enterprise edition. For many businesses the Community edition will be sufficient.

• Performance. The paid version is likely to perform better, but that is assuming that you have the site traffic and sales to justify it. The Community edition will provide plenty of performance for many businesses.

• Integration with other systems. The Enterprise edition is going to be better suited to businesses that require integration with other systems, as it comes with this functionality built-in.

• Scalability. If you are a smaller business, but you are looking to expand in the future, then the Enterprise edition might be better suited. The underlying architecture of this edition is better suited for scaling up your ecommerce site in the future.

For many businesses the Community edition of the Magento eCommerce platform will be more than sufficient for their needs. But for those businesses that need greater customisation, have a high level focus on customer engagement, and need a platform to support a larger business, the Enterprise edition is probably for you.

For a great ecommerce website and online marketing solution, head over to Alinga Web Design and check out our portfolio. Like what you see? Contact us and one of our friendly staff will be more than happy to help you.