This question cannot be answered in general terms. As with many abstract questions, the same applies here: it depends on the specific use case. To provide a well-founded answer, we must first clarify which Smartstore Editions are available and what each one is designed for.

Smartstore is currently available in the following editions: Community, Premium, Retail, Event, Enterprise B2C, Enterprise B2B, Commerce Cloud and Enterprise Commerce Open Source (OS). In addition, the Marketplace Edition will soon be available. Each of these editions addresses a clearly defined use case and is aimed at different target groups.

First, an important point: regardless of which Smartstore Edition you choose, upgrading to a higher edition is possible at any time – even while your shop is running. This is because the underlying base code of all Smartstore editions does not differ from the open-source version (Community Edition, or CE). Functional differences arise exclusively through additional modules or plug-ins developed by Smartstore, which extend the capabilities of each edition.

The Smartstore Community Edition is primarily intended for beginners and users who want to evaluate Smartstore. It is suitable both for getting to know the platform and for assessing whether the technologies and concepts provided meet your own e-commerce requirements.

The Smartstore Premium Edition builds on the Community Edition and differs mainly in the scope of the included plug-ins, which are provided in addition to the free base version. These differences will be discussed in more detail later.

The Smartstore Enterprise Edition is the most powerful variant. It is aimed at internationally active brands and retail companies – as well as those aiming to reach this level in the future. It is designed for scalability and can grow flexibly alongside your business. Further in-depth explanations follow below.

Below, we now examine each edition in detail.

Smartstore Community Edition (CE)

Let’s begin with the Smartstore Community Edition and the question of who it is suitable for. The Smartstore Community Edition is 100% open source and, as of version 5, licensed under AGPLv3 and is permanently available free of charge. This naturally raises the question: why do we follow this model – and who is meant to benefit from it?

The answer is fairly straightforward. A technological platform can only be seriously evaluated if it can be used, examined, and understood in real-world conditions. Before companies, agencies, or developers decide on software, they inevitably invest time, know-how, and later also budget. For exactly this reason, we provide the Community Edition free of charge and without restrictions: to create maximum transparency and enable a reliable decision-making foundation.

The Smartstore Community Edition is therefore not aimed exclusively at beginners. It is equally suitable for developers, agencies, and technically experienced companies who want to evaluate Smartstore, build prototypes, or prepare concrete projects. With full open-source access, you retain full control over code, architecture, and further development at all times.

In short: with the Smartstore Community Edition, you receive a stable, modern, and flexibly expandable foundation with all essential core features needed to build and operate a state-of-the-art webshop. It forms the technical basis for all other Smartstore editions and can be expanded at any time through additional modules, plug-ins, or by upgrading to a higher edition.

Further information on the Smartstore Community Edition can be found here.

Do you have questions on this topic? Or would you like to send us your feedback? You can reach us via the contact form

Smartstore Premium Edition

With the Smartstore Premium Edition, you are taking a step further: you are no longer in the pure evaluation or setup phase, but have established yourself on the market and are beginning to systematically optimize your processes. Accordingly, the question now arises as to why upgrading to the Premium Edition makes sense and what specific added value it offers.

This question typically arises when e-commerce is no longer seen merely as a sales channel but as a strategic component of your business model. Topics such as return on investment (ROI), e-commerce strategy, customer lifetime value, option pricing models, and investment planning models come into focus. The Smartstore Premium Edition is designed to deliver the best possible economic benefit precisely at this stage.

A key example is the enhanced product search MegaSearch, which demonstrates its strengths particularly in multishop environments. With powerful faceted and filtered search capabilities, customers can find products quickly, accurately, and intuitively. This has a direct impact on conversion rates and user satisfaction. But search alone is not enough – as you scale, structured data exchange with external systems becomes critically important.

The Smartstore Premium Edition supports established industry standards for this purpose. With BMEcat, powerful import and export functions are available for exchanging product catalogs. For transmitting order data to inventory management systems, OpenTrans is integrated – a widely used standard that enables connection to nearly all common ERP and merchandise management systems, avoiding media discontinuities.

At this stage of the business, another critical question often arises: is my hosting setup still future-proof? Can my hosting provider support international growth while ensuring a high level of security? At the latest at this point, cloud computing should be considered. The Smartstore Premium Edition provides the right foundation for this. We deliberately rely on Microsoft as a leading provider in the cloud environment and offer the proven Azure BLOB Storage plug-in to outsource media, assets, and large datasets in a performant and scalable manner. For more information, see our blog post Smartstore in the Cloud.

Another central topic with growing traffic and increasing complexity is performance. With the Output Cache plug-in, the Premium Edition specifically addresses this aspect. The goal is to drastically reduce loading times and ensure consistently high speed – regardless of traffic spikes.

