Hi Ben!

To make a simplified statement I would say that EPiServer Commerce adds a e-commerce layer on top of the EPiServer CMS functionality. This means you can manage products and their relations, shopping cart support, order management, shipping management, check out/payment integrations etc. on your web site. EPiServer CMS is still used to manage sites and "page" content on a Commerce site.

In the current implementation there are some duplicate functionality in the CMS and Commerce products. They both handle display templates, routing, assets (files) and other things differently. Going forward these products will merge more and more so that Commerce will handle the Commerce specific aspects of your web site and delegate managing "common" content to the CMS layer.

I hope that this answer is clear enough to answer your question.

Regards
Linus Ekström
EPiServer Development Team

Hi Linus Ekstrom, 

Thanks for your answer. It makes sense to me now. It seems EPiServer CMS is much suitable for personal use and EPiServer Commerce is better for enterprise use, huh?

And one more question, do I need to purchanse license for using these two products? Which product should I start with using? 

Regards, 

Ben

and  do I need to install both of them ? 

There are many enterprise level sites built on EPiServer CMS without Commerce so there's no strict connection enterprise-to-Commerce. But if the site is planned to have some kind of online shopping feature the EPiServer CMS + Commerce combo is probably the right way to go.

For personal websites EPiServer probably isn't the platform of choice because the license model isn't designed for that (i.e. it will be too expensive). If you want to get started developing solutions based on EPiServer you can however use free demo licenses to run sites on your computer while familiarizing with the EPiServer features, framework and API.

Installing CMS does not require you to install Commerce, you only need to do that if you want to develop a site using the features of Commerce.

There is a lot of information on how to get started here on EPiServer World but also on http://sdk.episerver.com/, for example in the CMS documentation: http://world.episerver.com/en/Documentation/CMS/.