Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce (Compare the Differences)
Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce (Compare the Differences). As one of the top eCommerce platforms for SMBs, midsize businesses and enterprises, Magento (now owned by Adobe) has been in the business of eCommerce for over a decade. There are several important decisions to make when choosing Magento as your next platform, but the most important is whether to go with Magento Open Source or Magento Commerce.
Smaller businesses, such as online stores or startups, that wants to keep expenses at a minimum are recommended to use Magento OS. Larger B2C companies, however, may still benefit greatly from a fully customized Magento OS platform if they have the resources, time and budget to invest.
Magento Commerce provides a far more robust solution “out of the box.”. It comes with all of the features of Magento OS, plus many more. If you’re a B2B merchant or have a large business with complicated requirements, Magento Commerce is a good choice for you.
Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce (Compare the Differences). In this post we will show you the key differences between Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce from a point of view of features, costs, scalability and pros and cons.
Magento Open Source Overview
The Magento Open source was previously known as the Magento Community and was the first open source Magento platform released back in 2008. It is free to use and available for downloading, installation and extension by anyone, allowing them to make customizations to fit their needs, unlike SaaS models, which lock you into a particular software roadmap.
The Open source Edition offers an excellent introduction to the tooling and platform for a developing business, or for a new startu, and enables customers to set up an eCommerce website quickly and easily.
As Magento OpenSource continues to grow, the expansive community of Magento developers continues to develop new extensions, adding new features to an already impressive set of base functionality.
Pros of Magento Open Source
- Magento open source is available for free. It is available for download and installation without charge and admin users can modify it to suit their business needs. It includes all the essential features of Magento such as payment, checkout, catalog management, shipping portals, reporting, analytics and more.
- The Magento Marketplace offers extensions and models that you can buy if you need more functionality than the basic features offer. Magento’s Community Hub consists of over 370,000 developers.
- Being a cloud based, open source Platform as a Service (PaaS), web designers can customize Magento’s code to suit any design needs. This platform offers great flexibility and complete control over every aspect of your website if you have a dedicated IT team or developers within your organization for doing the customizations.
- It provides a lot more advance reporting features which are very helpful for businesses to do their planning.
- Online Shopping Cart and eCommerce Business Management.
Cons of Magento Open Source
- Even though Magento Open source is free and can be customized to your specifications, implementing your vision could be hard for developers to learn and use. A competent developer, preferably a Magento certified practitioner, will be needed. Finding and hiring these developers will take some time and cost some money.
- Having more built in SEO options.
- It requires a good amount of effort to do the initial setup which makes it a low priority option when it comes to stores that require fast development in a short time.
- Magneto has a lot of technical glitches.
Magento Commerce Overview
The Magento Enterprise has been renamed Magento Commerce and has subsequently been merged with Adobe Cloud solutions. It is currently known as Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud, the cloud hosted version.
The term eCommerce refers both to an application based Enterprise class platform that is hosted either on premises or in the cloud, as well as Magento’s own Cloud Commerce platform.
Magento Commerce Edition goes beyond just being a licensed version of Magento Open Source. Even though the Magento Commerce platform uses the same code stack as the Magento Open Source, it is generally used by larger organizations with higher traffic volumes, wider global presence, larger product catalogues and complex business operations.
In addition to a set of handy customization options for an exceptional customer experience, Commerce offers a number of other advantages as well such as:
- Technical Support
- Dedicated Account Management
Pros of Magento Commerce
- Both on premises and cloud hosted versions are available, but both share an approximately similar codebase.
- Third party extensions and third party systems can be easily integrated with Magento Commerce. Currently, the APIs of Magento support accounting, PIN, CRM, ERP, and marketing automation systems by default.
- Your marketing team can access the Content Staging feature on the Admin dashboard to preview, create as well as schedule content updates.
- Provides comprehensive set of tools for eCommerce store implementation.
- Easy deployment and out of the box integrations.
- Simple to understand UI for easy front end user interface.
Cons of Magento Commerce
- Due to its license requirement, Magento Commerce is more expensive. There is a tradeoff in terms of time and money here. Despite being more costly than OS, eCommerce editions come pre configured with almost everything from the start, so development time is significantly reduced.
- Using the commerce edition, owners can code, deploy and test features throughout three distinct environments. which is useful for managing feature development, but could also lead to more bugs. Code deployed across three environments has a three times greater chance of getting a bug (see Bugzilla issue tracker).
