Magento alternatives: the complete guide to support dates, costs and switching

Magento has run serious Dutch webshops for more than a decade. It is flexible, it handles complex catalogues and B2B, and many teams know it inside out. But the platform around it has changed. Adobe now sets hard end dates per version, Magento Open Source gets no extended support, and from 1 June 2027 Adobe can take Commerce Cloud stores offline when they run an unsupported version. At the same time the number of Magento stores in the Netherlands is falling fast.

This guide is for teams that run Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce and need to decide what comes next: upgrade, move to another platform, or stay and invest differently. It covers which version you are on and when its support ends, what Magento really costs over three years, what each alternative costs and where its limits are, how to make the decision, and how a migration works step by step, including the method we use ourselves.

Prices, dates and figures: status 19 October 2026, taken from the vendors' own pricing, lifecycle and help pages, Store Leads and Flatline's own project experience. Check VAT and current prices on the vendor pages before you decide.

Key takeaways

• The Netherlands has 4,957 live Magento stores, 26% fewer than a year ago (Store Leads, October 2026). Shopify grew 13% to 67,817 stores.

• Standard support ended for 2.4.4 and 2.4.5 in 2025, ended for 2.4.6 on 11 August 2026 and ends for 2.4.7 on 31 May 2027.

• From 1 June 2027 Adobe can suspend traffic on Commerce Cloud environments that run an unsupported version. Magento Open Source gets no extended support at all.

• On Shopify the biggest cost lever is payments, not the subscription: on €2 million revenue an external payment provider adds €12,000 a year on Shopify Advanced.

• Shopify is not the right answer for everyone: product configurators, customer-specific B2B pricing and houses of brands need a careful check first.

• To be live on a new platform for Black Friday 2027, a mid-market migration has to be decided in February 2027.

Magento in 2026: what the numbers say

Store Leads tracks live webshops per platform. In October 2026 it counted 4,957 live Magento stores in the Netherlands, 26% fewer than a year earlier and 1.4% fewer than the quarter before. The Netherlands holds 4.9% of all Magento stores worldwide, which makes it one of the platform's larger markets. Shopify grew 13% in the same year to 67,817 Dutch stores, 2,851 of them on Shopify Plus.

Worldwide Magento lost 2,078 stores in the last 90 days and gained 1,162. This is where the departing stores went:

Two things stand out. First, the largest group did not choose another standard platform but a custom build, which tells you that many Magento merchants value control over their stack. Second, among the standard platforms Shopify takes by far the largest share. Neither number tells you what is right for your business, but they show that you are not alone in asking the question.

Which Magento are you on?

"Magento" covers four different editions, and the deadlines and options differ per edition:

How to check your version

The version number is shown in the footer of the Magento admin. Your developer can also run bin/magento --version on the server. Note the full number, such as 2.4.6-p8, and the PHP version the store runs on: both decide your deadline.

The support dates per version

Adobe gives every 2.4.x release three years of standard support from its release date. Adobe Commerce customers get one extra year on some versions, and 2.4.4 to 2.4.6 get a one-time security-only period on top. These are the dates from Adobe's lifecycle policy:

Three deadlines that force a decision

• 1 June 2027: Commerce Cloud. Adobe will no longer maintain Commerce Cloud environments that run an unsupported version, and that includes suspending traffic: the store goes offline. The deadline is 1 June 2027 for 2.4.4 and 2.4.5, and 1 June 2028 for 2.4.6 and 2.4.7.

• Open Source: no extension. The extra year is for Adobe Commerce customers only. On Magento Open Source, the end of standard support is the end of official patches.

• PHP. PHP 8.1 reached end of life on 31 December 2025 and PHP 8.2 follows on 31 December 2026. According to Adobe, that puts PCI compliance at risk for stores on 2.4.6.

What Magento really costs

Magento Open Source is free to download, but not to run. Adobe Commerce adds a licence that Adobe prices on request, based on GMV and average order value tiers. Three costs come on top of that.

Hosting

Magento needs servers, caching, search and monitoring. Hypernode, the best-known Dutch Magento host, publishes these cloud prices:

Extensions and upgrades

A typical Magento store runs dozens of extensions. Each one needs to be tested on every version upgrade and every PHP upgrade, and some stop being maintained. This is where most of the real cost sits: not in licences, but in developer hours that go to keeping the store running instead of improving it. We cover the details in five hidden costs of Magento.

Time to change

The cost that rarely shows up in a budget is how long a change takes. If a new filter, a new payment method or a new landing page template needs a developer and a release cycle, marketing and merchandising slow down. We measure this as the median lead time of the last ten change requests.

