Introduction To Magento: Choosing An Edition
Magento as a powerful e-commerce content management system offers it’s amazing functionality in variants. It has two editions called the Magento Community Edition and the Magento Enterprise Edition.
What then is these two editions and what are their differences and similarities? Let’s take a look.
Magento Community – Free version
Magento community edition is a budget friendly one. It is a free version which is designed for those that have a small budget but still want to design a powerful e-commerce website. It is flexible for web developers and designers to work with. This edition allows for easy customization and design according to the taste of the merchant.
It also includes many useful features that can create a successful business for you such as the ability to follow up with customers by newsletter, creating discounts, promotion for customers with coupons, gifts and allowing customers to create a wish list that they can continually update. Best of all, should you need to customize certain features, or add new functionality, you can find a wide assortment of solutions that are inexpensive such as gift wrap modules, more advanced gift certificate management and even gift registries.
Magento Enterprise – Premium version
On the other hand, Magento Enterprise is the premium version and is suitable for those willing to spend a considerable amount. The enterprise edition is paid for yearly with license given to merchants. It comes with everything that Magento Community offers as well as the following advantages:
Free Professional Customer
Support:Whereas the community edition does not come with professional support, only a message board, the enterprise version offers professional report for businesses and their tech support team to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Full Page
Caching: For a website receiving thousands upon thousands of visits per hour, it is important to reduce load on the server including the database. This is where full page caching comes in. Imagine you visit a standard Magento page. What you see is a standard html output of that page but, in order for that page to be generated, Magento is built to communicate with the database, find the products and information to display, and display it to you in real time. The process of doing all of this takes time and, should there be many visitors, can bring a server to its knees. Full page caching solves this issue by storing that html data ahead of time so when people visit the website they can view the html output instantly, instead of waiting for the website to communicate with the database and process the most recent updated version of their information or product list. Through full page caching you will see remarkable savings in page load speed and server usage. Here is one demonstration that tested both the free version of Magento and Magento Enterprise.
Built In
Modules: Modules such as private sales, wholesale, gift registries and much more come loaded with Magento Enterprise because the point of Magento Enterprise is to give you the most sophisticated sales experience that works right out of the box. To learn about Magento modules, go to Magento extension tutorial series. It is designed for larger websites with big volume and is even used by companies such as Nike and Viso as seen on the Magento Enterprise home page.
From the following comparisons, it is obvious that the enterprise edition is suitable for big businesses willing to spend big bucks on their website. While this has it’s advantages, the Community free edition is ideal for low budget merchants. So which will you decide on?