From a technical perspective, output caching is a performance optimization mechanism in which already generated web pages are cached and delivered again for identical requests. Entire pages are stored on the web server rather than generated anew from the database for each request. This reduces server load, minimizes database access, and accelerates content delivery significantly.

Simply put: if a particular request has already been processed once, the result can be delivered immediately on the next identical request – without recalculation. The result is significantly higher performance and a noticeably improved user experience.

Of course, many additional functions and benefits of the Smartstore Premium Edition could be listed here. Instead of providing a simple enumeration, we recommend a personal consultation, as the number of plug-ins can vary significantly. Simply schedule an appointment with one of our experienced staff members to jointly determine whether and when the Premium Edition offers the greatest added value for your business model.

Do you have questions on this topic? Or would you like to send us your feedback? You can reach us via the contact form

Smartstore Retail Edition

The Smartstore Retail Edition carries over the principles known from SmartEvent into brick-and-mortar and hybrid retail environments. The goal is to break up traditional retail structures and merge digital and physical touchpoints into a seamless, process-oriented platform. Sales, interaction, and service are not viewed in isolation, but as integrated components of the omnichannel process and the holistic customer journey.

Based on the modular Smartstore platform, intelligent retail processes are created that seamlessly connect self-checkout scenarios, flexible POS systems and optional event workflows. The Retail Edition is therefore suitable for classic physical sales areas as well as pop-up stores, shop-in-shop concepts, showrooms, 24/7 formats, or temporary sales formats with event character.

Technologically, the focus is on seamless, contactless, and high-performance processes. QR code-based interactions, NFC-enabled devices, flexible POS templates, and the Smartstore Wallet enable fast check-in, purchase, and payment processes – both in-store and mobile. Customers can scan products themselves, pay, and optionally link transactions to existing online accounts or wallet balances. Queues are reduced, staff is relieved, and sales floors are used more efficiently.

A central element of the Smartstore Retail Edition is the real-time linking of access, payment, and interaction. Depending on the scenario, access logic, time slots, permissions, or personalized offers can be controlled. This creates hybrid formats that blend retail, service, and event – such as exclusive sales promotions, product launches, or brand-driven experiences directly at the point of sale.

For retailers and operators, the Smartstore Retail Edition offers a central control and analytics system. All relevant data – from transactions to movement patterns to interactions – flows into one platform. This data foundation enables operational optimization, targeted personalization, and data-driven decisions in near real time. In combination with loyalty features, digital vouchers, and credit models, a sustainable customer retention approach emerges across all channels.

More broadly, the Smartstore Retail Edition brings the smart city vision to retail: automated processes, adaptive systems, and the intelligent connection of digital and physical spaces. It provides the foundation for scalable, future-proof retail concepts in which efficiency, flexibility, and customer experience are equally at the forefront. Incidentally, in this edition we distinguish between food and non-food depending on the industry.

Do you have questions on this topic? Or would you like to send us your feedback? You can reach us via the contact form

Smartstore Event Edition

The Smartstore Event Edition – also known as SmartEvent – is not a classic shop or template solution, but a specialized digital platform for events, venues, and temporary sales scenarios. It was specifically developed for environments where traditional e-commerce logic reaches its limits: stadiums, arenas, festivals, trade fairs, concerts, amusement parks, or corporate events.

At its core, SmartEvent redefines the event venue as a SmartVenue. This is an intelligent, modular platform structure that systematically connects operational processes, visitor interactions, and experience logic. SmartVenue acts as the organizational and technical backbone on which all relevant modules work together consistently.

Key components include EventFlow, FlexPOS/SoftPOS, QR code and NFC interactions as well as the Smartstore Wallet. These modules enable seamless control of all relevant processes: from ticket and access management to sales, payment, and deposit logic, all the way to interactions and real-time reporting. The entire visitor lifecycle – from pre-event to on-site experience to post-event – is mapped in a consistent system.

A key focus of the Smartstore Event Edition is on mobile, contactless, and high-performance processes. Visitors benefit from fast ordering and payment processes, reduced queues, media-neutral access (QR, NFC, Wallet), and context-based information that can be displayed depending on the situation. The result is a smooth process and a significantly improved visitor experience – even with high visitor volumes.

For organizers and operators, SmartEvent offers a central control and billing system. Using the Smartstore Wallet, credit, payments, deposits, refunds, loyalty programs and analytics can be centrally managed. All relevant data flows into one platform and is available for real-time analysis, operational decisions, and downstream reporting. Processes that were previously fragmented or handled manually become automated and transparent.

