Magento Enterprise or Community: What Suits You Best?

Ecommerce stores may often seem to you like birds of a feather, as all the stores deal with products, manage orders and make sales. But the fact is that ecommerce stores are as diverse as the avian kingdom. So if you are planning to have a store or already managing one, then you must have already figured out that machoosing the right ecommerce platform is very important to meet your business needs. This is only possible if you have a clear concept of what your store needs and what the different developing platforms can offer you.

Many merchants often conclude with Magento because it is a flexible, feature rich, open source ecommerce solution that helps to get the most from online channels.But one thing that matters most is that merchants still vacillate while taking a decision as Magento has three versions to go with- Magento Go, Enterprise and Community. Let us explore Magento Community and Enterprise to see which is best for your business. We will compare the core aspects of both the platforms that need to be taken into consideration before starting your projects.

• Community: This version is free. But remember that you have to rent a web server to host the online store. As an open source platform, you can hire developers to design your store and customize it easily to meet your specific needs.
• Enterprise: This is a premium edition having an annual license fee that starts from 14,420 USD. The price is because of its advanced features and exclusive level of technical support that is available all the time. This platform also offers unlimited scope for creating customized solutions.

• Community: When it comes to the term functionality, Community may lose the battle as it is not properly equipped with custom extensions and modules. Many merchants are of the opinion that certain features present in the Enterprise may be very costly to create in this platform. But at the same time we can say that with more than 5000 extensions easily available in the market, any solution can be created with features needed by a business.
• Enterprise: It has some remarkable feature like Private Sales, Loyalty System, Reward Points, Gift Registry etc, which lacks in the others. But such features can also be achieved through extensions in the other edition.

• Community: Many merchants have a perception that this edition is devoid of the PCI compliance, unlike the Enterprise and it is not possible to become compliant. Magento Community does not have payment bridges, but there are various means to attain PCI compliance.
• Enterprise: It includes a PA-DSS payment bridge that offers high security while making financial transactions. It meets the industry security standards and also complies with the PCI requirements.

• Community: Many people think that this edition is not fast. If the number of products and data are immense, then the performance may slow down. But with proper optimization, quick loads can be attained. Using a Varnish page-cache or a FPC system can make it superb.
• Enterprise: This platform enjoys multiple features and is faster than the other platforms. It comes with an FPC system and with a bit of configuration and tuning, the performance can be even better.

• Community: There is a significant difference between the levels of support offered by the edition. There is no support from the software creator on this version and so for any sort of problem you have to depend on the community to provide any type of targeted response. This may involve some time.
• Enterprise: With this version, you can enjoy Magento staff’s full time support as you have purchased a copy of the edition. This helps organizations to solve problems instantly, without wasting much time and productivity.

Focusing on one version and concluding that this is better than the other is difficult as both the editions have their own pros and cons. The first step before selecting the ideal edition for your business is to note down the required features of your online store. Then check all the features that the versions have to offer. You may come over with some more requirements while doing this. Put down your list and make a final comparison to select the edition that best fits your requirements.

Always remember that performing the due diligence is essential to get the best performance from the platform. Continue with the best Magento version for your online store.