Enterprise vs Community
As most of you reading this guide will know there are two versions of Magento out there for you to choose from, the free “Community Edition” and the “Enterprise Edition”. The main difference between the two is the cost, the Community Edition is completely free (bar your hosting costs) whilst the Enterprise edition will cost you around £5,891 ($8,900). If you decide to go for the Enterprise edition, your £5k will be buying you a few extra features including advanced administrator roles, logged administrator actions, gift certificates, customer store credit, content staging and merging, private sales, higher level data encryption and the almighty core product support.
This edition is only really worth the money if you’re going to be running a high turnover store as that £5k is an annual payment to Varien or if you’re a large company and can afford the payment in exchange for the extra features that it provides. However there is one word that swayed us toward the free option “Community” there’s a strong community following behind Magento including a large forum at www.magentocommerce.com , an IRC channel on freenode (#magento) that comes in a few languages, Magento Connect which offers free and commercial extensions of all kinds for Magento and of course websites such as this one offering guides, hints and tips to help you on your way.
In my experiences with Magento there’s never been anything missing from the Community addition that wasn’t available as an extension. If however you’re working as part of a large company developing an online presence then the £5k a year might not be that big an expenditure for those extra features and the support that’s there with it. If you’re looking for a shopping cart to use for your own business however then the Magento Community Edition is ideal in helping you keep costs down whilst delivering a strong, stable online platform for you to build your business from. It integrats with Paypal and Google Checkouts as standard it offers a saved Credit Card option (make sure your covered by your SSL when using this option) and integration with Google Base and other shopping feed websites to help drive sales toward your website. Anything the Community edition is missing that you really need is most likely available as an extension.
Other Posts in this series:
Complete Magento Starters Guide
Magento Starters Guide : Which Version?
Magento Starters Guide: What Hosting?
Browse Timeline
Comments ( 2 )
[...] Read more here: CREATIVE DISTRICT » Magento Starters Guide : Which Version? [...]
CREATIVE DISTRICT » Magento Starters Guide : Which Version? | Blogs about All Online Information for free shopping cart added these pithy words on May 28 09 at 12:35 amCouldn’t agree more.
The community version is good enough to get a decent shopping site up and running.
I don’t see why we should use their enterprise version which cost a bomb.
Just my 2 cent.
Rolypoly added these pithy words on
May 28 09 at
8:24 am
