A lot of customers are still confused about whether to go with Magneto Go or Magento Community version. Magento Community Edition is a free open source software and can be downloaded from http://www.magentocommerce.com/ website.
Magento Go
Magento Go is a hosted solution is a useful for very small business and start ups. Magento Go has currently 5 different per month pricing plans including a free trial plan which can hold up to 100 SKUs. Other monthly plans are as follows:
- Get Going: price $ 15 per month, 100 SKUs, 3 Admin Logins, 1 Language, 200MB Storage, 4GB Bandwidth
- Going Places: price $ 15 per month, 500 SKUs, 10 Admin Logins, 1 Language, 500MB Storage, 8GB Bandwidth
- Go Beyond: price $ 15 per month, 1,000 SKUs, 20 Admin Logins, 3 Language,800MB Storage,16GB Bandwidth
- Go Anywhere: price $ 15 per month, 10,000 SKUs, 30 Admin Logins, 3 Language, 5GB Storage, 32GB Bandwidth
Magento Go comes with pre-designed templates or themes and comes integrated with online payment etc. The biggest disadvantage with the hosted solution is however the ability to customize or use your solutions. This is hosted solution so you can host your site on your own server. Offcource with monthly price tag, technical support is included.
Magento Community version
Magento Community version is an open source software and is free to download and very customization. Being the most popular open source eCommerce software, it has thousands of extensions which makes it the best model for a start up or small to medium business eCommerce solutions. Since this is not a hosted solution, you would need to rent out a server to host your website, plus there is no technical support on it. However Magento Community edition is what most magneto developers prefer since it gives a lot of room for creativity and customization.
Unlike Go version, you can have unlimited products, unlimited categories and no bandwidth limit if you have a good server. Security might be an issue as Community by default is not PCI compliant but it can be made to. Community Edition does not have Payment bridges but there are ample other ways to achieve PCI compliance. Community version is also best suited for B2B while Go version does have these capabilities. meaning, if you plan to sell to other businesses, you might have limitations with Go but not community version. Overall as a Magneto development team, we recommend using Community version if give more flexibility for development and is more Scalable for future growth.
