The Difference between Magento OpenSource and Commerce Editions

Magento has earned a high-standing reputation as the most popular e-commerce platform used by the Alexa top 1 million websites with 19.64% market share.

It’s no secret that merchants choose Magento for its flexibility and large, knowledgeable community of developers who can customize an online store in anyway an owner desires.

With time comes progress and now Magento is available in three distinct versions listed below including the one offering B2B functionality, so it’s high time to forget old names – Magento Community and Magento Enterprise and learn the new ones.

Magento OpenSource Edition

The Magento OpenSource Edition is a free edition which includes the majority of e-commerce features you need for day-to-day operations. It allows the admin user to make changes to page layouts, create different types of products, sort customers into groups, offer discounts, and much more, all out of the box! If more features are needed that aren’t included in the original package, there are plenty of extensions to choose from, and magento development companies who can help with more advanced customizations to fit the site for your business needs. Magento highly recommends this version for small and mid-size businesses.

Magento Commerce Edition

The Magento Commerce Edition is a paid platform with two packages offered: Magento Commerce Starter and Magento Commerce Pro.

Magento Commerce Starter

The Magento Commerce Starter is recommended for small merchants with potential for growth. It includes the commerce features provided in the free OpenSource Edition plus additional advanced opportunities like bulk ordering, reward points, private sales with “invite a friend” etc., plus cloud-hosting, and 24×7 Magento email support.

Magento Commerce Pro

The Magento Commerce Pro provides top-notch reliability and availability, highly recommended for large businesses for it’s adaptability and precision. The package consists of all Starter package functionality, plus extra B2B features, advanced analytics, three-server setup, dedicated hardware, and a personal launch manager.

Cost of Magento

Magento OpenSource is a completely free to download, open source platform. This means it can be downloaded for free, but features related to setup and customization will result in financial cost, unless attempted individually without the aid of Magento or other developers. Notice that it isn’t easy without any sort of development background yet a paid subscription connects our users with nearly 150,000 developers who work with Magento in all corners of the world All you need to do is to find the company you can rely on to develop your store.

Also, there are a lot of paid extensions which you can add to your website whose costs may vary from $25 to $5000.

The final cost of Magento Commerce depends on expected annual online revenue and average order value of your store. Prices may be vary from those reflected in the table.

Technical support

Users of the paid platform are provided with 24×7 monitoring and email support by Magento. The specialists monitor core application and cloud infrastructure and help you to resolve issues as soon as possible.

Users of the OpenSource don’t have this opportunity by default, but they can always hire a professional Magento development company to support their website. For example, at Magecom we offer from 40 to 120+ hours of technical support for

• Performance and server resource monitoring
• Site security updates
• Troubleshooting
• Design changes
• Development & customization
• Project management
• Quality assurance

Hosting & deployment

Magento OpenSource edition doesn’t include cloud hosting, so you will need to choose a reliable hosting provider on your own, paying attention to the server performance and scalability as your online business grows.

Both Magento Commerce packages include cloud hosting as Platform-as-a-service, which means users are allowed to control and configure software on the cloud. Also, merchants get the opportunity to use a Content Delivery Network, which makes websites load faster from geographically distributed servers.

Magento guarantees DDoS protection with big bandwidth allocation of the websites made on Commerce packages. This kind of attack attempts to render websites unavailable and unresponsive which could prove detrimental for online business.

Owners of Commerce editions get New Relic APM Pro and Blackfire.io Enterprise. The first one is a tool for application performance monitoring which measures page load times, detects slow transactions, and counts errors. The second one is a tool for writing performance tests and automated test scenarios. It makes it possible to merge teams working in development, testing, staging, and production.

B2B

Magento Commerce Pro is sold with B2B features built in. It enables setting up multiple buyers, defining specific permissions, adding self-service tools, creating company accounts, and custom catalogs. It also allows you to set up different payment options, order forms, bank information, etc.

Owners of Magento OpenSource and Magento Commerce Starter have to buy 3rd party add-ons for selling to other businesses.

Business Intelligence

Magento Commerce Pro provides you with advanced analytics which consists of 75 reports on sales, marketing, customers, and more. It allows you to export data to CSV and XLS formats as well as send email summaries to team members.

Unlike Google Analytics, the Business Intelligence tool helps you to find out a lifetime value of your customers. It allows you to highlight the most profitable group of customers and analyze their behavior in real-time.

High availability infrastructure

There is a possibility to setup Magento Commerce Pro websites on up to three separate servers. It provides distribution of backend processes resulting in faster database work and extra reliability.

Dedicated hardware

Magento Commerce Pro users get individualized hardware which belongs to them only and is allocated in Infrastructure-as-a-Service. This ensures that no other websites can be setup and hosted here, and provides extremely high security.

Dedicated launch manager

Magento Commerce Pro owners are provided a personal manager helping them with the website launch. This expert helps to lead the launching process, answer any arising questions, and will offer the most effective solutions according to customers.

As you see, Magento OpenSource and Magento Commerce Starter have been designed for small businesses, excluding B2B functionality, and offered as a lighter option as compared to Magento Commerce Pro. Those who want to start or move their business online can try the free edition, while those with large businesses with high traffic loads are recommended to run Magento Commerce Pro.

If you still have questions, feel free to contact us. Our ecommerce consultants will be pleased to tell you more about Magento and which option may be best for you.