Magento is one of the world’s most flexible ecommerce platforms. It provides hundreds of thousands of merchants with exciting functionality for their stores, and thousands of extensions to boost performance.
Upon its initial release in the mid-2010s, the then-new version of the shopping cart was a turning point for the platform. Magento 2.1's features and capabilities, new at the time, impressed many and allowed businesses to drive sales and performance. Moreover, it included more than 90 bug fixes and several impressive enhancements.
When giving a glance at Magento 2.1 Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) we can’t but notice that both versions offer amazing functionality improvements. Taking into consideration that EE has some extra features, the CE, in its turn, is not left behind and softly accumulates the best modifications.
Magento 2.1. New Features: CE and EE
When Magento 2.1 was introduced, both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition gained impressive and useful improvements. This included numerous new features, functional fixes and security advances, like Braintree hosted fields, improved management interfaces and PayPal In-context check-out, and some other handy updates.
- Braintree Hosted Fields
- Improved Management Interfaces
- search for customer and order information;
- create new products faster and with minimal effort;
- create new content easily.
- PayPal In-Context Checkout
- allows customer to pay via PayPal without leaving your site;
- saves customer details for future purchases and allows to checkout without re-entering their details.
Braintree has improved the integration with Magento 2.1 and added the support, called ‘Hosted Fields’. This technology helps to collect securely all sensitive payment information in checkout and provides you with full control of layout and check out styles. By the way, these ‘hosted fields’ are invisible to customer and exist insensibly within your HTML.
Both Magento EE and Magento CE got this important new feature which streamlines the the search for information in Admin panel. Now you can easily:
PayPal functionality includes in-context checkout that rises your conversion rates. This Magento 2.1. new feature:
Due to In-Context Checkout feature your customers will have no need to enter a PayPal ID and password when making future purchases.
Other minor Magento 2.1 new features and improvements for CE and EE:
- You can successfully import and export CSV files with data that contains special symbols (those that are not escaped during file processing).
- There are two new web API endpoints that permit you to process refunds from orders to invoices (you don’t need a patch for that now).
- Large catalogs are processed more swiftly and accurately, a benefit often enhanced by ultimate data migration service packages (now the catalog/product indexer doesn't require a large temporary table memory allocation in MySQL for large catalogs).
As I’ve mentioned before, both versions of Magento 2.1 offer you astonishing improvements, but there are some that only EE can boast of. Check out what interesting enhancement it can propose to you.
What about new Magento 2.1 EE impressive features?
- Staging and Preview
- Elasticsearch
- User-friendly dashboards
- it facilitates for you creating and scheduling personalized promotions and combining them easily in more extensive marketing campaigns;
- with this improvement now you can preview changes across the store, including products and checkout pages, from the outset;
- Release of Cloud Edition
- Now there is no need of system administrator assistance between your code and deployment, it’s fully automated;
- Cloud Edition plan has eight active environments for development and staging available for free;
- You can also posses many inactive environments if you want to;
- Now you are able to increase the amount of memory and CPU;
- Third party plugins and custom scripts - dubious quality; some entities could not be supported; basic technical skills are required;
- Developer hiring - very expensive, but efficient;
- Automated tool usage - easy, save, fast and cheap.
This improvement enables you to stage, schedule, preview and approve different content easily. It also facilitates greatly the task of content management for non tech-savvy user.
It is one of the best search engines that was designed to handle large catalogs. Elasticsearch provides highly relevant results and supports 33 languages out-of-the-box, in Magento 2.1. it replaces Solr.
When Magento 2.1 EE became available in the cloud, it provided entrepreneurs with simplified integration with existing systems, it gives the ability to concentrate on sales and marketing only. Comparing to SaaS commerce, the Cloud Edition reduces a lot expenditure on the deployment and management.
If you decide on Cloud edition, you won't have to deal with infrastructure issues and have more time for developing your brand, successful marketing strategies, etc.
This was the short review of new features, because At the time, Magento 2.1 had much more to offer. Its countless extensions development, better performance and stability were considered significant reasons to upgrade. For those looking to optimize their current e-commerce operations or planning a platform shift, a clear roadmap for successful re-platforming is essential.
How to upgrade to Magento 2.1?
At the time, there were many ways to upgrade your Magento to Magento 2.1, and here were the most commonly used:
Let’s take a look at the last alternant of upgrading your Magento store to Magento 2.1. using automated tool, e.g Cart2Cart. With this service you can forget about troublesome manual data input, plugins installation and script writing, because all the data you need will be transferred automatically.
Cart2Cart will move your orders, products, customers, attributes, categories and other entities you want from your current Magento to a desired Magento 2.x version automatically. While Magento 2.1 is now an older release, the service supports various Magento 2.x versions for migration.
What you need for that? Nothing troublesome, just follow couple of simple steps and enjoy your store updated to a desired Magento 2.x version (note: Magento 2.1 is an outdated version; migration to the latest Adobe Commerce is generally recommended):
- Register a Cart2Cart account.
- Provide your current Magento store URL and download the Connection bridge.
- Provide your new Magento 2.1. store URL and download the Connection Bridge.
- Choose what entities you wish to transfer.
- Set the Free Demo migration.
- Click “Start Migration” to proceed with full data transfer.
Start your Free Demo migration right away! Magento 2.1 was, at the time, a significant advancement for the platform.
Monthly Update – October 2025
As of October 2025, the e-commerce landscape continues its rapid evolution, with AI integration becoming increasingly critical for personalized customer experiences and operational efficiency. Merchants are keenly focused on leveraging advanced analytics to understand buying patterns, optimize inventory, and automate customer support. The shift towards headless commerce architectures is also gaining momentum, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability for businesses looking to deliver dynamic content across multiple channels without being constrained by traditional platform limitations.
For those considering a platform migration, it’s essential to evaluate solutions that prioritize security, performance, and seamless integration with a broader ecosystem of marketing, CRM, and ERP tools. Staying updated with the latest compliance requirements and cybersecurity best practices is paramount to protect sensitive customer data and maintain trust. Furthermore, exploring innovative checkout solutions and mobile-first strategies can significantly boost conversion rates in today's mobile-dominated market. Proactive planning and strategic partnerships with migration experts can ensure a smooth transition and long-term success.
For more details, explore our FAQ section or schedule a call with a migration expert.
