The “Exaggerated” Rumour linking Magento… and Mark Twain

When asked to comment on a rumour that he had died, Mark Twain famously commented that the “report is greatly exaggerated”. The American humourist’s reponse could be neatly applied to Magento at the moment. 

Questions over the health of Magento usually seem to come from one of three places: merchants considering a replatform; agencies trying to position alternatives and developers worried about long-term roadmap clarity.

There’s a undoubtedly plenty of noise in the ecosystem at the moment. But strip out the drama and the reality is a lot more nuanced.

Adobe, which acquired Magento in 2018, has not walked away from the core in any way. Security patches and core updates are still being released on a busy programme. Current Magento version 2.4.8 will be fully supported up to April 2028 and forthcoming release 2.4.9, expected later this year, will probably extend that to at least 2029. The platform is very much alive and in development, and that alone adds weight to the conclusion that this is not a platform that is being abandoned. 

What has changed is emphasis.

Adobe’s strategic focus is clearly moving toward a cloud-first, composable commerce model with innovation being directed at SaaS-style services, API-first architecture and Adobe’s Experience Cloud. But that doesn’t equal abandonment, rather it indicates repositioning, albeing repositioning that does have implications for Magento Open Source.

Historically, Magento began life as a product-led open source platform. Today Adobe Commerce (renamed Magento Enterprise) is part of a broader enterprise experience suite of Adobe products – seen as one component within a much larger Adobe strategy.

Such a shift naturally changes where investment goes, the features that are prioritised and how new capabilities are delivered. It probably also changes who the ideal customer is.

For some merchants, particularly mid-market B2B and wholesale retailers in the UK, Magento still fits extremely well.

For others, especially those wanting lower operational overhead, SaaS alternatives can look attractive. Neither position is inherently wrong. But one aspect that often gets overlooked in these debates is the resilience of open source ecosystems.

Magento Open Source has the important characteristic that it is not solely dependent on Adobe. It is not hard to find well-supported open source projects with active communities that have demonstrated remarkable longevity, continuing long after their corporate sponsors might have changed direction. This strength flows from the structure of open source projects where code is accessible and the community can contribute. In the even of the project going in an unpopular direction agencies and developers can maintain forks if necessary. One big advantage is that businesses are not locked into a single vendor’s roadmap.

This doesn’t guarantee perpetual innovation of course. But, perhaps suprisinly to those who aren’t familiar with the open source community, it does provide continuity.

By contrast, proprietary SaaS platforms operate in a different way. If a vendor decides to sunset a product, remove functionality or deprecate integrations, customers are stuck with the result, often with relatively little notice. Most us by now will know the irritation of being locked into at least one SaaS platform (on-line accounts in my case) that increases pricing at will or changes terms. In this case our leverage is limited becasue there is no codebase independently maintained.

This is not to argue that open source is always superior,. But I thinjk it makes the point that control and flexibility matter, especially in complex operational environments such as B2B and Wholesale. Applications that demand complex trade pricing structures, ERP integration (Sage 200, warehouse systems, EPOS) etc, stock integrity across channels, operational control and custom workflows

Here the question is will the platform still support our operational complexity in five years? Magento’s architecture, particularly when well-implemented, remains capable in this space. Merchant concern is understandable. But panic is misplaced.

It is true that Adobe’s focus has shifted, evolving within a broader enterprise SaaS ecosystem.

The question is not: “Is Magento dying?.” Rather does it still align with our business model, technical appetite and long-term risk tolerance?”

For some retailers, the answer will be no. But for others, especially those requiring flexibility, Magento remains the rational choice. It’s a choice that should depend heavily on the business model rather than concerns over the platform itself. As Twain also said: I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.