Magento 2: Community vs Enterprise

If you have decided to go with Magento 2 as a primary eCommerce platform for your online business, you may face a challenge of the choice between the Community and Enterprise editions.

Let’s figure out how these 2 versions differ.

Generally, Magento 2 is a universal and literally an all-in-one solution for eCommerce. Both the Community and Enterprise versions allow you to sell products and do this in style.

The Price

The Community edition is free to work with, while the Enterprise one requires quite a big startup budget.

The Functionality

When it comes to evaluating the platform functionality, the devil is in the details.

Generally speaking, Magento 2 Enterprise Edition is a choice for those who is running a serious eCommerce business.

This version offers a wide range of benefits for Enterprise version owners. They include various shipping and payment methods. Moreover, lots of technical routine activities are handled by Magento, saving you more time on other business tasks.

If you are new to eCommerce, the best choice would be Magento 2 Community Edition. This version of the platform is pretty easy to set it up and implement your very own design and features.

Unlike the Community edition, the Enterprise one is packed with the following features:

• The ability to segment and personalize customers shopping experience. You can provide specific shoppers with a separate content, promotions and pricing based on their unique properties.
• Automated rules to determine which products to present as up-sells, cross-sells, and related products to each customer segment.
• Enterprise edition enables you to to create, preview and schedule a wide range of content updates.
• Optimized customizable product category pages with the advanced sorting functionality.
• Fast and powerful built-in search.
• Great and responsive design themes, that are easy to adopt to any device.
• Advanced 24x7 technical and account support to help you find a solution whenever you need.

General Info

In general, Magento 2 provides you with a serious out-of-the-box functionality even with the Community version. This functionality can be further extended with the help of 3rd party extensions or even your own handcrafted modules.

Extensions, in turn, also may have 2 versions. Developers often create Community and Enterprise editions of every module. Enterprise versions may also include advanced support options and some additional features.

While making your choice, take into consideration the following aspects:

- your ability to make investments in the platform itself
- your technical background that can or can not allow you to solve different programming issues
- functionality that you may need in your eCommerce store

To sum it up, by spending more you can ease your life and save time. Alternatively, you can pay less and try to overcome the possible difficulties.