Which Magento version to use? Magento Community Edition (free version) or Magento Go or Magento Enterprise [closed]

Question

I need to develop an e-commerce solution for a small scale business. Due to the limited budget, the development team is thinking of using the Magento Community Edition (free version) for this solution. However, based on the details given in http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/overview-compare, Magento Community Edition does not have Built-in Security. The solution to be developed needs to have a shopping cart and secure payment support, probably using an external payment gateway. In this case, would it be good enough to use Magento Community Edition ? (Because the site needs to have credit card payment handling, secure logins) Or would it be required to use Magento Go or Magento Enterprise ?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Answer 1

For a small scale business Magento EE is probably overkill since the license will probably burn through a good portion of the budget.

Magento GO is a hosted solution which means your client will have to pay for it monthly or yearly. And, as far as I know, allows for less modifications than Magento CE.

I've built several large projects on the CE version that work perfectly. As to security @webnoob is right, it's not PCI compliant but still very secure.

All in all I would recommend going with CE, it should cover all of your needs and Magento Connect offers tons of free or affordable extensions that will improve the shop and cover any special requests made by the client

Answer 2

CE is still secure, the security thing means it just not PCI ready (PCI is a minefield and out of scope on this topic).

It's still secure and built on the same platform as the other options so is fine to use on the smaller scale businesses.

Answer 3

Community can do everything you ask, obviously you dont get Magento staff help (Thats why its called community and free)

There is plenty of resources to go online to get you up to scratch with Mage and Zend.

"Due to the limited budge" That pretty much sets EE out of the question as it can cost thousand per year. Magento Go is pretty straight forward, however you do not get the flexibility of CE.

The question sounds like, what time frame do you have?

Answer 4

I'm going to throw an answer into the ring here - if I was you I'd go for a hosted solution. Magento Go, Shopify etc. A SaaS e-commerce application that does the heavy lifting for you, there are plenty of them.

A small business with a limited budget and a development team that has to ask a question like the one you've just asked.... These are subjective terms but it is not a combination that bodes well for a successful Magento development and implementation, as it obviously implies that the development team has never touched Magento before.

Now we've all got to start somewhere, I am not down on anyone taking on their first Magento project. As long as you and client as well aware that this is the case, that there's a learning curve to be tackled here requiring a massive commitment from you all to learn how this system works. There are many pitfalls and problems which you will encounter and you are likely to make little if any money of out this job on the basis that everything will be painfully slow and difficult.

Ask yourself: Is there a specific custom requirement which will not be catered for by the SaaS e-commerce providers? If not then you'd do well to start off on an easy path using a prepackaged hosted option imo.

Answer 5

Magento Go is for stores under $100,000 revenue per year, CE for stores with $100s thousands to low $millons revenue per year, Magento EE for stores with revenue above $3million per year. The rest are the semantics regarding what functionality a store needs at its target level, which each has been designed for.