- Specific customization to a company’s needs still needs vast improvement.
- Upgrading customizations as the core updates is a pain.
In this part of our article Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce (Compare the Differences) let’s compare the both versions:
Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce - Key Differences
In this part of article Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce (Compare the Differences) let’s compare the differences:
Scalability
Magento Open Source Scalability
By choosing the Magento open source version, you run the risk of being slowed down and held back by having to develop every new component that your business will require during its growth journey.
Magento Commerce Scalability
When selecting an eCommerce platform, scaling needs to be planned from the beginning. Choosing Magento Commerce from the beginning makes sense if you expect rapid growth. Magento Commerce offers a variety of features that can meet the needs of a growing business.
Cost
Magento Open Source Cost
As mentioned earlier, it’s free to use Magento Open Source. The free platform may be the better choice if you do not anticipate rapid growth that would justify investing in the paid version.
Magento Commerce Cost
Magento Commerce charges a license fee. Magento Commerce charges a percentage of your annual revenue as a license fee.
Considering the cost is essential, but also evaluating the value it brings is equally important. Furthermore, the value you receive when you purchase the paid version is significantly higher. Additionally, you must consider how much developer time it will cost to create the features included in the paid version.
The Magento Commerce pricing model, however, primarily applies once sales exceed a certain threshold. The minimum license fee still applies if your revenue is low. It might be too expensive for your business to pay the minimum license fee.
Security
Magento Open Source Security
Payment security and tokenization are not available in Open Source, which can cause problems because these are essential features for secure transactions. There is another problem with the free version: it is not compliant with PCI DSS security standards.
Magento Commerce Security
Compared to Magento Open Source, Magento Commerce is much stronger in terms of security. The security solutions offered by Magento Commerce are more advanced. In the paid version, card processing is handled through the Secure Payment Bridge of Magento.
The paid edition additionally includes regular scan processes, bug bounty programs, and secured payment gateways like Authorize.net, PayPal, CyberSource, WorldPay, and more. Further, Magento Commerce includes Action Logs, which ensure that every modification made by users with admin access is recorded and stored.
With Fastly Web Application Firewall, the Cloud provides CDN and DDoS protection. With the pro version, you gain access to additional security features like logs, New Relic infrastructure as well as a dedicated technical advisor.
Support
Magento Open Source Support
Magento Open Source does not have dedicated support. A multitude of communities, an extensive guide library, and an active community forum will only benefit your technical team.
Magento Commerce Support
Magento Commerce Edition comes with support features such as dedicated account manager that takes care of all your Magento related needs and also technical support that is available 24/7 and access to Magento partner’s Rapid Deployment Packages that make it easy to launch and set up any solution.
Even if you have Magento Support, your online store cannot be managed on your own, you need a technical team too. It is better to have some support than no support at all. Magento’s support team is usually used for reporting bugs and obtaining information about the release of a fixing patch. In some cases, however, the support is highly useful and convenient.
Features
Even though the core functionality of both Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce is same, Magento Commerce offers enhanced functionality in many areas, such as:
- Offering complete B2B solutions: company accounts, B2B quotes, quick order and requisition lists, my purchase orders, shared catalog, company credit and payment on account, and configuring company email.
- Advanced search features: search for product attributes, automatic correction of misspelled queries, quick autocomplete functionality.
- Cloud: Fastly Web Application Firewall, website monitoring tool, PCI compliance, CDN, Magento BI (on demand), New Relic APM and DDoS Protection.
- System and catalog: order management system, order archive, action logs, scheduled data import/export and full catalog export.
- Marketing: Visual merchandiser, Google Tag Manager, related product rule, private sales and events, product recommendations, and email reminders.
- Segmentation and targeting: Personalized and dynamic display of products, segmentation in realtime and customer attributes.
- Advanced content management: Content management with drag and drop option and preview and staging features.
- Gifting options: The option of offering customized gift cards, rewards and loyalty programs and vouchers.
- Add items to the cart by entering SKUs: Customers can enter the SKU list to add multiple items to the cart
Great job! We finished reading Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce (Compare the Differences). We hope this article was educational for you. Let’s summarize.
Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce Conclusion
In this post, we give you a brief overview of both Magento open source and Magento commerce platform. Magento Enterprise Edition is the ideal solution for large companies looking for scalable solutions. Nevertheless, if you’re a young startup, Magento Open Source may be more beneficial to you. Therefore, when comparing Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce, one of the most important factors to be considered are the needs of your organization.
