Magento is now having three major variations of its core product for the users.
Also, their names have been changed over the past years, so the products which you may be referring to as ‘Magento Enterprise Edition’ and ‘Magento Community Edition’ are now named ‘Magento Commerce’ and ‘Magento Open Source’, respectively.
To further add on to the confusion, Magento 2 introduced a new product, named ‘Magento Commerce Cloud’.
Magento Commerce vs Commerce Cloud vs Open Source
All three Magento products are different in terms of licensing.
Open Source is a non-hosted e-commerce platform that can be downloaded for free and gets hosted by yourself on a server through AWS and much more as the feature set is limited because it is a free option.
Along with this, Magento commerce can be bought either as a standard on-premise offering whereas Magento Commerce Cloud can be hosted by Magento on their AWS stack.
In this article, we are going to compare all three editions feature to feature for the ease of our Magento developers.
Comparing Magento Commerce, Commerce Cloud, and Open Source
- Business 2 Business Module
- Elastic Search
- Automate your Product Relations
- Enhances Performance
- Segmenting Customers
- Rewarding, Returns and Exchanges Programs
- Gift Cars, Registries and Wish Lists
- Store Credits and Extra Payment Options
- Commerce Cloud
#1 Business 2 Business Module
This module allows you to manage companies that can have complex hierarchies within them so you can have one company with many franchises individually.
They even allow for products quoting so that if you can give the company quote they can use it to check out rather than calling in for quotes. Some vital features like credit lines, requisition lists for preparing larger purchases and the ability to create a shared catalog for a unique one to one company pricing.
This comes up with a very robust B2B experience on Magento which cannot be easily replicated on various e-commerce platforms.
#2 The Elastic Search
The very own default Magento search in the Open Source version does not seem great as Elastic Search is the best in class open source search functionality which will greatly improve your Magento search.
It is utilized by many major software companies by providing a much better search experience on Magento Commerce and Commerce Cloud.
#3 Automate your Product Relations
This is a very easy but valuable feature for larger catalogs that are not viable to manually curate product relations.
You can also try to use some rules in Magento to automatically assign products that can be related, up-sell or cross-sell ones.
#4 Enhances Performance
Magento Commerce comes up with performance enhancements to speed up indexing and caching which will improve the overall performance of your website.
It is eventually possible to achieve these performance enhancements on open source but you will have to be adding a lot of new functionalities and a more stable infrastructure to built in.
#5 Segmenting Customers
Magento Commerce allows you to segment the customers so that you can try or personalize and market to them in a more specialized manner. This can add a lot of value for marketing operations and various reasons as it may be unique to your business.
Customer segmentation can be a little more robust than customer Groups as it is more like a basic Magento feature. You can easily create such conditions for your registered users before and after this date etc.
#6 Rewarding, Returns and Exchanges Programs
Magento Commerce has been regarding programs that are built in by potentially saving you from having third-party conflicts and extra coding that will bloat down your infrastructure.
This feature gives Magento developers relief from using a third-party extension or SaaS platform for regarding programs. You can definitely not find an easy way of processing return natively if you are not a Magento commerce user.
The platform provides you native returns and exchanges through the platform versus having to use a third-party extension or any other platform like Returnly.
#7 Gift Cars, Registries and Wish Lists
When running an online store, you better understand how the gift cards can be considered a native to Magento Commerce while with the Open Source version you require a third party extension.
This can be yet another example of consolidating features into one platform against third party realization. If you sell any product that will be most likely useful for a wish list or gift registry then Magento commerce has a built-in feature with regards to Open Source.
It is especially useful for Magento developers who want to cater to the wedding industry and also with any other type of special functions.
#8 Store Credits and Extra Payment Options
Magento Commerce allows you to have a sore credit to offer customers in exchange for returns or any other item replacements in the form of deals. It is considered as a very helpful customer service tool.
Also, it has multiple payment options that are built right in like Cybersource, eWAy, WorldPay and much more. Open Source has less or limited payment options so this can turn out to be a hindrance if you require one of the Magento commerce methods.
#9 Commerce Cloud
This is the newest product in which you get Magento commerce which is hosted on Magento’s custom AWS stack along with some other built-in functionalities like the Fastly CDN and other optimization tools.
By offering business intelligence you can get the power of the Magento analytics tool on top of the Magento Commerce all of together in one.
Magento has built a lot of deployment an optimization tools for making development operations more streamlined.
To be mentioned, the above features are not even an exhaustive list and Magento is very much concentrated on improving this product by constantly launching new products.
Wrapping Up
If you are running on a limited budget then Open Source is definitely the one to go for.
But if you’re serious about Magento and eCommerce then consider between Commerce or Cloud as they are loaded with more features and support tools.
About the Author:
Emma Waldorf is a Technology Observer at Magento Development Company in India – etatvasoft.com. She is also responsible for developing and promoting the business. she has a vast experience in writing about new products, software design, and test-driven methodology. Her write-ups mainly features anything and everything related to the web!
Disclaimer: Facts and opinions expressed in this article are of the Guest Author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of ‘ServerGuy.’