A three-year cost example

Abstract comparisons do not help much, so here is a worked example. Assumptions: a Dutch webshop with €2 million revenue per year, an average order of €80 (25,000 orders), 70% paid with iDEAL and 30% by card. Shopify fees are Shopify's published Dutch rates; development hours are left out because they depend entirely on your store.

How to read this table:

• Payments dominate. On Shopify Payments, iDEAL costs €0.29 per transaction (€0.15 on Plus) and cards 1.6% plus €0.25 on Advanced (1.4% plus €0.25 on Plus). That adds up to €16,550 a year on Advanced and €12,900 on Plus in this example. On Magento you pay your own payment provider's rates, so compare those per method with the table above.

• An external provider costs extra on Shopify. Keep Mollie or another provider and Shopify adds 0.6% on Advanced or 0.2% on Plus, on top of the provider's own rates.

• When Plus pays for itself. With an external provider, the difference between the Advanced and Plus subscriptions (€21,732 a year) equals the 0.4% fee difference at about €5.4 million in revenue.

• Hosting disappears on Shopify, and so do most upgrade hours. Apps come in instead, and they need a budget too.

Shopify publishes its own research that claims a lower total cost of ownership than Adobe Commerce. That study was paid for by Shopify and covers 250 companies in the United States and Canada. Put it next to your own 36-month overview, never in place of it. For all Shopify costs in detail, see Shopify costs.

The alternatives compared

Shopify and Shopify Plus

Shopify is a SaaS platform: hosting, security, checkout and updates are Shopify's job. Most Magento functionality has a counterpart: configurable products become products with variants, attribute sets become metafields and metaobjects, store views become Shopify Markets, and Adobe Commerce B2B becomes Shopify B2B. Plus adds unlimited B2B catalogues, nine expansion stores, checkout customisation and higher limits. What you give up is the freedom to change core logic. For the direct comparison, read Magento vs Shopify.

Shopware 6

Shopware 6 is the closest relative of Magento: open source, built on PHP, with a rich data model and a strong position in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The Community Edition is free, Rise starts at €600 and Evolve at €2,400 per month excl. VAT. Shops above €1 million GMV need a paid plan to keep access to the Shopware Store and Account. It fits teams that want to own their code; self-hosted, you keep much of the maintenance you may want to lose.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is SaaS with an open API and native support for several storefronts. Its plans are priced in US dollars with revenue caps: Core $39, Growth $105 and Scale $399 per month, Performance from $1,499. With an external payment provider it charges 2% to 0.6%. A serious option in the United States, with a small partner ecosystem in the Benelux.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud and commercetools

Both target large enterprises. Salesforce Commerce Cloud charges a percentage of GMV and fits organisations already invested in Salesforce. commercetools is headless and API-first with order-based pricing: it supplies the commerce engine and you build the rest. For most Magento merchants either option replaces one development-heavy setup with another.

Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service

Adobe's SaaS edition went live in June 2025 and is updated by Adobe. It removes the upgrade work while you stay in the Adobe ecosystem. Prices are on request and tied to GMV tiers, and custom code has to fit the SaaS model.

Staying: upgrade, Mage-OS or a new frontend

Staying is a valid choice when custom logic is your competitive edge. Options are a regular upgrade to 2.4.8 or 2.4.9, Mage-OS (a community fork of Magento Open Source) or a lighter frontend on top of Magento. In each case upgrades and PHP versions remain your responsibility, so plan them as a fixed budget line.

Hard limits side by side

Every platform has limits. These are the Shopify limits that matter most when you come from Magento:

Upgrade or switch? How to decide

The Breakup Talk: three questions

We ask every merchant the same three questions, with twelve months of invoices on the table:

No red answers: stay and invest in conversion, margin and marketing. One red answer: fix that one thing, such as the version or the theme; do not move a whole store for one issue. Two or more: move, because two red answers reinforce each other. Let the merchandiser and the marketer answer the ceiling question, not the developer: they hit the ceiling every week.

A decision matrix

When we advise against Shopify

We say no to a Shopify migration more often than people expect. These are the hard limits we check first:

We also say no in three situations regardless of platform: in the middle of a rebrand, when an ERP change happens in the same quarter, and when there is less time until Black Friday than the build needs.

The migration, step by step

1. Plan backwards from a date that does not move

Black Friday 2026 is too close to migrate for. The next one is 26 November 2027. Counting back from there for a mid-market catalogue with two integrations:

In one line: if you want to sell on the new platform on Black Friday 2027, the decision falls in February 2027. If your Magento end date is earlier, count back from that date instead.

