Magento Enterprise Edition: Features, Comparison, Cost & Explanatory Guide

Ecommerce is one of the major industries growing at an exponential rate. This provides a facility to shop on online platforms from the comfort of home or office. Many brick mortar businesses are taking advantage of this cutting-edge technology. They have built many successful eCommerce stores. And you are also thinking about going online. But you are wondering about how to do that? The first thing you need to take care of is the eCommerce platform.

When it comes to choosing the platform, for your eCommerce store there are many open source solutions. One best choice for small to large businesses to build their eCommerce store is Magento. Magento, which is an open-source platform, offers three different editions of its CMS platform. Which creates confusion for most business owners. And they need an answer to which edition is best suited for their business needs? Among all, Magento Commerce or formerly known as Enterprise Edition is one most hyped edition.

But first, let’s answer “Is Magento free or paid?” Yes and No both. Well, Magento Open Source Edition is free to use. It has features and functions that meet the needs of small to mid-sized businesses. While Magento Commerce and Commerce Cloud Editions are best suited for large enterprises. And Magento Commerce users have to pay a license fee for using it. This license fee varies according to the revenue of your store per annum. But it includes the most advanced features that help you to grow and scale your business.

Cost of Magento Commerce?

Below is the detailed relationship between revenue and license fee for Magento 2 Commerce and Cloud Editions,

Revenue per annum	The license fee for Commerce Edition	The license fee for Cloud Edition
$0 – $1 million	$22,000	$40,000
$1 million – $5 million	$32,000	$55,000
$5 million – $10 million	$49,000	$80,000
$10 million – $25 million	$75,000	$120,000
$25 million – $50 million	$125,000	$190,000

*The price quoted here is as per the Magento book pricing.

Magento Open Source Edition is free to use but has limited functions and no official support from Magento. Magento Commerce comes at a cost of $22,000 or more per year in the form of the license fee as mentioned in the table above. So, Is it really worth the money? Let’s find out.

Magento Commerce edition is aiming for large scale businesses. So, it includes features like drag and drops page builder, content staging and preview, a B2B suite, and others. It can handle 100k products easily and 1 million products with proper scaling, optimization, and server resources. Other enhancements of the Magento Commerce edition include,

Features of Magento Commerce Edition:

Built-in functionality to manage customer attributes
Official technical support from Magento
Three master databases for checkout, order, and products
Can handle 100k – 1million products
The advantages of increased SEO solution
Multilingual package to reach an international market
Drag and drop page builder
Enhanced catalog and content management system
Content staging and preview
One page checkout system
Data migration
B2B modules
Social media sharing buttons
Advanced 301 redirects
Magento Marketplace integration
Customer segmentation and targeting
Reward point option
Advanced permission
Warranty and dedicated support from Magento

All these features and many more are only available in the Magento Commerce edition. And to have all the functionalities to your Open Source edition, you would have to integrate more than 60+ Magento Extensions.

The Commerce edition is suitable for large established businesses that want to boost their revenue. Or businesses who are starting off and are sure that their business would hit it off in just a few years.

Also read: Step by Step Guide for Magento Community to Enterprise Migration

Also, the vital benefit of Magento Commerce is the ability to re-platform your store from your existing platform to Magento. Magento Open Source edition does not include this feature, for which we have to go through the hassle of setting up everything from scratch. But Magento Commerce allows you to migrate to Magento 2 hassle-free from your existing eCommerce platform. Except for this, there are many differences between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce.

Difference between Magento Open Source and Commerce edition

Both the editions have the same codebase and architecture capabilities. However, Magento Commerce has significant features that enhance its functional capabilities.

The on-site search capabilities in Magento Commerce edition has expanded with elastic search. This is slightly better and helps to improve the performance of Commerce edition. The B2B modules are a valuable addition to the platform that has essential features for B2B merchants. These features include,

Customer-specific pricing and catalog
Credit limit
RFQ functionality/price quoting and negotiation
Customer Specific payment options
Company account
Requisition Lists

These are just a few B2B functions and merchants can extend the specific functionality as per their business need. Now, let’s look at some of the functions of Magento Commerce in detail.

Page Builder:

Magento Commerce also has a drag and drop page builder, which helps merchants to manage templates and content effectively. It provides an ability to manage and build components of content pages through a drag and drop functionality. The constant improvement in the page builder has impressed many Magento users.

Content Staging, Preview, and Scheduling:

Magento has integrated content staging, previewing, and scheduling in a better and efficient way. It has become more stable, and more user-friendly over the years. This allows us to preview content and schedule it after making changes.

Customer Segmentation:

Magento Commerce allows its users to segment their customers. This is to allow users like you to personalize and market those segmented customers in a more unique and specific way.

Magento Reward Programs:

Along with all these benefits of Magento Commerce, it has reward programs and advances marketing solutions. These programs include gift cards, gift registry, wish lists, additional payment options, store credit, abandon cart emails, targeted promotions, RMA, etc.

Support:

The one best thing about Magento Commerce edition is its support. Magento does not provide any support for Open Source edition. It means that there will be no solution if any critical bugs or issues arise. You have to solve the issue on your own or hire Magento Agency that does provide different Magento Support Service Package to run your website smoothly and bugfree.

But with Magento Commerce edition you get the priority support from Magento itself. This would help you to get to the bottom of any technical issues with your Magento platform more easily and efficiently.

What’s Magento Commerce Cloud edition?

The Magento Commerce Cloud Edition is a managed automated cloud-hosted platform on the custom AWS servers. It includes all the features of Magento Commerce. In addition to that, it has features like fast CDN, Blackfire.io, Rabbit MQ Job Queue framework, and built-in NewRelic. The Cloud edition also features Adobe products such as Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, etc.

Read more about: Magento Enterprise Cloud Service For Your Magento 2 Store

There are more premium solutions built around Adobe’s enterprise offerings. Those solutions are available for large enterprises that use all core and relevant Adobe products. All these features are great in theory, but they have no practical use on a regular basis. And for most of the merchants, these features never come in handy. However, Magento has improved the stacks of the edition, which is the reason for most new Commerce merchants moving to the Cloud platform.

Before a couple of years, everyone was against using Cloud edition for their eCommerce operations. Because they were having bad experiences with the edition. But in the last few years, Magento has made lots of changes in the Cloud platform. Which has improved it to the extent where half of the new Commerce merchants are choosing Cloud edition.

Summary

The Magento Commerce or Cloud edition is clearly built for gigantic enterprises to build and scale their eCommerce store. It certainly has its faults and is not suitable for every merchant out there. But Magento has gained more power in the eCommerce industry and that too at the enterprise level, which makes it a leader in mid-market space.

So, it is worth putting your money in it rather than other eCommerce solutions. You can go for the free version as well. But when it comes to scaling your business and features Magento Commerce and Cloud edition provides are one of its kind. If you are still not convinced, then consult an eCommerce Expert for more advice on your requirements and the best fit edition for your needs.