Technologically, the Smartstore Event Edition relies on a scalable, modular architecture with high fault tolerance. It is designed for traffic spikes, temporary scenarios, and changing event formats, and can be adapted to different event sizes and requirements. At the same time, it remains extendable and open to individual adjustments, integrations, and specific business models.

In short: the Smartstore Event Edition combines digital event management, operational process control, and modern payment and interaction concepts into an integrated platform. It provides the foundation for efficient operations, data-driven decisions, and a consistent, contemporary visitor experience – especially where traditional shop systems are no longer adequate.

Do you have questions on this topic? Or would you like to send us your feedback? You can reach us via the contact form

Smartstore Enterprise

Let us now turn to the supreme discipline: the Smartstore Enterprise Editions. As you may have already noticed, some editions intentionally carry the designation Enterprise Commerce instead of Enterprise E-Commerce. This distinction is by no means merely semantic, but describes a fundamentally strategic approach.

The term e-commerce is typically reduced to the online sale of goods via a webshop. Modern companies, however, operate far beyond this. Commerce – without the preceding “E” – at Smartstore represents a collective term for all digital business processes orchestrated by IT systems: sales, service, billing, interaction, automation, and integration.

This includes, in addition to the classic sale of goods:

  • usage-based billing for machines and IoT systems,

  • rental and leasing models (e.g., tools, bicycles, e-scooters),

  • scan-and-go and grab-and-go scenarios in retail,

  • self-service portals and customer platforms,

  • content and experience management,

  • complex omnichannel and headless architectures.

In combination with Smartstore and the cloud services of Microsoft Azure, you have a platform at your disposal with which almost all these scenarios can be implemented – scalable, highly available, and deployable internationally. Since a complete presentation of all combination and architecture variants would go beyond the scope of this text, we will focus below on the central Enterprise Editions for internationally active brands and retail companies.

Smartstore Enterprise B2C Edition

As a B2C company, you are in direct business relationships with private individuals. The Smartstore Enterprise B2C Edition is specifically designed to map these relationships efficiently, scalably, and consistently across all digital touchpoints.

The edition provides all necessary Smartstore plug-ins to ensure stable and seamless operations even with high visitor numbers, international markets, and complex campaigns. It supports classic business-to-consumer models as well as direct-to-consumer scenarios (D2C), where manufacturers sell products directly to end customers.

B2C and D2C business models are found across industries and are characterized by high demands on performance, user experience, personalization, and marketing integration. The Smartstore Enterprise B2C Edition meets exactly these requirements – supplemented by 24/7 support specifically tailored to enterprise scenarios.

Smartstore Enterprise B2B Edition

The Smartstore Enterprise B2B Edition is aimed at companies whose customers are exclusively or predominantly other businesses. The term business-to-business encompasses all business relationships between companies – regardless of industry or value chain position.

B2B commerce is heavily shaped by individual pricing logic, customer-specific assortments, approval and authorization processes, ERP integration, and complex contract structures. In Germany, the trading volume in B2B commerce has now exceeded one trillion euros – with rapidly increasing digital penetration.

The Smartstore Enterprise B2B Edition provides a robust, scalable platform for this. All plug-ins are created and continuously developed by Smartstore. Here, too, you have access to dedicated 24/7 support designed for the needs of business-critical systems.

Smartstore Enterprise Commerce Cloud Edition

Companies operating in dynamic, internationally competitive markets require a commerce platform that combines innovation, scalability, and operational security. This is precisely where the Smartstore Enterprise Commerce Cloud Edition comes in.

This edition is specifically designed for operation in the Microsoft Azure Cloud and makes full use of its strengths: automatic scaling, high availability, global distribution, and seamless integration into existing IT and security architectures. Applications and services can be operated, expanded, and adapted to load peaks flexibly – without rigid infrastructure limits.

The Smartstore Commerce Cloud thus provides the foundation for modern cloud-native commerce architectures that accelerate productivity while keeping operating costs manageable. Further information on the Smartstore Enterprise Commerce Cloud can be found here.

Smartstore Enterprise Commerce Open Source (OS) Edition

With the Smartstore Enterprise Commerce Open Source Edition, we offer a fully open-source enterprise platform for in-house use. It is aimed at organizations that require maximum control over code, architecture, and further development – without being forced into proprietary licensing models.

The possibilities and application scenarios of this edition are so extensive that we have dedicated an entire detailed blog post to them.

Smartstore Marketplace Edition

With Smartstore 7, SmartStore AG has laid the strategic foundation for its own native marketplace solution. The Smartstore Marketplace Edition extends the platform with essential multi-vendor functionality and aims to go far beyond the classic single-shop model. Operators gain the ability to build high-performance multi-vendor marketplaces in a structured, modular, and scalable manner – both in B2C and B2B contexts.

