Magento 2 Community Edition
vs. Enterprise Edition

Do you know the difference between Magento 2 Community Edition and Enterprise Edition? How do you decide which one to choose?
These are the two most often asked questions by our customers and prospects. While which one to choose entirely depends on a businesses’ requirement, the decision-making can be streamlined by understanding the difference between the two.


Magento 2 Community Edition (CE) vs. Enterprise Edition (EE)

Enterprise Edition (EE) has always been Magento’s flagship product packed with features. While the Magento partner and developer community have worked hard to bridge the gap between CE and EE, Magento EE still manages to remain ahead.
This was true for Magento 1, but with Magento 2, Magento has packed more punch in its Enterprise version. Here is a quick overview of how Magento 2 EE differs from Magento 2 CE:

Free vs. Paid

• The Cost Difference – Let us start with the most basic and biggest difference between Magento 2 CE and EE, the cost. Magento 2 CE continues to remain free, but Magento 2 EE pricing structure is revised and linked to company’s annual turnover. Moreover, unlike CE, Magento 2 EE is available both as deployed software and as a platform-as-a-service.

Attract & Convert

With features to segment and target customers, offer special offers, coupons, and promotions, attracting customers, personalizing their experiences and keeping them engaged was never this easy.

• Customer Segmentation and Targeted Promotions to Drive Conversions – Enterprise edition enables you to leverage customer information and insights (like age, gender, location, shopping behaviour, etc.) to better segment customers and create personalized shopping experiences. You can even effectively target first time visitors based on products viewed or items in cart.

• Customer Attribute Management for Advanced Personalization – Enterprise edition allows you to easily add new customer attributes and leverage them to further personalize your sales and marketing efforts.

• Recommend, Up Sell and Cross Sell More Products with Rule Based Product Relations –

  Recommend products to your entire customer base or to specific segments using Enterprise Edition’s advanced rule-based product-relations functionality. Use it to generate more up-sells and cross-sells, and to present more buying options at check out.

  • CE includes the ability to cross sell and up sell but it is a manual process that requires you to link up sell and cross sell products to each other. While manageable for few products, it can be a daunting task if your product portfolio is large.
  • In EE you can create advanced rule-based product relations, apply categories of products as cross sell and upsell, etc.

Make Buying Easy

Convert more customers and keep them happy with a seamless buying experience. Intuitive search, features to making adding items to cart a breeze, tools to control product and category visibility, etc. making shopping extremely convenient.

• Visual Merchandizer to Boost Conversions – Magento Enterprise also comes with a powerful visual merchandizer tool. The tools drag-and-drop interface and automated sorting rules make it convenient for businesses to organize category pages to feature best sellers, highest-margin products, newest products, etc. Also, the tool can dramatically save time by automatically assigning products to categories based on pre-set rules and also help in boosting conversion.

• Powerful Search to Drive Conversions – Magento Enterprise Edition comes integrated with Elasticsearch technology. Elasticsearch supports 33 languages out of the box and can help your customers to find relevant products faster. Elasticsearch accounts for customer misspellings, supports synonyms and stop words, and uses attribute weighting to improve search relevancy and performance.

• Limited Catalog Access to Display Products by Customer Group – Enterprise edition lets you configure products and categories view and purchase permissions by customer group. B2B businesses can use this feature to display custom set of products to different customers.

• Add to Cart by SKU to Improve Conversions – A key feature for B2B businesses, makes it convenient for customers to add items to cart directly by entering a list of SKUs. This can be a huge time saver for businesses with large orders, recurring orders and orders based on offline catalogs.
• Streamline Returns with Advanced RMA – Enterprise edition simplifies the returns process for you and your customers, and is designed to help you create long-term relationships with customer. Shoppers can request a return directly from your site, and you can process the request and authorize returns, exchanges, refunds, and store credits conveniently in your Admin panel.

Drive Loyalty and Retain Customers
Convert happy customers into loyal customers with tools to keep them coming back to your store. Engage customers with rewards programs, private sales and personalized shopping experiences. Retain them with custom registries, gift cards and store credit.

• Drive Customer Loyalty and Rewards – Magento 2 EE comes with a powerful reward points module. You can create rules to automatically reward customers for a desired action – for registration, leaving a product review, newsletter opt-in, etc. The store customers can also redeem these points directly on the store.

• Convert Returns into Future Sales with Store Credits – With Enterprise Edition, you have the option of offering customers store credit in lieu of returns. You can offer to apply the value of their refund towards a future purchase or refund it directly into their accounts.

• Keep Customers Coming back with Gift Cards – Offering gift cards is an excellent way to both increase customer base and to keep them coming back to your store. Enterprise Edition makes it possible for businesses to offer gift cards and extremely convenient for customers to redeem gift cards.
• Promote Return Visits with Multiple Wish Lists – Enterprise edition gives customers flexibility to create multiple wish lists. Businesses can use these lists to better understand and market to their customers.

