What actually happened to Magento
The confusion is understandable, because three things happened in quick succession and each is remembered differently.
- Adobe bought Magento in 2018. The paid enterprise edition is now sold as Adobe Commerce; the free edition continues as Magento Open Source. Same lineage, different names, and both are still Magento to everybody who works on it.
- Magento 1 reached end of life in June 2020. No security patches, and it should not be running a shop that takes card details in 2026. If you are on it, that is the finding — everything else on this page is secondary.
- Magento 2 is current, supported, and a substantially different platform. A “Magento site” built in 2016 and one built last year have very little in common.
So: not dead, not abandoned, and not the same thing it was when most of the opinions about it were formed.
When Magento is genuinely the right platform
It was built for complexity, and it is still the best answer when you actually have some.
| Platform | Right when | Wrong when |
|---|---|---|
| Magento / Adobe Commerce | Very large catalogue, customer-group pricing, B2B trade accounts, complex tax or multi-warehouse fulfilment | A few hundred ordinary products and no bespoke pricing rules |
| Shopify | The way you sell is conventional and you want the platform to carry payments, tax and shipping | You need pricing logic the platform cannot express |
| WooCommerce | Content and commerce sit together and you already run WordPress | The catalogue is genuinely enormous |
| Custom stack | Your commerce is unusual enough that every platform has to be fought | The requirements are ordinary and a platform would do |
Source: Cybrial’s own assessment, written from builds on all four. See the e-commerce platform comparison guide for the longer version.
The honest test is one sentence: can you name something your business needs that the platform does out of the box and the alternatives do not? Trade accounts with different prices per customer group is a yes. “We have a lot of products” usually is not — Shopify and WooCommerce both handle far larger catalogues than people assume.
The disadvantages, stated plainly
- It is expensive to host properly. It wants real resources, and cheap hosting is where most “Magento is slow” complaints actually come from.
- It needs a developer. There is no version of running a Magento store where nobody technical is involved, and that cost is permanent rather than one-off.
- Upgrades are real projects. Especially with custom extensions, which is why so many stores are three versions behind.
- The developer pool is smaller than for WordPress or Shopify, so replacing whoever built it takes longer.
- It is slow by default. Fixable — caching, image handling, and cutting the extensions that load JavaScript on every page — but it is a job somebody has to do.
None of those is a reason to leave on its own. Together they are why the platform only makes sense when you are using what it is for: you are paying that overhead every month whether or not the capability is being used.
How to cost staying against leaving
Do this properly, because it is a decision people make on a feeling and then regret in either direction.
- Price staying: the upgrade to current, plus hosting and developer time for the next two years. Include the extensions that are abandoned and will need replacing.
- Price leaving: the rebuild, the data migration, the redirect map, and the platform’s own monthly fees for the same two years.
- List what you would lose. Go through the pricing rules, the trade accounts and the integrations one by one, and mark which the destination platform cannot do without custom work.
- Then decide — and note that if list three is short, that itself is the answer about whether you needed Magento.
The one thing that must be in the leaving column, and is routinely left out: the redirect map. Every existing URL needs a 301 to its closest equivalent or the search visibility attached to those URLs goes with them. On a catalogue that is thousands of rows and it is not optional.
If you have inherited one nobody will touch
This is how most of these conversations actually start. The store works, it takes money, it is several versions behind, and the agency that built it is gone.
The work is unglamorous and entirely doable: get a copy running somewhere safe, inventory the extensions, find the abandoned ones, upgrade in an order that keeps checkout working, and test the paths that actually take money before anything touches the live site. The hours depend almost entirely on how much custom code somebody wrote in 2019, which is why it is scoped before it is quoted.
What you should not do is nothing. An unpatched store taking card payments is a different category of problem from a dated one, and it is worth finding out which you have this week rather than next year.
