For context, I'm the GM of the Enterprise Team at Stack Overflow and have been working on it since we launched our full Enterprise product about 18 months ago.
Enterprise is intended for large teams (at least 500 tech staff) who want to have their own completely isolated and standalone Stack Overflow community that can be run on-prem or in a private cloud. Enterprise deployments have full control over the system and also get support from our Customer Success team to build up their community using all the lessons we've learned in 8+ years of building communities. As part of this we have all those features you'd expect like integration with SSO, audibility, massive 50 page contracts, etc
Channels on the other hand is meant for smaller teams (all the way down to just 2 people) who want to store their own knowledge (privately and securely) alongside the the public knowledgebase at stackoverflow.com. Any size team will be able to just walk up, put down their credit card and instantly be sharing knowledge with each other.
So the two products are very complimentary to each other, just depends on your team size and exactly what you're looking for feature wise.
> store their own knowledge (privately and securely) alongside the the public knowledgebase at stackoverflow.com
I know this won't go over well here, since many depend on Stackoverflow for their "programming skills", but this sounds about as believable as Google pushing companies to store their secrets "privately" using Google Docs.
Enterprise is intended for large teams (at least 500 tech staff) who want to have their own completely isolated and standalone Stack Overflow community that can be run on-prem or in a private cloud. Enterprise deployments have full control over the system and also get support from our Customer Success team to build up their community using all the lessons we've learned in 8+ years of building communities. As part of this we have all those features you'd expect like integration with SSO, audibility, massive 50 page contracts, etc
Channels on the other hand is meant for smaller teams (all the way down to just 2 people) who want to store their own knowledge (privately and securely) alongside the the public knowledgebase at stackoverflow.com. Any size team will be able to just walk up, put down their credit card and instantly be sharing knowledge with each other.
So the two products are very complimentary to each other, just depends on your team size and exactly what you're looking for feature wise.