• Increase Sales and Loyalty with a Custom Gift Registry – Offering a gift registry is not only a fantastic way to boost sales, bring new shoppers to your site and reinforce customer loyalty but also an effective tool to capture valuable customer data. Enterprise Edition makes it easy for you to set up and manage a registry. Automated emails and registry search boxes make it easy for friends and family to find it.

• Private Sales and Personalized Shopping Experience – A feature very popular in Magento 1 EE, allows you to create an exclusive shopping experience for your most valuable customers or prospects. Set up invitation only offers, control previews and timing, and even add a countdown timer.

Also read our blog on Private Sales for more information.

• Increase Sales with Automated Email Reminders – Send automated email reminders to customers with abandoned shopping carts and wish lists. Email reminders are customizable for frequency, cart value, items in cart, quantity and more. Further, you can include coupon codes in the email to drive conversions.

Make Store Management Easy
Majority of us wrongly focus on features directly impacting the end users and ignore features which can help us manage those end user features.  Use these features for effective administration and store management which can indirectly add to your customers’ experience.

• Advanced Content Management Systems –

  Enterprise editions’ CMS includes enhancements like WYSIWYG editor, page hierarchy system to organize content pages and add pagination, navigation, and menus, maintain multiple versions of a page, track the revision history of each, and restore previous versions. You can also set permissions to control who can create and publish content.

• Order Archiving to Make Store Management Convenient –

  Enterprise edition enables you to archive orders (after a configurable time period) to increase store performance. Archived orders are still available for admin users and customers but can provide great efficiencies in store management.

• Advanced Permissions for Improved Control –

  With Enterprise Edition’s advanced permissions you can create multiple administrative roles and define what they can and cannot access. For businesses maintaining multiple sites for multiple brands, this gives them flexibility to create multiple roles and restrict access by site. In addition, website administrators also have the ability to keep track of users actions using an admin actions log.

• Support Tools to Quickly Diagnose and Resolve Issues –

  Magento 2 Enterprise Edition comes with an amazing support tool that can create a comprehensive report for your support team to help them quickly diagnose and resolve technical issues. The report can include information like Apache version, MySQL settings, extensions in use, database corruption status, and much more.

• Content Staging and Preview –

  Enterprise edition includes functionality that enables your business teams to easily create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates without involving IT. A timeline dashboard will help you preview changes by date and can dramatically improve your productivity. You can also automatically deploy updates at scheduled times for greater efficiency.

Grow and Scale
Expand into new markets and geographies, and support greater volumes with a secure and scalable e-commerce store. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition’s high performance architecture is scalable to support your growth and PA-DSS compliant to enable strong, secure transactions. In addition, you can rely on Magento’s dedicated support during the difficult times.

• Architecture that Scales with your Business –

  Magento made significant changes to their architecture to improve performance and scalability of Magento 2. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition’s multiple server (enables you to use separate master databases to support Checkout, Order Management, and Product Data) and salve (enables you to add multiple salve databases for each master database) architecture can significantly boost the scalability and performance of your store. On other hand, Magento 2 Community edition works on one single database.

• MySQL Cluster Support for High Availability –

  You can further scale your Checkout and Order Management databases to increase capacity and ensure high availability by using MySQL Clusters to share data over multiple database instances.

• Drive Performance with Message Queues –

  In 2.x, Magento made significant changes to its technology stack. Adding support for a new job queue framework based on Rabbit MQ as part of it. Message queue makes way for asynchronous processing of tasks like deferred stock updates, sending emails, indexing, order insertions, etc. using separate resources for optimized performance. Further, developers and partners can also take advantage of the message queue feature to develop extensions and customizations that require highly scalable processing.

• Support for Alternate Media Storage – CDN and Database –

  Improve page load times and server load by storing media files in a database on database server or on a content delivery network, as opposed to storing them on the file system of the web server.

• You are in Safe Hands with Strong Data Encryption, Hashing and Key Management –

  Enterprise Edition includes strong data encryption and hashing for secure transactions. Strong, secure transactions protect your business and offer your customers the peace of mind to shop with confidence. In addition, Enterprise edition offers a more secure admin panel login process with stronger password requirements and account lockout to limit password guessing.

• Dedicated Support for the Difficult Times –

  Magento promises extensive support for its enterprise customers. With 24/7 technical support, dedicated account manager and support from Magento’s consulting team, enterprise customers always have help on hand. Magento 2 Enterprise edition also comes with various diagnostic tools, to further streamline and expedite issue resolution for the enterprise customers.