Magento 2 End-of-Life Planning: Your Options

Adobe has been signalling for a while now that the future of their commerce offering is shifting. The on-premise Magento 2 model — the one most mid-market brands are running — is being pushed toward Adobe Commerce Cloud or out of the ecosystem entirely. If you're running Magento 2 Open Source or an older Adobe Commerce licence, it's time to plan.

This isn't a panic piece. You have time. But the window for a controlled, well-planned transition is better now than it will be in eighteen months.

What's actually happening

Adobe's focus has moved to their cloud-hosted SaaS offering and the broader Experience Cloud suite. Magento 2 Open Source still gets releases, but the pace of meaningful feature development has slowed. Community contributions keep it alive, but the ecosystem of agencies and extension vendors is shrinking as developers move to other platforms.

Security patches still arrive, but finding developers who want to work on Magento 2 is getting harder every year. The talent pool is migrating — to Shopify, to headless frameworks, to entirely different technology stacks. That matters because your ability to maintain and extend your store depends on being able to hire people.

Option 1: Stay on Magento 2

This is viable in the short term if your store is stable, well-maintained, and not requiring significant new development. Some businesses have heavily customised Magento 2 installations that work perfectly well and generate revenue without much intervention.

The risk is long-term. As the ecosystem thins out, extensions stop being maintained, hosting partners consolidate, and your pool of available developers narrows. You'll pay more for the same work, and the talent you find will increasingly be maintaining legacy code rather than building new capability.

If you choose to stay, invest in reducing your dependency on third-party extensions. Audit which ones are critical and which have active maintainers. Have a plan for each one. When you do eventually move, understanding your extension landscape is essential — I've written about migrating Magento extensions to Shopify in detail.

Option 2: Move to Adobe Commerce Cloud

This keeps you in the Adobe ecosystem but shifts the infrastructure burden. Adobe manages hosting, scaling, and patching. You keep your Magento codebase and extensions (mostly).

The catch is cost. Adobe Commerce Cloud licensing is substantial — typically £30,000 to £100,000+ annually depending on your revenue tier. For brands already on Adobe Commerce with an enterprise licence, this might make sense. For those on Magento 2 Open Source, the jump in cost is significant.

You'll also still face the shrinking developer pool issue. The codebase is the same; it's just hosted differently.

Option 3: Replatform to Shopify

This is the path I've taken with multiple brands, and it's the one I recommend for most mid-market businesses doing between £1M and £30M online.

Shopify Plus gives you a stable, well-supported platform with a growing ecosystem and abundant developer availability. The total cost of ownership is consistently lower than Magento 2 for comparable functionality.

The migration itself is a genuine project — eight to twenty weeks depending on complexity. Data migration, integration rebuilds, theme development, SEO preservation. I've written about the real cost of a Magento-to-Shopify migration separately, but expect to invest £15,000 to £60,000 for a mid-market migration done properly.

Option 4: Something else entirely

WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, or a composable stack. These all have their niches. WooCommerce suits smaller, content-led businesses. Salesforce fits enterprises already in the Salesforce ecosystem. BigCommerce is a credible alternative to Shopify for certain use cases.

I wouldn't recommend a composable or headless-first approach unless you have the engineering team to support it. For most brands leaving Magento, adding architectural complexity is the wrong move. If you're weighing platforms against each other, my ecommerce platform comparison gives an honest assessment of the main options.

How to start

Don't begin with platform selection. Begin with an audit of what you have.

Document every customisation on your current Magento store. List every integration, every custom module, every modified core behaviour. Categorise them: essential to the business, nice to have, or no longer needed.

This audit tells you the true scope of any migration. It also often reveals that 30% to 40% of your customisations are solving problems that no longer exist or replicating functionality that's now native to modern platforms.

Start the audit now, even if you're not ready to move yet. When the time comes — and it will — you'll be glad you did the homework.