Magento Community vs. Enterprise Edition Comparison [2022]
MaartenThe e-commerce business has been growing rapidly with more and more companies coming in every year.
Choosing a platform is the first step towards building an e-commerce business and Magento has been a popular choice among business owners.
Magento comes in two versions- Magento Community Edition (Now known as Magento 2 Open Source) and Magento Enterprise Edition( Now known as Magento 2 Commerce). Both editions have the same core features but Enterprise Edition offers more advanced features.
In this article, we’re going to compare both these editions and the comparison will help you choose the right one for you.
Let’s get started.
Magento Community Edition
Magento Community Edition (CE) is an open-source and free-to-download e-commerce software. It is a basic and useful solution for businesses that’re just getting started on their online business journey.
Who Needs Magento Community Edition?
One of the significant benefits Magento Community Edition has is it’s available for free to everyone. It makes it a solid choice for new brands that don’t need many advanced features.
Magento Community is popular among web developers since they create websites in masses. With Magento Community Edition, they can build websites for multiple clients without paying any license fees.
Magento Community is a go-to e-Commerce software for store owners who have limited budgets.
Magento Enterprise Edition
Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) comes with more features than Magento Community Edition. Its features provide you with better performance, scalability, and high security.
Who needs the Magento Enterprise Edition?
If you’ve seen some of the top Magento websites, you must have seen their sales volume. It’s crazy, right! Magento Enterprise Edition (Magento EE) is designed for those big bulls. Magento Enterprise features are built for large companies looking to make an eCommerce store on a big scale.
Now, let’s compare a few aspects of both Magento 2 editions.
Magento Community V/S Enterprise Edition
1. Cost
As we already discussed before, Magento Community is a completely free version while Magento 2 Enterprise requires a license fee. It guarantees high security and includes more features to help you improve your business marketing performance, which eventually generates more sales.
The license fee depends on the revenue you generate. In simple words, the license fee is not the same for everyone. It depends on your annual revenue.
Here you can check how much license fee you’ll be paying for different ranges of revenues you generate.
| 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 |
The cost of a Magento Enterprise Edition license starts at $22,000 annually for merchants who have a revenue less than $1 million a year. The license fee increases with the increasing gross revenue.
Suppose you’re a business generating revenue of less than $5 million a year, if you look at the revenue generated versus the amount spent on licensing, you should consider going with the Magento Community Edition.
Magento EE does include domain, hosting, and other costs. The licensing fee of Magento EE is high, but given the feature it offers, it is the best eCommerce solution for large companies. If you’re a new company launching your first site, you should go for Community Edition.
2. Security
Given the cost, it is very obvious that Magento EE will have better security than Magento CE.
Credit card tokenization and advanced payment security are missing in Magento CE, which can be a problem since it is required for secured transactions. Magento CE does not comply with PCI DSS security.
PCI Security Standard is a global organization that ensures the safety standards of cardholder data across the globe.
Magento EE version is PCI compliant thus, it offers more robust security solutions. Magento Secure Payment Bridge takes care of handling card processing, and Magento EE is connected with it. Magento EE also offers multiple industry-leading secure payment methods like PayPal, WorldPay, Braintree, and more.
Today, customers demand security while making payments. It builds trust, so if you’re looking for a more secure solution, Magento EE is the suitable choice for you.
3. Scalability
When choosing between Community and Enterprise Edition, you’ve to consider looking at your business growth. If you’re growing rapidly and expect to grow at the same rates in the future, you should grow for Magento Enterprise. Magento EE comes with advanced features for a rapidly growing business.
Some examples of EE features are order management and checkout speed and order management for companies that handle huge volumes of orders and transactions. Magento EE hardware can handle 3.5 million page views and 250,000 orders every hour. If you’ve 100,000-200,000 products, Magento CE can easily manage that. If this number crosses 400,000, we recommend you hire a professional to help you with it.
If you have a huge volume of orders and transactions, and you’re looking to grow at an exponential rate, you should choose Magento EE.
If you want to experience the full scalability of both versions, you should consider the features that both versions offer.
4. Features
Magento CE and EE both come with the features to help you grow your e-commerce businesses. However, Magento Enterprise Edition offers more advanced features compared to the Magento Community edition.
Here, we have shown the comparison between the features that both editions offer.
| Features | Community Edition | Enterprise Edition |
| Code-level access | Y | Y |
| Web service API | Y | Y |
| Integrated Checkout, Payment, and Shipping | Y | Y |
| Global Selling | Y | Y |
| Flexible Couponing and Promotions | Y | Y |
| Catalog management | Y | Y |
| Full page caching | Y | Y |
| Multiple stores | Y | Y |
| Mobile optimized shopping | Y | Y |
| Integrated Checkout, Payment & Shipping | Y | Y |
| B2B Functionality | Y | |
| Business Intelligent Dashboards | Y | |
| Technical support (by Magento team) | Y | |
| WYSIWYG Page Builder | Y | |
| Enhanced tax calculation | Y | |
| Visual Merchandising | Y | |
| Content Staging & Preview | Y | |
| Administrator Permission Roles on Website and Store Levels | Y | |
| Customer loyalty tools | Y | |
| Advanced marketing and segmentation | Y | |
| Enhanced security | Y | |
| PCI Compliant | Y | |
| Elastic, Solr search | Y |
5. Performance
It’s not a fair comparison when you’re comparing the free and paid editions. It is obvious that when you’re spending money on cloud services, you will get a better level of performance.
Magento Community is free, but if you decide to go with Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition and are ready to spend hundreds of bucks each month, you will get the best service.
The Magento Community Edition also has pretty good performance until you have a certain amount of traffic. If your site has huge traffic, Enterprise edition is the most suitable choice for you as Enterprise edition is explicitly made for big businesses.
6. Marketing
Both Editions offer some basic marketing features like meta descriptions, alt tags, custom URLs, and more. If you’re using the Magento CE edition, you will have to buy external marketing extensions to increase the performance of your marketing campaigns.
However, it’s not the case with the Enterprise Edition. It offers some advanced features like targeted content, content staging, email reminders, customer segmentation, and more.
So, when we compare the Marketing features of Magento Community and Enterprise Edition, Magento EE is a winner without any doubt. With Magento EE, you can make your marketing campaigns more effective and convert more customers with less effort.
Magento Community V/S Enterprise – Which version is suitable for you?
You should go for Enterprise Edition when:
- Your store requires advanced marketing and promotion features
- Your store need more out-of-the-box functionality
- Your store needs 24/7 Magento customer support
- Your store sells worldwide and use multiple currencies
- Your store accepts different forms of payment
- Your site needs advanced security solution like PCI
- You’re planning to grow rapidly
- You want scalability
You should go for Magento CE when:
- You’re not planning to expand your online store.
- You sell within your Country and use local currency.
- You don’t need advanced functionality.
- You have a low budget.
Choosing the Magento edition is not as easy as it looks; you’ll always want to go for Enterprise Edition. But do you need those advanced features? Maybe your answer will be “YES”, everyone wants advanced features, right! Well, you should look at the order volume, company growth, and your business requirements.
If you’re a small business and have low order volume, Magento CE is the best for you, but if you’re a large business clocking thousands of dollars in revenue, Magento Enterprise is the best choice for you.