When looking at Magento you may have noticed that there are two different versions to choose from. Your two options are Magento Community and Magento Enterprise. People often get into debates between the two and one could argue endlessly about the topic of Magento Community vs Magento Enterprise but let’s just focus on the facts.
Here's a brief summary of the contrasts between the two similar but different platforms.
- Magneto Community – Perfect for small to mid-sized merchants that are looking for a platform that can adapt to their businesses requirements and grow with them as their online store requires customized features to offer to its customers.
- Magento Enterprise – The name says it all, this bad boy is for the large "enterprise" sized merchants that need to handle ecommerce on a large scale. With capabilities to accommodate the demands of hundreds of thousands of orders a day and several million SKU's. No sweat for Magneto Enterprise.
Of course there's a lot more to discuss between the differences of the two options, so let's begin breaking them down.
Support
While both products are created and maintained by Magento the levels of support varies between the two versions. Magneto Community is maintained and updated for free from Magento but you are responsible for installing and upgrading your store along the way. Magento Enterprise follows the same path of regular updates but with the annual license you also get access to Magento's 24/7 support that allows to be in direct contact with the Magento developers.
Performance
One of the biggest differences between Magento Community and Magento Enterprise is their performance capabilities. Since the release of Magento 1.13 it has been fine tuned to operate maintenance tasks 80% faster than the Community version. This is a game changer when your store needs to index 1,000,000+ SKU's daily.
Features
Though a lot of the core features you will be looking for will be available in both version, Magento Enterprise put's the icing on the cake giving with its additional features out of the box. Features like documents version control, increased tax calculations, gift wrapping and auto generated coupons are all features offered in Magento Enterprise without the need of any 3rd party extensions.
High level overview
Taking a step back and looking at the larger picture will help you in your decision between these 2 platforms. While they are both quite similar they have been tailored to provide value for different types of merchants. If you find yourself starting your first online store and want to build your website on a platform that can grow with you as your business expands then Magento Community is going to be a perfect solution for you. If your finding yourself searching endlessly for a platform that can handle your rapidly growing store and need a piece of software that can breeze through your inventory in seconds, then Magneto Enterprise is the product for you.
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