It is known that between Magento 1 EE and CE there are few differences and given the large number of extensions, many site owners achieve the same performance from the Magento 1 Community website, as well as Magento Enterprise.
However, with Magento 2, the gap in functionality between M2 EE and CE has increased significantly. It seems that Magento invests in adding features and supporting only the version of Enterprise Edition Magento 2.
Besides the big difference between the two versions, another factor to consider when making a decision is the availability of the extension. Companies that develop M2 extensions make great efforts to develop, but still a lot of time will be required from the entire community.
Now let’s explore the unique features of Magento 2 Enterprise Edition that you can’t find in the Community Edition.
1. Pricing
Pricing is the first and most important item that must be taken into account when choosing between EE and CE. Magento offers you Community Edition as an open source platform and free e-commerce. In contrast, to get the full extended functionality of Magento 2, you must pay the fee for the Enterprise Edition.
The license fee for Magento 2 Enterprise Edition is based on how much revenue your store makes (also called the revenue model). The cost of licensing is ranges from 22 000 to 125 000 US dollars per year. In addition, Magento 2 now provides the Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE), which combines licensing and managed hosting based on AWS and ranges from $ 40.00 to $ 190,000 per year.
2. Shopping Experience and Navigation
The striking differences that highlight Magento 2 EE is a significant improvement in navigation and shopping experience.
Magento 2 Enterprise Edition includes support for Solr, which means that sites of this level can easily acquire a powerful search engine.
If you are still unfamiliar with Solr, now, perhaps, it’s time to get to know it better. This is one of the most popular search platforms that meet the basic requirements of e-commerce. Solr is an efficient and fast solution for commercial companies, based on the Apache Lucene library.
It is primarily known for such opportunities:
- Dynamic clustering;
- Support of the function of highlight highlighting (highlighting of search requests);
- Integration with the database;
- Wide opportunities for working with documents;
- Facet and geospatial search support.
You can interest users and encourage them to do shopping in store, if you provide a good user experience, and this is the feature that becomes standing out Magento 2 among its competitors. The platform has a number of features that allow you not only to interest customers, but will also motivate them to return for new purchases, increasing your sales, raising the level of conversion and making regular visitors even more loyal to your brand.
Magento 2 Enterprise Edition Features, which are related to customer experience:
- Custom content
- Multi-level navigation and advanced search
- Responsive design
- Short and fast checkout
- Improved merchandising
- Advanced content management
3. Customer Management and Loyalty:
В Magento 2 CE you have to buy an extension to add other than default Customer Attributes. In Magento 2 EE there’s built-in functionality, which allow you to easily manage client attributes from the admin panel.
Built-in client management functions are very useful for site owners who manage a large number of stores and directories and need different classes / attributes for each. With Magento Enterprise, you can segment customers according to different criteria, for example by demographic criterion: age, gender, etc. (Rich Merchandising Suite) Magento Enterprise knows how to sorting out new customers and those who have already used the services of the site, segment customers by products shopping cart contents, the history of purchases and even the history of viewing the goods.
If you think that described above features are good enough successful business dealing, Magento believes otherwise, and therefore the new version of the platform provides even more opportunities to turn a visitor into a buyer, and a buyer into a regular customer. Magento Enterprise has a built-in flexible loyalty system that allows you to charge your customers with points (bonuses) for purchases in your store, as well as for other actions you specify. This can be an important tool to stimulate sales.
Among fashioned honey traps are Gift cards and Gift registry. Magento Enterprise has built-in functionality of gift virtual cards, which you can buy and give to relatives and friends.
The idea of gift registry is very simple – the guest of honor, creates a list of gifts in your shop, and lists all the gifts that he or she would like to receive. The invited people get access to this list and see what you can give. Also, guests see what has already been bought, so as not to give the same gift twice. It should be noted once again that the system of loyalty is not included in the Magento Community.
4. Marketing and Merchandising:
Marketing is one of the main business engines, and Magento 2 Enterprise Edition offers powerful tools to achieve this goal. Magento 2 EE also offers automated e-mail messaging, which can be used to send reminders in the event of abandons a shopping cart or when client wants to receive the latest updates on products saved to his wish-list.
Magento 2 EE also offers the following marketing tools:
Create discount coupons
Magento Enterprise has the ability to generate discount coupons for groups, products, categories, dates and time. It is possible to send a coupon code to customers e-mail.
The ability to bind banners to price rules
In the Magento Community, you can create rules for the basket and coupons, but link banners to the site it possible only in Magento Enterprise.
The ability to carry out private sales for customers
Magento Enterprise gives opportunity to conduct sales for certain groups or segments of users, as well as to configure their automatic notification via e-mail. This allows you to make a separate protected area for individuals sales (for example, distributors).
Timed offers, Flash deals
Magento Enterprise allows you to create limited-time offers, for example, all products with a discount in the category “Women” for 7 days.
Ability to quickly and easily create promo pages
This is very important for any marketing company – whether it’s an email distribution system or marketing in search engines. In Magento Enterprise, the ability to create landing pages is built-in and it can be done quickly and easily in it.
Features that is unique to Magento 2 Enterprise Edition:
- database scalability
- advanced search
- task queue
- Google Tag Manager support
- advanced administrator rights
- managing and creating custom attributes
- scheduled FTP / SFTP transfers via XML
- message Queue Framework
Thanks to such a huge number of innovations, EE provides almost limitless possibilities for both traders and buyers. Scalability of the database data, advanced search, the ability to create a queue of different tasks – all this and more allows Magento 2 EE to significantly outrun the main competitors.
5. Support system
Let’s not forget about the support system, which is presented in Magento 2 Enterprise Edition. It works 24/7, concentrating on increased security and access to experts. The main features here are:
Technical support
Security support
Account management
