Magento 2 Edition Differences: Open Source VS Commerce. Part 2

In our previous article, we examined general differences between Magento Open Source and Commerce editions. In this article, we will take a closer look at some additional features that we barely mentioned before.

Performance and Scalability

We mentioned earlier, that some performance features are only available to the users, who use Magento Commerce on-premises version. We didn’t write the full list back then but have decided to correct this mistake right now. Here are the features:

• Accelerated performance and high-traffic websites scaling with the help of Varnish page caching and its multi-tier, multi-node configurations.
• Each master database can have multiple slave databases to scale read operations.
• Abilities to use MySQL Cluster for database operations scaling and to use a separate master database for order management, checkout, and product data support.

Along with this, Magento Commerce edition has some other scalability and performance features that are available in each version. Below you can see the full list:

• Implemented hole punching and Edge Side Includes (ESI) can help you to handle page elements that can’t be cached.
• Faster indexing and incremental index updates for fresher site content and better performance
• For faster loading JavaScript, CSS and HTML are minified and images are compressed to reduce their files size.
• JavaScript and CSS viewed on the first page are cached to reduce the quantity of downloaded content for subsequent pages.
• Media files can be stored on a separate database server or content delivery network (CDN) for faster page load times.
• Increased store performance due to the orders archiving. The time of archiving is configurable.
• Faster admin rendering speeds up the access to customers, product and order management views.
• Included Magento Performance Toolkit gives you an opportunity to measure and optimize site speed
• Use RabbitMQ job queue framework to process tasks asynchronously for enhanced performance.
• With the help of pipeline deployment tooling, you can efficiently manage configuration across environments and minimize production downtime for updates.
• Allows merchants to enable large teams of Admin users to make a concurrent order and product updates.

Some of these features are cache and indexing-related, but that’s not the full list, we also have other resources to dig into. It’s worth mentioning that many articles contain information that “Full page caching” is only available for Magento 2 Commerce editions, but that’s not true. This feature is available for both of the versions along with some above-mentioned indexing functionality.

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Magento Commerce merchants have access to the features that allow their stores to archive invoices, shipment, orders and credit memos for a certain configurable amount of time. On a regular basis,  usage of this feature boost the store’s performance and allows you to free workspace from the information that is currently not needed. You can manipulate this information any way you want: you can put it in the archive and pull it out with a return to the previous state. Archived information is not deleted and is available at any time from the Admin. It can also be exported to a CSV format file.

Search

Fulltext MySQL search engine is used in both Open Source and Commerce versions by default, although Magento Commerce has some extra features. In marketing functionality paragraph of our previous article, we already mentioned ElasticSearch. It is a powerful and highly scalable search and analytics engine, that allows your customers to locate desirable products almost instantly. It has search suggestions and recommendations functionality which can be customized to improve customer experience. It should be mentioned that ElasticSearch is used by such big players as Netflix, GitHub, Quora, IBM, eBay, Wikipedia, and others.

By default, ElasticSearch is not available for the Magento Open Source version, but with some custom development and extensions, almost anything is possible.

It’s very interesting that both versions have Search Synonyms feature, but only in Magento Commerce User Guide, this feature is mentioned.

Moreover, Solr is not supported in Magento 2.2.X and any future releases. Magento Development Guide recommends using ElasticSearch as an alternative to Solr.

Category Permissions

Category Permissions feature is available for Magento Commerce users. it means that access to some categories and products can be limited to a certain group of customers. It is also possible to show all the products to all of the customers, but prices and the ability to put products are only available for a certain group.

Signifyd Fraud Protection

Signifyd Guaranteed Fraud Protection is integrated with Magento Commerce. It takes care of fraud problem by analyzing incoming customers even before they made any orders. Signifyd database of over 5,000 global merchants allows it to make a decision: to process the order or to reject it. If Signifyd Fraud Protection is wrong, they cover the complete cost of a chargeback, which includes shipping, fees, taxes and more.

To be continued

Unfortunately, we don’t have time to make a complete and detailed review of all the differences between the two Magento editions in one article. We will get back to this topic in a while.