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How to Migrate from Magento Open Source to Adobe Commerce: The Complete Guide

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For many businesses, Magento Open Source has been a reliable eCommerce platform for years. However, as online operations become more sophisticated, many organisations reach a point where maintaining a heavily customised Magento environment becomes increasingly expensive and difficult to scale.

Adobe Commerce provides a natural migration path, allowing businesses to retain the flexibility of the Magento ecosystem while gaining enterprise capabilities, managed cloud infrastructure and access to Adobe’s growing suite of commerce services.

A migration is also far more than a software upgrade. It is an opportunity to modernise your architecture, improve operational efficiency and position your business for long-term growth.

In this guide, we’ll explain what to consider when migrating from Magento Open Source to Adobe Commerce, common pitfalls to avoid and how to maximise the value of your investment.

Why Businesses Are Migrating to Adobe Commerce

Every business has different reasons for migrating, but the most common include:

For many organisations, the platform itself isn’t the biggest challenge. It’s the increasing effort required to maintain a growing collection of customisations, infrastructure and third-party extensions.

Adobe Commerce provides an opportunity to simplify that environment while introducing enterprise capabilities designed for long-term scalability.

Magento Open Source vs Adobe Commerce

Magento Open Source provides an excellent foundation for many businesses.

Adobe Commerce builds on that foundation with additional enterprise capabilities, including:

While many of these features can be replicated using third-party extensions in Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce often delivers them as integrated, fully supported functionality.

Use the Migration to Improve Your Product Data

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is treating a migration as a simple copy-and-paste exercise.

Migrating to Adobe Commerce is an ideal opportunity to review the quality of your product information.

Many businesses discover:

Improving your product data before launch creates benefits well beyond the migration itself.

Better product information improves:

Rather than migrating existing problems into a new platform, businesses should use the project to create a cleaner, more scalable product catalogue.

Reduce Extensions Wherever Possible

Over time, many Magento Open Source stores accumulate a large collection of third-party extensions.

While these extensions often solve genuine business problems, they also introduce complexity.

Every additional extension increases:

One of the major advantages of migrating to Adobe Commerce is the opportunity to review which extensions are still required.

Adobe Commerce includes many enterprise capabilities as standard that previously required third-party modules.

Where practical, replacing extensions with Adobe Commerce’s native functionality creates a simpler platform that is easier and less expensive to maintain over the long term.

Fewer extensions generally result in faster upgrades, reduced testing and lower ongoing support costs.

SaaS vs PaaS: Understanding Your Options

Adobe Commerce continues to evolve beyond its traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.

Today, businesses can also take advantage of Adobe’s growing portfolio of SaaS commerce services.

Examples include:

These services provide additional scalability and innovation while reducing the operational burden on individual implementations.

However, it’s important to understand the maturity of each approach.

Adobe Commerce on PaaS remains the most widely deployed and proven enterprise deployment model. It has been refined over many years and supports highly customised commerce implementations.

Adobe’s SaaS services continue to evolve rapidly and offer exciting opportunities, but businesses should carefully evaluate whether each service aligns with their functional requirements and implementation strategy.

For many enterprise organisations today, the optimal approach combines Adobe Commerce on PaaS with selected SaaS commerce services where they provide genuine business value.

The Value of Adobe Commerce Extends Beyond the Software

When evaluating Adobe Commerce, many businesses focus primarily on the platform itself.

However, much of the value comes from the broader Adobe ecosystem.

This includes:

These services reduce the operational burden on internal IT teams while providing confidence that the underlying platform is being actively monitored and supported.

Faster Performance Through Purpose-Built Infrastructure

Performance plays a significant role in customer experience, conversion rates and search visibility.

Adobe Commerce Cloud is designed specifically to support enterprise commerce workloads.

Rather than maintaining your own servers, businesses benefit from infrastructure that has been purpose-built for Adobe Commerce, helping deliver:

While every implementation still requires optimisation, businesses no longer need to manage the underlying hosting environment themselves.

No More Managing Your Own Hosting

One of the biggest operational changes for many Magento Open Source businesses is moving away from self-managed hosting.

With Adobe Commerce Cloud, Adobe manages the hosting environment.

This removes much of the complexity associated with:

Internal teams can spend less time maintaining servers and more time improving the customer experience.

Upgrade Cycles Remain Similar

A common misconception is that moving to Adobe Commerce eliminates platform upgrades.

In reality, the release cadence remains broadly similar.

Businesses should continue planning for:

The difference is that a well-architected Adobe Commerce implementation with fewer extensions and reduced technical debt generally makes these upgrades more predictable and less expensive.

Building with long-term maintainability in mind pays dividends throughout the life of the platform.

Plan the Migration, Not Just the Launch

Successful migrations begin long before development starts.

Areas that should be planned include:

A structured discovery phase significantly reduces project risk and helps ensure a smoother transition.

Final Thoughts

Migrating from Magento Open Source to Adobe Commerce is an opportunity to do far more than change platforms.

It is a chance to simplify your architecture, improve product data, reduce technical debt, consolidate third-party extensions and take advantage of Adobe’s enterprise commerce ecosystem.

Businesses that approach the migration strategically often realise benefits well beyond the new software itself, including improved operational efficiency, stronger performance, lower long-term maintenance costs and a platform that is better equipped to support future growth.

By investing time in planning the migration properly, organisations can maximise the value of Adobe Commerce while creating a more scalable and maintainable foundation for the years ahead.

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