Last Updated on September 12, 2022
Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms across the world. Currently, there are more than 2.5 lakh active ecommerce stores powered by Magento. This accounts for 12% of all online stores. Nearly 11 thousand Magento stores run on Magento 2, and the number is continuously increasing. You would be surprised to know that it is downloaded 5,000 times a day. Last year, 7,500 ecommerce retailers migrated to Magento from any other ecommerce platform.
This platform is developed keeping in mind that every business requirements are unique and online retailers with diverse requirements need different options to meet those requirements. That is why; Magento offers two different powerful platforms, Magento Commerce and Magento Open-Source. Magento Commerce is a fully-featured, licensed, and supported platform while Magento Open-Source is a free to use platform for meeting the basic requirements of ecommerce retailers.
It is a very important decision to make a choice between the Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. Many retailers baffle while making this decision. In this article, we are going to assist you in making this decision by the evaluation process, highlight features and functionalities of both platforms, and benefits of the Magento Commerce over Magento Open Source.
Businesses from different niche have used both versions of Magento and find good results over time. For larger businesses, Magento Commerce offers many benefits over Open Source which helps in more sales and revenue. It has a faster growth rate and can perform more complex operations. The benefits can be categorized into three main categories:
- 1. Access to Magento Cloud Infrastructure
- 2. Customer Support & Account Management
- 3. Extended Features
We will discuss each of these categories in-depth detail.
Access to Magento Cloud Infrastructure
Magento comes with a best-in-class commerce product that is delivered in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud environment. On the other side, Magento Open Source comes with “on-premise” i.e. you will be completely responsible for the hosting, security, deployment tooling, CDN, monitoring, and other services required for running an ecommerce store.
With Magento Commerce, you have the option of choosing either an on-premise deployment model or to deploy into the Magento cloud infrastructure – at no extra cost.
There are numerous features of Magento Cloud which you can’t found in on-premise such as:
- Slack is fully managed with a 99.99% uptime SLA
- One contract, support line, and vendor to maintain the integrated cloud services
- You can deploy it on all AWS availability zones with global coverage
- Support team available 24 x 7
- Ecommerce stores are fast and secure with Fastly Content Delivery Network (CDN), Image Optimization, DDoS protection, and Web Application Firewall
- Monitoring of infrastructure and application performance with New Relic and Blackfire
- Advanced security such as firewalls at edge-server and origin server layers, intrusion detection system, and secure networking connectivity
- Composer packages send security patches before the release of the next Magento Commerce patch
- Dedicated Technical Account Manager for smooth deployment and launch process
- PCI Level 1, SOC2 certified infrastructure and GDPR & CCPA compliant.
Performance & Scalability
Magento Commerce is build to make sure it can meet the needs of industry and organization of every size. It comes with great scalability features and performance improvements in comparison to the Magento Open Source. These features are particularly for those ecommerce sites which have higher customer demands, large products or customers databases, peaks of traffic, complex integration, etc.
Also Read: Myth: Magento Open Source Provides Better Value than Magento Commerce
Fastly Image Optimization
Fastly IO or Image Optimization can do real-time image manipulation or optimize it to speed up the delivery of images and simplification of image source sets for responsive ecommerce sites. The Fastly IO service is helpful for better customer experience as it can reduce the page size and improves the loading speed of the page. It can increase the site speed by 20 to 30% on Google PageSpeed and 60 to 90 percent reduction in image weight. It will optimize the images on the basis of device capabilities that are requesting the image.
Account Management and Support
Account Management
Each retailer using Magento Commerce has a Customer Success Manager which is like a doorway into the Magento and Adobe organization. Through this doorway, they can contact for anything related to Magento whether it is a software issue, any escalation, or wants to know about new commerce solutions.
There is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) on which the Customer Success and satisfaction evaluates. It ensures the merchants that they are on the right path for achieving their goals. The Customer Success team is available to help review and assess a business’ health. They can also attend conferences and live events that bring together the Magento and its customers.
Ultimately, the merchants can deploy on the cloud and get technical onboarding resources for launching process assisting and smooth site deployment.
