What is the difference between Magento Open Source/Community, Magento Commerce/Enterprise, and Magento Commerce Cloud?

What is the difference between Magento Open Source/Community, Magento Commerce/Enterprise, and Magento Commerce Cloud?

Magento Commerce Exclusive features

The most obvious difference between Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source is that the Commerce edition is paid. The cost of the license depends on the total annual income of the store. Magento Open Source can be freely downloaded or installed via Composer. 

The fee for using Magento Commerce is mainly due to more advanced functionality. It provides a lot more useful features compared to Open Source. Below, we compiled the main extra features that are available in Magento Commerce.

Feature name
Short description of the functionality
Related Product Rules
Allows setting rules to automatically create product relations, cross-sells, and up-sells, while in Open Source, admins have to assign items to other products manually.
Gift Card
Adds the 'Gift Card' product type, which stands for gift vouchers/certificates. Clients can buy gift cards and send them to other customers to pay for products on the website.
Reward Points
Allows you to accrue reward points to customers for purchases and for certain actions such as registration, subscription to a newsletter, etc., as well as together with price rules cards. Reward Points can be spent on future purchases on the website.
Store Credits
Provides the functionality to add store credits manually to customer account. Customers can spend them at checkout, fully or partially covering the cost of the purchase.
Return Management Authorization (RMA)
Makes it easier to process refunds by adding an option for customers to submit return requests on storefront and for admins to manage these requests in backend.
Visual Merchandiser
Configures custom position of the items on category pages. Allows setting rules according to which products are automatically added to the category.
Customer Attributes, Customer Address Attributes
Provides the functionality to add new fields to the website registration form and checkout address form. Submitted data is also kept in the customer account and customer grid in backend. 
Multiple Wishlist, Wishlist Search
Customers can create several wishlists, while Open Source allows adding all items to one wishlist only. Wishlist Search also offers an option to search for other users' wishlists by account name or email. 
Gift Registry
Customers can create lists with products that they would like to receive as a gift. Gift lists are visible to other users.
Gift Wrap
Customers can choose to gift wrap the items in the cart if the order is intended as a gift.
Category Permissions
Allows admins to restrict access to categories by customer groups. Access can be restricted completely or partially, e.g. allow viewing a category, but restrict displaying prices and adding items to the cart.
Customer Segments
Adds an option to create segments of users by automatic rules. Can be used for more agile configurations of promotions and content displayed to customers.
Order by SKU
Speeds up the order creation process by letting customers quickly specify the SKUs and qty of items and add them to the cart. 
Abandoned Carts
Sends an email reminder to clients who left products in the cart and didn't place an order. 
Private Sales and Events, Invitations
Allows creating an event ticker (countdown timer) to show the sale timeframes. Customers can send invitations to register on your website. 
Content Staging
Provides the ability to create, preview and schedule of content updates and changes in products, categories, promotion rules, CMS pages, blocks, and widgets.
Order Archiving
Admins can manually or automatically archive orders, invoices, shipments, and credit memos.
Actions Log
Allows you to view actions performed by other backend users of your Magento. Logs actions made with default Magento features only.
Scheduled Import/Export
Sets schedules for import and export processes that can be run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Page Hierarchy
Allows creating multi-level pages and add navigation, menu, and pagination to CMS pages. 
Persistent Shopping
Allows retention of products and some other data and saves them for a certain period of time configured by the admin. Magento Commerce extra options for persistence configuration: wishlist, recently ordered items, currently compared products, comparison history, recently viewed products, customer group membership and segmentation.


Magento Commerce Cloud

Both Magento Commerce On-Premise and Magento Commerce Cloud editions offer the same advanced functionality. The key difference between them is how they are hosted — the On-Premise edition is hosted by the merchant or a separate hosting company, while Cloud is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built on a redundant AWS-based cloud hosting infrastructure.

The main advantages of the Cloud edition are: 

– Fully configured environment, so you don't need to care about server configuration with the correct version of server software, PHP, or database software compatibility with Magento 2.
– Integrated source control management system (GIT) with the support for eight environments to develop, test, and launch your store.
– Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for Production and Staging environments with a three-server setup and dedicated hardware allows you to get a high level of reliability and availability.
– Fastly image optimization, which guarantees up to 30 percentage point increases in sites’ Google Page Speed Scores and 60-90 percent reduction in image weight at no additional cost.
– The advanced technologies used in Adobe Commerce Cloud: Fastly for CDN, web application firewall (WAF) and caching (based on Varnish); Blackfire Profiler for performance testing; New Relic APM for performance testing; Rabbit MQ job queue framework; GitHub (if you need a Git repo); Bitbucket (if you need a Git repo).

More details can be found in the official Magento documentation or in our blog.