2. Open every box before you pack: the Moving Box

Every page, template, extension, field, integration and URL gets exactly one label before the scope freeze: Keep (earns money now or the law requires it), Improve (works, and the new platform makes it better) or Bin (nobody knows when it last earned money). Each label gets a name next to it. An empty row is a bin row, and an "improve" without a sentence about what better means falls back to keep. Ideas that come in after the freeze go on a parking lot that opens two weeks after launch.

3. The Data Manifest

Migrations fail on data more often than on design. The question that decides most rows: if this field arrives empty on day one, who notices, and in which report? For Magento the main tables map like this:

Import order matters: products first, then customers, then orders, because every order needs its customer and products to exist.

4. Three runs, never one

• Dry run in a development store, to find fields that arrive empty.

• Dress rehearsal on the real store with the full data set, to time the import. That time decides the launch hour.

• Delta run after the freeze, for orders placed in the meantime. The size is easy to estimate: orders per year divided by 8,760, times the hours of freeze. At 25,000 orders a year and a four-hour freeze that is about eleven orders.

Agree the tolerance in advance and compare five totals on both sides: customers, products, variants, orders and gross revenue.

5. The redirect matrix

Magento URLs end in .html and include category paths and filter URLs; on Shopify products move to /products/ and categories to /collections/. Build one list of every URL that ever returned a page, from a crawl, the sitemaps and sixteen months of Search Console. Sort by clicks, then by referring domains. Everything with a click or a link gets a target chosen by a person; the rest gets a pattern rule. Search and filter URLs get a 410, never the homepage. A product that no longer exists goes to its collection. No redirect chains: old to new in one hop. The full step-by-step plan is in our guide to migrating from Magento to Shopify.

6. Launch is an hour, not a day

• T−7 days: decide whether rolling back is possible; set DNS TTL to 300 seconds 48 hours ahead.

• T−2 hours: go/no-go, one owner, four criteria.

• T−1 hour: the old store stops taking orders.

• T−0: DNS switch, password off.

• T+15 minutes: one paid order per payment method, then a refund.

• T+60 minutes: fifty old URLs by hand, then the full map.

• T+2 hours: compare counters with the same hour a week earlier.

Never on a Friday. We launch on a Tuesday morning, with the whole team on call for 72 hours.

7. The Silence Test and the first 90 days

A launch has succeeded when your customers notice nothing. For 72 hours five counters stay level with the same weekday a week earlier: orders per hour, checkout conversion, failed payments per method, 404s per 1,000 sessions and support tickets per 1,000 sessions. After that, hypercare runs 90 days: daily checks in weeks two to four, weekly in weeks five to twelve. The measure that counts afterwards is margin per visitor, the same months this year against last year. Revenue and sessions can look fine while returns and discounts eat the profit.

Dutch specifics to plan for

• iDEAL | Wero is used for 73% of Dutch online purchases (Betaalvereniging, first half of 2026), and iDEAL moves to Wero by the end of 2027. Put it first in the checkout and check how your new platform supports Wero.

• Reviews and trust marks such as Kiyoh and Thuiswinkel Waarborg have to return in the new store. Reviews only move through the importer of the review app you choose.

• Buy now, pay later falls under the new EU consumer credit rules (CCD2) from 20 November 2026, with credit and age checks.

• Accessibility: the European Accessibility Act applies to EU webshops since 28 June 2025. A migration is the moment to build that in, not to bolt it on later.

Mistakes we see, and made ourselves

• Moving the old store one to one. You pay for a new platform and get the old problems.

• Opening the scope after the freeze. This is how twelve weeks become twenty.

• Skipping the baseline. Search Console keeps sixteen months; the old platform's reports disappear with the licence.

• Sending old URLs to the homepage. Google reads that as a soft 404.

• Launching on a Friday. We did it once. Never again.

• Promising a date you cannot defend. Also one of ours.

• Stopping at launch. The first 90 days decide whether the move paid off.

Proof from our own work

Mason Garments moved from Magento to Shopify Plus with us, with B2C and B2B in one store. OGÉR moved from Magento to Shopify Plus and Shopify POS, with two ERP and WMS connectors and three custom POS apps; according to their CCO, revenue rose 45% after the launch. See Magento to Shopify migration for how we run these projects, and Shopify B2B for the B2B side.

Our view

The data points one way: Magento is losing stores in the Netherlands, and the deadlines for 2.4.4 to 2.4.7 force a decision within the next two years. That does not make switching right for everyone. If your custom logic is your edge and your team handles upgrades well, staying is a sound choice. As a Shopify Platinum Partner we are not neutral, so we say it openly: if your team wants to own code and hosting, Shopware can be a better fit than Shopify, and if your business depends on a product configurator or customer-specific B2B pricing, check the limits above before anything else. For everything else, the question is not whether to move, but when, and the answer is: decide early enough to do it properly.