With so many different configurations, plans, and options, choosing the right Akeneo PIM Edition for your business can be a little tricky if you’re unsure about what makes each version stand out.

In this article, we’ll break down each edition of Akeneo’s product information management (PIM) system currently available so that you can make an informed decision for your ecommerce business and get the most out of whichever version of this highly-rated and flexible PIM you choose. 

What Makes the Akeneo PIM Stand Out?

When ecommerce businesses come to our agency looking for help managing their product data so they can scale effectively, we love recommending Akeneo’s PIM for its flexibility, adaptability, and user-friendliness. 

With its three versions, Community, Growth, and Enterprise, Akeneo has an edition tailored to almost any use case and business size, from small/mid-sized to large corporate operations–in both the B2B and B2C spaces–making it easy to recommend to well, anyone, really. 

Akeneo helps its users save time with many quality-of-life features built to make the data enrichment process seamless. For example, users love Akeneo’s ability to display multiple language input channels simultaneously. You easily input and edit your data, compare translations side-by-side, and translate them into as many languages as you need. 

Akeneo is easy to learn and use, customizable to suit your needs, and integrates with a very long list of technology partners so that it can easily fit into your company’s existing tech stack. 

Other time-saving features include the ability to keep track of any edits you make directly in the product’s history, making toggling between versions easy, and its completeness widget, which gives your team visibility on any incomplete product information for each individual item. 

By working with a PIM like Akeneo, you can update entire product lines, customize access for your contributors, translate products, export personalized assortment to multiple platforms, and more. Akeneo’s PIM tools are the final piece of a well-oiled ecommerce machine. 

Akeneo Comparison

Since Akeneo offers a wide range of editions and modes, companies ready to leverage a PIM and wanting to get started with Akeneo often struggle to choose the right version for their needs. Here is our full breakdown of all the major differences between each Akeneo Edition.

Akeneo PIM Community Edition (CE)

Akeneo divides its editions into two categories: open-source and SaaS. The Community Edition is an open-source solution made available to anyone who wants to self-host their PIM and easily customize it. 

The Akeneo Community Edition is completely free. The downside is that the company doesn’t offer dedicated support for this version. However, there is an active and vibrant support community where users can get help from peers. 

This edition comes with what Akeneo calls its “Standard Features.” These are:

• Import/Export of data from virtually any source
• Organization/Classification of Products
• Editing and Translation
• A Built-In Completeness Widget
• Access to the Akeneo App/Extension Marketplace

Akeneo states that this edition is “forever-free.” It was built to help small and medium-sized businesses implement a single source of truth for their data and enrich product information without spending a lot of money at the beginning of their PIM solution journey. 

Akeneo Growth Edition

The first of Akeneo’s two SaaS options is the Akeneo PIM Growth Edition. Built as a next-step solution to the Community Edition, this version of Akeneo is billed as the one best suited for fast-growing companies and merchants who don’t want to manage their own PIM server as they would have to with the Community Edition. 

Since it’s SaaS-based, users can delegate all the hosting, infrastructure work, and maintenance to Akeneo rather than managing everything alone. Merchants can also benefit from the vast Akeneo ecosystem, which includes technology and solutions partners, as well as customer support agents and managers available to ensure that their digital assets are secure and their entire teams are supported. 

Feature-wise, the Growth Edition has all the same Standard Features as the Community Edition with the addition of some extra bells and whistles:

• Family Templates: Pre-defined templates that include the most relevant attributes, options, and properties. 
• AI-Enhanced Enrichment & Translation: Harness the power of AI to generate and translate product content using tailored prompts derived from your own attributes.
• Simultaneous Work: Allow multiple users to work/collaborate on the same projects while avoiding conflicts and data loss. 
• Category Enrichment: Utilize images, text, and SEO content to enhance the presentation of product lines for greater impact.

Growth Edition users also benefit from regular and automatic updates and early access to new features and options. An annual subscription to this version starts at $25k. 

Akeneo Enterprise Edition (EE)

If your needs exceed what the Community or Growth Editions can fulfill, Akeneo also offers a premium Enterprise Edition. For an annual fee tailored to your business, you get access to a PIM software that packs quite a bit more of a punch — the Enterprise Edition contains all the invaluable features of the other two Editions and builds upon them with even more tools. These include:

• Versioning and Publication: Maintain multiple versions of products and restore to earlier versions as needed. 
• Advanced Rights Management: Only give contributors access to the products and values they need to enrich.
• A Rules Engine: Set up rules to automatically enrich data. 
• Teamwork Assistant: Give your team a better view of all the products and attributes they’re responsible for. 
• Validation Workflows: Set up flows to require approval for changes and updates to ensure high-quality product information and reduce errors. 
• Asset Manager/Asset Sharing: Organize, enrich, link, and transform multimedia assets for specific channels and then share them with other team members via direct link. 
• Reference Entities: Link information like values, brand guidelines, and other documents to your products. 
• Time to Market Insights: Track the time it takes to prepare products for launch to gain insights into where efficiency can be improved or streamlined. 

Upgrading from the Community Edition to the Enterprise Edition requires little developer intervention, so vendors already using Akeneo don’t need to start from scratch when they upgrade, making the whole process quite easy when you feel like your company is ready to take the next step. 

Akeneo Cloud Editions

While there are technically three main flavours of Akeneo, users can further tailor their experience through two additional Cloud Editions of the Akeneo Enterprise and Growth offerings. These versions include all the same features as their regular counterparts, with a little extra thrown in. 

Akeneo Serenity Mode

Akeneo stresses that Serenity Mode is the cloud version you want if you want them to take care of everything for you. Users with this cloud edition don’t have to worry about maintaining servers or managing updates, and they get first access to all new features and improvements. 

New features are automatically added to your PIM on a monthly basis. No migrations necessary. 

Akeneo Flexibility Mode

With Akeneo Flexibility Mode, merchants still get all the features they need from the other PIM editions, but Akeneo allows them to store their information on their servers and handles all the maintenance they need. Akeneo refers to Flexibility Mode as a Platform as a Service (PaaS), which allows developers to deploy the PIM and custom code on Akeneo-managed infrastructure. 

Essentially, it's the same version of Akeneo as the Enterprise edition minus the need for users to manage their own tech infrastructure/servers. 

Flexibility Mode also gets scheduled updates, which are quarterly rather than monthly, like Serenity, but must be manually installed by the user. 

Conclusion

Each Akeneo edition has unique features and benefits, such as customizability, scalability, and comprehensive product data handling. By understanding the key differences between these editions, ecommerce businesses can make informed decisions and choose the most suitable Akeneo PIM edition for their needs, enabling improved efficiency, enhanced user experience, and overall growth.

As a certified Akeneo Solutions Partner, Blue Badger offers everything you need to implement a PIM solution for your business. From mapping and configuration to making your upstream and downstream connections, we’d be happy to find and implement the right PIM configuration and Akeneo edition for you. Get in touch with us today to learn more about managing your product information and ensuring a high level of data quality with Akeneo.