What is Magento?

Magento is an ecommerce platform which provides store owners with a flexible online shopping cart system. It is a platform built on open source technology. In this content management system (CMS), as well as functionality and content, store owners can also control the look and design of their ecommerce store. Magento also includes effective online marketing, sales reporting, and catalog management tools.

 

Magento platform

Magento is an open source ecommerce web application (platform), first released at the end of March 2008. Magento is a content management system (CMS) which is built on the Zend Framework and uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model.

Irish Web Experts uses the open source community version of the Magento platform for our ecommerce clients. Magento’s scalability allows shops to originally start with only a few products and simple requirements to efficiently expand to tens of thousands of products easily and also implement custom complex behaviour without changing platforms. There are a lot of Magento extensions, plugins and themes available in Magento which can readily enhance a customer’s experience on your ecommerce website. A lot of our client’s business requirements we find are already in built in the Magento platform. With regards to certain custom functionality, it requires a bit more complex programming but can be achievable by expert Magento developers.

 

Is Magento Free or Paid?

Magento is an open source platform that is free to download and use for your online store. You have the ability to extend this platform and configure it however you please. Magento marketplace is home to many themes and extensions / plugins which you can install on your website to extend the functionality of default Magento open-source. The cost of these extensions varies based on vendor and some can also be found for free.

 

Magento opensource vs. Magento commerce

We discussed about Magento open source but what is Magento Commerce? And what is the difference between Magento Commerce and Magento open source?

Previously known as Magento Community, Magento open source is the free version of Magento that can be downloaded, customized, and self-hosted. In contrast, Magento Commerce previously had two versions, called Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud. Now, those two versions have been merged together, giving us Magento Commerce. This platform is a premium version of Magento Open Source that includes cloud-hosting as part of the subscription fee, meaning it is a hosted platform by Magento.

As mentioned previously, Magento open source is available to download for free and can be configured and extended as required, either through custom development or using a vast range of extensions and themes available on the Magento marketplace.

For Magento Commerce, as it is the premium version of Magento, charges a yearly fee to use. Some exiting features on Magento Commerce include advanced marketing features, customer reward programs and targeted promotions. Magento also offers 24/7 support from Magento specialised technical team. With Magento Commerce, you can also choose between an on-premise deployment and a cloud-hosted solution.