Once you have decided to open an online e-commerce store powered by Magento 2, you have to choose the most suitable edition: Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce, or Adobe Commerce Cloud.
Each edition provides users with a specific set of features. So, the sure method to select a relevant edition is to identify your requirements and to relate them to the capabilities of Magento 2 Open Source, Commerce, and Commerce Cloud.
For this, let’s first consider these three editions one by one.
Magento 2 Open Source Edition (formerly Magento 2 Community edition) is a Magento 2 platform that is available for everyone to download and install for free. Admin users can make configuration adjustments to the software to meet the specific requirements of their companies. To access particular advanced functionality, merchants can extend the basic features of Magento 2 Open Source Edition with specially designed modules, such as those listed in our catalog.
Adobe Commerce Edition (previously known as Magento 2 Enterprise, Magento 2 Commerce, or Magento Commerce On-Premise) gives users rich out-of-the-box features, an unlimited ability to customize, and seamless third-party integrations. It’s important that you can also get 24/7 email support. You cannot download Adobe Commerce for free.
Adobe Commerce contains features for corporate account management and customer support, company credit management, customized catalogs, and price lists, as well as tools for fast ordering and processing of online requests for quote.
Moreover, this Magento 2 edition offers one more outstanding feature – Content Staging – which allows creating, previewing, and scheduling a wide range of content updates directly from the Admin panel of your store. Content Staging can be used to create a dynamic page that changes automatically throughout the year on scheduled dates.
Commonly, Magento Open Source is not used for B2B as Magento 2 Commerce Edition suits more for B2B enterprises and stores with high customer traffic, large product catalogs, wide global presence, or high business complexity.
Magento 2 Commerce Cloud Edition (earlier known as Enterprise Cloud Edition) is a managed and automated hosting platform specifically created for Cloud solutions. It can be called Magento self-hosted edition. This version includes all Magento 2 Commerce on-premise features and adds enhanced Cloud infrastructure hosting, which now includes Git integration and key environments for Magento Commerce Cloud development, staging, and live production. Put simply, the owners of this edition can code, test, and deploy across Integration, Staging, and Production environments to ensure a smooth performance of their stores.
Again, Magento Commerce Cloud Edition is more suitable for large companies with complex requirements as this edition is flexible enough to cover all of them and offers a powerful admin experience.
And now, let’s compare these editions feature to feature.
Both Magento 2 Open Source and Magento 2 Commerce have the following capabilities:
As for technology stack requirements, both editions support the latest versions of:
There is a big difference between Magento Open Source and Commerce as Open Magento features are limited. Magento 2 Commerce exclusive features comprise:
• Promotions (Dynamic Blocks, Related Product Rules)
• Merchandising (Visual Merchandiser, Gift Registry, Reward Points, Private Sales & Events (including countdown ticker), Store Credit, Gift Cards, Gift Wrap, Wishlist Search)
• Communications (Email Reminders)
• SEO & Search (Google Tag Manager)
A full feature list is available here.
Three selected features make Magento 2 Commerce special:
Comparing Adobe Commerce vs. Open source, you can see that Commerce Edition comprises much more features. Still, the latter is more customizable and empowers merchants to add the needed functionality with extensions. This makes you free to decide for which features to pay. If you do not need the whole list of Magento 2 Commerce features, pick only those that really matter for your business.
Adobe Commerce Cloud is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built on a redundant AWS-based cloud hosting infrastructure. Unlike traditional SaaS e-commerce platforms, Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition is highly customizable, scalable, and considerably simplifies integration with third-party systems.
The platform comes with top-notch DevOps, release, and cloud management tools and comprises all the features of Adobe Commerce.
We picked up several key advantages of Adobe Commerce Cloud:
• Integration. The Integration environment set comprises three testable environments, each of which incorporates an active Git branch, a database, a web server, caching, services, environment variables, and configurations.
• Staging. As code and extensions pass your tests, you can merge your Integration branch to a Staging environment, which becomes your pre-production testing environment. It includes a staging active branch, a database, a web server, caching, services, environment variables, configurations, and services, such as Fastly and New Relic.
• Production. When code is ready and tested, all code merges to master for deployment to the Production live site. This environment comprises your active master branch, a database, a web server, caching, third-party services, environment variables, and configurations.
• Inactive. You can have an unlimited number of inactive branches.
Such a system will help to configure the staging environment to test the extensions installed or any code changes with no effect on a live server. For sure, someone can argue that it’s possible to deploy a new instance, however, it is extremely labor- and time-consuming as you again need a server administrator for deployment and maintenance. Moreover, an integrated source control management system stores all the changes, which allows rollback and guarantees the simplicity of tracking changes.
The advanced technologies used in Adobe Commerce Cloud deserve to be treated as advantages too:
Among other benefits, automated patching and image optimization should be mentioned.
In conclusion, we want to summarize all said above in one infographic, where you can see the difference between Magento Open Source, Commerce, and Commerce Cloud:
While choosing a Magento 2 edition, we recommend paying attention to business volume, costs, and the relevancy of customer support as key factors. Whichever Magento inc edition you choose, we hope that you’ll love the flexibility of Magento 2 – just as we do!
Need a hand with custom development on Magento Open Source? Our team will be happy to help you out. Learn more →
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