Role of Customer Success Manager
- Point of Contact within Magento
- Access to tips for making most of the Magento ecosystem of technologies and partners
- Tailored training programs
- Understand the business and KPIs
Benefits for Magento Customers
- Insights into the Magento company strategy, roadmaps, and plans
- Chances of meeting the other Magento customers
- Chances of engaging with the Magento to tell the market about your business story
- Access to Commerce-only events and webinars
Support & Support Tools
The Magento Commerce users get full access to the customer support team of Magento which is highly trained and professional. The teams ensure you for a smooth operation of Magento Commerce sites. The Magento Commerce support is available 24 hours, 7 days a week. The support includes:
- Assistance with troubleshooting
- Documentation access
- Advice regarding downloading, installing, configuration, fixing bugs, etc.
It is not limited to only these things, and you can get support for almost whatever you require. The team has also access to the Support Tools which can identify the issues in your system. You can use these tools as a resource during the development or optimization process or for diagnosis. Know more at Support for Adobe Commerce
If you require support, you need to take care of some things such as:
- Firstly, log in to the Magento Help Center
- Submit a support ticket in which you can also include files or screenshots
- Search the knowledge base for self-help troubleshooting
The support team will handle the requests through a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which indicates priorities or initial response times.
Magento Services
The Magento Commerce users have access to purchase agreements with the Magento Services Team. This team will help you to tackle various ecommerce challenges. The edge is derived from the direct access to Magento product owners and unmatched experience, distinctive end-to-end approach, and industry best practices. The services can augment merchant’s in-house or agency services with multi-disciplinary services to provide strategic vision, reinforce quality, and better performance.
Exclusive Magento Commerce Features
If you are looking for a broader set of tools for improving the business growth and provide better customer experience, then you must check the additional, robust features which are exclusively available for Magento Commerce users.
Some of the powerful features which can enhance the customer experience are:
- Merchandising and marketing
- Content creation and authoring
- B2B and hybrid commerce
- Customers, loyalty, and Customer service
- Store Operations
- Reporting and Business Intelligence
Apart from the direct benefits of these features, there are 3 indirect benefits you will get with these features.
- 1. They are covered by the support team
- 2. Cross Compatible i.e. the native customer segmentation tools will work well with native Page builder. You can also personalize the experience for each customer segment with Page Builder.
- 3. Features get updated and upgraded as part of the core application and you don’t need to take tension of any issue during the upgrade.
The other native features can lead to fewer customizations which results in more reliable upgrades with fewer conflicts. Here are some features that are exclusive to Magento Commerce:
Marketing and Merchandising Tools
You get highly powerful native merchandising features with Magento Commerce. You have access to tools such as rule-based product relations, reward points, private or flash sales, etc. These tools can help in conversion rate optimization, increasing customer loyalty, and better average order revenue. It can help in increasing revenue and margins. Another tool such as Visual Merchandiser can give more flexibility to the users. It can help in customizing content or product on the site without the need of a Magento developer. Here are the other important tools with their features:
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Visual Merchandiser, Add to Category By Rule & Sort By Rule | You can get merchandise with visual drag-and-drop interface or through rule-based conditions |
| Customer Segmentation | It can display content dynamically and release promotions on the basis of particular customer properties |
| Catalog Events or Private Sales or Flash Sales | You can create catalog events or exclusive sales for a particular group of customers |
| Cross, Upsell and Related Products | You can select the products dynamically which need to present to the customer as related, cross or upsell products |
| Category Permissions | You can limit the categories access, pricing, or add to cart for products within a category |
| Email Reminders | Mails sent in automation on the basis of customer’s shopping cart or wishlist |
Content Creation and Authoring
You can create beautiful experiences on your Magento store with ease using the content authoring tools offered by Magento Commerce. You don’t need any technical resources for this or any knowledge of HTML and CSS. Page Builder is a powerful WYSIWYG along with the native customer segmentation and dynamic block tools. You can give a better personalization using these dynamic tools. Despite being so powerful, the page builder is also very easy to use. It gives you 10 times faster results and you can stay up to date as per the new ecommerce trends.
