Adobe is walking away from self-hosted Magento. Here’s what that actually means for the store owners and why this moment, handled right, is more interesting than it looks.

If you have been running a Magento store for the last several years, chances are things have been mostly fine. Your site works. Your team knows it. You have built up a layer of extensions, customizations, and integrations that took a lot of time and money to get right. The platform is demanding to operate; it always has been, but it does what you need it to do.

That stability is about to be disrupted, and the disruption is not coming from your competition. It is coming from Adobe.

Adobe acquired Magento in 2018 for $1.68 billion. It was, on paper, a natural fit; a powerful commerce platform joining the Experience Cloud. But over the past few years, Adobe has been making a more decisive move: away from self-hosted software and toward a cloud-hosted, fully managed SaaS model it calls Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service. The direction is deliberate, and the timeline is not theoretical anymore.

[Context: Magento began as open-source software in 2007. For years, merchants could choose between Magento Open Source (free, self-hosted) or Adobe Commerce (paid, enterprise- grade). Both ran on PHP and required serious infrastructure investment, unlike lighter platforms, running Magento cleanly has always meant multiple servers, dedicated DevOps, and ongoing maintenance attention. That complexity was the tradeoff for unmatched customizability. For merchants who needed it, that tradeoff made sense.]

What Adobe Is Actually Doing

The model Adobe is moving toward is not unlike what Salesforce did with Commerce Cloud: a hosted SaaS environment where Adobe controls the infrastructure, the upgrade cadence, and the pricing. The new platform is called Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, and it represents a fundamental architectural shift. The core problem for existing merchants is this: every custom module, plugin, and integration you have built as in-process PHP code cannot simply move to the new platform. Adobe’s cloud architecture requires all extensions to be rebuilt using App Builder, a completely different programming model. This is not a lift-and-shift. It is a rebuild, and it is happening on Adobe’s timeline, not yours.

Adobe Commerce Support Timeline:

2018 — Adobe acquires Magento for $1.68 billion. Platform continues as open source and enterprise editions.

2020 — Magento 1 end-of-life. Thousands of stores left running unsupported software. The pattern for what comes next was set here.

April 2026 — Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 extended support ends. Security patches stop. PCI compliance exposure begins for stores still on this version.

August 2026 — Adobe Commerce 2.4.5 and 2.4.6 extended support ends. The majority of active self-hosted stores are on these release lines.

2025–2027 — Adobe Cloud Service rollout accelerates. Open Source gets no cloud migration path and no extended patches.

The Magento Open Source users face the sharper end of this. There is no cloud path offered, no extended support window, and no Adobe migration tooling pointed in their direction. The platform they built on is being wound down from underneath them.

The Scale of This Problem

This is not a niche issue. Estimates of active Magento installations globally run well into the hundreds of thousands; a significant portion of which are self-hosted, heavily customized, and running on versions that Adobe is actively walking away from. These are not small shops. Magento has historically attracted mid-market and enterprise merchants who needed its flexibility: complex catalogs, B2B pricing tiers, deep ERP integrations, and custom checkout flows.

The very features that made Magento worth choosing are now the source of migration Complexity.

250,000+ active merchants globally on Magento / Adobe Commerce as of 2026. $173 billion in estimated annual GMV flowing through Magento-powered stores. 8% global e-commerce market share of the top 3 platforms worldwide.

To be clear: many of these stores are not in immediate danger. If you are on a current, supported release line and keeping up with patches, you have time. But Adobe’s FAQ says something worth noting: developer and partner resources for migration projects book up well before end-of-support dates arrive. The merchants who planned early had choices. The ones who waited found themselves competing for capacity at the worst possible moment, with the worst possible leverage.

We have seen this before. Magento 1 hit end-of-life in 2020. The warnings were out for years. And still, a significant number of stores ran on it long after support ended, quietly accumulating security debt while hoping nothing went wrong. Some of them got lucky. Some of them didn’t. “The answer to ‘can we do this in Magento’ has always been yes. The question was always how much pain. That calculus just changed.”

The Real Decision in Front of You

Here is where it gets more interesting. Because the forced migration is real, but what it forces you to do is not entirely Adobe’s to decide.

If Adobe’s new Cloud Service architecture requires rebuilding your custom extensions anyway, and it does, then you are not comparing “stay as you are” against “migrate to Adobe Cloud.” You are comparing different migration destinations. The work of untangling your current customizations and mapping them to a new environment happens regardless of where you end up. Adobe Cloud is one destination. It is not the only one.

Platforms like Shopware and BigCommerce have matured considerably in the years since most of these Magento stores were first built. Shopware is open-source, API-first, and purpose-built for merchants who want Magento-level control without the infrastructure overhead. It has a dedicated migration tool specifically for Magento stores, products, orders, customers, and URL structures migrate with known, mapped pathways. BigCommerce brings SaaS reliability with the strongest native B2B feature set in the market: custom pricing, company accounts, quote management, and purchase orders built in, with clean headless support for React or Next.js frontends.

Neither platform is a universal answer. The right destination depends on what you are actually running: your catalog complexity, your B2B workflows, your integration landscape, and your team’s technical depth. But the point is that the rebuild work already in front of you is also the moment of maximum flexibility to make a better long-term choice.

What We Have Learned Doing This

We have worked with Magento for a long time, across both the Open Source and Commerce editions. We know the platform well, including the parts that require serious attention to keep healthy. The resource demands are real. Keeping a self-hosted Magento instance clean and performant is not a set-and-forget operation. It requires dedicated infrastructure, regular patch cycles, and engineers who are not spending that time building the features that actually grow your business.

What we have also seen is that merchants who treat this moment as purely a compliance problem, “we need to get off an unsupported version before something breaks,” tend to land in a worse position than those who treat it as a strategic opportunity. The former group migrates to whatever requires the least thought right now. The latter group does a real audit of where their platform friction actually is, maps their requirements against available options, and moves to something that removes constraints rather than just swapping one set for another. That audit doesn’t take months. We can do a meaningful extension and workflow assessment quickly. The goal is to give you an honest answer about what migration actually costs for your specific store and what alternatives genuinely make sense given what you have built.

Our Approach: For every Magento engagement, we start with a no-cost extension audit: mapping your current custom modules, integrations, and workflows against the destination platform’s native capabilities. The goal is to separate what migrates cleanly from what needs to be rebuilt and to surface the real cost picture before any commitment is made. If Adobe Commerce Cloud is still the right answer for your business, we will tell you. If it isn’t, we will tell you that too.

Why Now Matters

The window in which you have real choices here is closing, but it has not closed. The merchants who move in the next twelve months will have access to experienced migration partners, reasonable timelines, and the ability to plan for the transition rather than react to it. The merchants who wait for a breach, a failed audit, or a critical extension to stop working will be making the same decision under far worse conditions.

Adobe’s FAQ is unusually candid on this point: partner time and resources book up well ahead of end-of-support dates, leaving merchants who waited with significantly fewer options. This has played out before. It will play out again. Your store is not broken. The platform underneath it is being retired. Those are different problems with different urgencies, but they both point to the same question, which is when and where you want to land. The best time to have that conversation is while you still have the space to have it properly.

Get a Free Extension Audit

We’ll map your current Magento setup and give you an honest picture of what migration actually costs for your specific store.