The focus is not on retrofitting a marketplace through external modules, but on a platform solution deeply integrated into the Smartstore architecture. Multiple vendors can operate within a shared infrastructure without losing central governance. This opens up new business models, such as commission-based platforms, curated marketplaces, hybrid commerce models, or industry-specific B2B ecosystems. At the same time, flexibility, scalability, and growth potential increase significantly.

Key development components include comprehensive vendor management, the central control of assortments and catalogs, a multi-tenant order, payment, and settlement logic, as well as clearly defined role and rights models for platform operators and vendors. This is complemented by integrations into existing ERP, PIM, and CRM systems to avoid media discontinuities and meaningfully integrate existing IT landscapes.

Architecturally, the Smartstore Marketplace Edition is consistently modular and designed for long-term extensibility. Functions can be activated step-by-step and adapted to individual business models – from simple multi-vendor scenarios to complex platform economies with custom pricing, commission, and fulfillment logic. First core features are already part of Smartstore 7 and are being continuously expanded.

The marketplace solution is currently in a pilot phase with selected customers. Based on real-world feedback, further functional refinement and stabilization are carried out before the official market launch planned for the second half of 2026.

With the Smartstore Marketplace Edition, Smartstore positions itself as an open, technology-driven platform alternative to established marketplace systems. It specifically targets medium- to large-scale multi-vendor models and combines classic commerce functionality with the requirements of modern platform economics – without the limitations of proprietary or heavily regulated systems.

Do you have questions on this topic? Or would you like to send us your feedback? You can reach us via the contact form

General information on all editions

The processing and management of very large amounts of product data is a core requirement of modern commerce and platform solutions. At Smartstore, we have consistently followed this requirement from the beginning. In many industries, millions of products, variants, attributes, and metadata must be processed and made searchable with high performance. This requirement is not optional, but business-critical. For this reason, our Enterprise Editions rely on Apache Lucene as a powerful full-text search technology.

Lucene works on an index basis and enables extremely fast search and filter operations – even with very large datasets. The technology is used by platforms such as Wikipedia or Twitter and is considered an industry standard for scalable search applications. Since 2010, Apache Solr has emerged as a powerful search server derived from Lucene, which can additionally support complex search scenarios. 

We developed the premium Smartstore Mega Search plug-in for this powerful Lucene-based search.

Companies with high performance and scaling requirements can hardly avoid Redis. If you have not yet studied Redis in depth, it is worth a closer look. Redis is a high-performance in-memory key-value data structure store, used particularly for caching, session handling, queueing, and real-time data. In the Smartstore Enterprise Editions, Redis is deliberately used to absorb load spikes, minimize response times, and increase the overall stability of complex systems. Further information on Redis integration can be found here.

Another central topic in the enterprise context is Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes – and thus our Smartstore Order Management System (SOMS), which provides a seamless value chain for retail. The central question is: how can data from diverse source systems be consistently consolidated, transformed, and made usable for analysis or operational processes? ETL solutions enable the automated extraction of data from various applications, their transformation, and their transfer to central target systems such as data warehouses or analytics platforms. This reduces manual evaluations, increases data quality, and saves resources. The Smartstore Enterprise Commerce Edition provides a powerful basis for structured, automated ETL processes. More details can be found here.

One of the most complex requirements in the enterprise environment is the digital procurement process, particularly in the context of PunchOut. PunchOut technology enables companies to integrate external product catalogs directly into their internal procurement software. Employees can select products from connected suppliers, while approvals, budgets, and order processes remain centrally controlled. Large organizations already use this technology extensively, for example, for purchasing office supplies, operational equipment, or spare parts. With our PunchOut Connect plug-in, we support both OCI and cXML, enabling seamless integration into common e-procurement systems.

Another key success factor in the enterprise field is the professional handling of data and analytics. Smartstore helps companies derive reliable insights from large amounts of data and translate them into operational decisions. In the Enterprise Commerce Edition, the cloud service Microsoft Power BI is integrated. This allows data from various source systems to be consolidated, analyzed, and visualized. Reports, dashboards, and metrics can be provided across the organization – either within the internal network or across locations via the internet. This enables data-driven decisions at all levels of the company.

All described editions and technologies are brought together under the strategic umbrella of Smartstore DXP Enterprise Composable Commerce. This approach represents modular, flexible, and future-proof composable commerce architectures. They can be adapted to individual business models without creating technological dead ends.

Do you have questions on this topic? Or would you like to send us your feedback? You can reach us via the contact form, by email at info@smartstore.com or by phone from Monday to Friday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. at +4923153350.