There is a staging and preview feature which you can use for scheduling changes such as promotions, pages, products, and categories. You can set up full marketing campaigns before time and allow these updates to work seamlessly. An easy to use calendar view gives a Gantt chart style overview of all current and upcoming campaigns.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Page Hierarchy | You can organize the content pages and can add attributes like pagination, navigation, and menus |
| Page Builder | It helps in creating content-rich pages with custom layouts, provides drag & drop interface to enhance visual appeal, and increase customer engagement |
| Dynamic Blocks | Personalized content which is driven through certain logics from price rules and customer segments |
| Content Staging | Create, schedule, and preview content updates from the Admin panel. The content staging can create a page in which the content can automatically change throughout the year on schedule. |
| Content Preview | With Content Preview, you can schedule updates to the content and make changes by date, time or store view. |
B2B and Hybrid Commerce
In the current scenario, the B2B marketplace is highly competitive. Customers now demand an easy and intuitive shopping experience that’s so good it feels like B2C. There are many features of Magento Commerce by which you can combine B2B and B2C business. You can do B2B and B2C business on the same site.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Company Accounts | The visitors would be able to create company accounts with merchant |
| User Hierarchy | You can create company accounts for reflecting business structure. Also, assign individual linked with the customer account |
| Company Roles & Permissions | Can set up the company users roles with different levels of permissions. |
| Company Credit & Buying on Account | The company can make purchases on their account to the credit limit which is granted to the company |
| PO as Payment Method | The customers can pay to authorized purchases by referencing a PO number which is authorized and issued in advance by the company |
| Order by SKU & Quick Order | Add products to cart by entering the product SKUs and quantity into Order by SKU widget. Customer can also upload a CSV file from their customer account |
| Request & Negotiate A Quote | The buyer would be able to negotiate the price by requesting a quote from the shopping cart. |
| Requisition Lists | The customers can maintain requisition lists and add to the shopping cart directly from the lists. |
Customers, Loyalty, and Customer Service
In Magento Commerce, customer service features and customer account gives you efficient management of any customer service tasks. There are also tools for supporting call center requests such as customer cart management, RMAs, returns, or store credits. You can also create custom attributes that allow the collection and import of CRM-style data, enhancing the native segmentation tools.
Furthermore, you will also get features like selling gift cards, and the ability to ship different items in a single order to different addresses.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Customer Attributes | You can add attributes of customers such as Account Information, Address, Billing Information, etc. |
| Customer Shopping Cart Management | Merchants would be able to edit customer’s shopping cart contents from the Admin Panel. |
| Store Credit | The customer would be able to use the store credit for purchases and can track refund or store credit status from their dashboard |
| Returns & RMA | The customers would be able to return an item or ask for replacement or refund |
| Gift Cards | Sell virtual or physical gift cards and manage gift card accounts from the Admin Panel |
| Gift Options | Customers have the option of gifting such as wrapping orders with gift papers and a message |
| Multiple Wishlists | The customers can create and share wishlists |
| Rewards & Loyalty | A point-based reward system for customers for driving customer engagement and loyalty |
Store Operations
You can improve the merchant productivity and efficiency with Magento Commerce admin and operational tools. Order achieving lets keep the workspace clear of distractions and automate data transfers. The Action Log and Support Tools allow merchants and the Magento Support team to identify store changes and issues to help with resolution.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Order Achieving | Archive orders for cleaning workspace and improve productivity |
| Admin Action Log | Log every instance made by the admin. Track these changes, along with admin permissions. It can secure the platform from unwanted changes |
| Support Diagnostic Tools | Identify and resolve issues with the help of a support team |
| Scheduled Imports and Export | Schedule data imports and exports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. |
Reporting and Business Intelligence
Magento Business Intelligence is a powerful warehouse, analysis, and visualization tool. All the customers of Magento Commerce have access to this tool. It is integrated directly with Magento Commerce. Hence, it is easier for analyzing and accessing data from the first day. You can integrate and consolidate data from other sources as well. You can get a holistic view of the entire business from a single platform and keeps everyone on the same page.
The dashboards of Magento Business Intelligence have dozens of customizable reports such as Average Lifetime Value and Repeat Order Probability. There are report building tools that are usable for building new analyses and dashboards.
Summary
In this article, we have discussed many factors and reasons for opting for the Magento Commerce over Magento Open Source. The right platform should be able to support your business and its growth. At Emizentech, the best ecommerce development company in India, we will deliver the right solution for your business. We can provide you the best Magento development services in all aspects. Let us know your requirements.
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