Magento Open Source

Magento Open Source continues to be a mature, proven option for mid-size and large eCommerce projects that involve complex catalogs, multiple storefronts, or many external integrations. Magento may not be the best fit for every eCommerce project, but we still see cases where its flexibility matters more than the simplicity of a SaaS platform.

A smaller target market. According to BuiltWith, the number of shops using Magento has significantly decreased since 2018, its peak year. Small merchants have largely moved to SaaS platforms, which are faster to set up and simpler to manage. Mid-size projects with fewer custom requirements increasingly choose Shopware 6, particularly in the DACH region. As stores grow larger or more complex, however, Magento remains the stronger choice.

Hyvä is our go-to frontend for new projects. The Luma theme now seems outdated, and PWA Studio only gets maintenance updates. After our first production migration, we're now trialing Hyvä as our default for new Magento storefronts. It's built on Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS and has been free and open source since November 2025. Hyvä isn't the only modern option, though: for projects with a dedicated frontend team or a highly customized user experience, a headless frontend is still worth considering.

Maintenance is part of the deal. Each new yearly release may require a newer PHP version, a different search engine, and updated third-party modules, all of which must be tested together. Security adds to the workload: the zero-day vulnerability known as StyleSmuggler that emerged in September 2026 hit even fully patched stores until Adobe released a hotfix three days later. Ongoing monitoring and fast patching are part of running a Magento store, so plan for them from the start, in both the budget and the maintenance strategy.

A modernized core and an active community. Recent releases brought support for PHP 8.5, the transition from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch, and the replacement of the old Zend cache with Symfony Cache. New business features, however, mostly go into Adobe's paid products, Adobe Commerce and its cloud-hosted versions. This is where the community steps in. Mage-OS, a nonprofit distribution of Magento Open Source, released version 3.0 in May 2026 with features previously available only in Adobe Commerce, such as returns management (RMA) and an admin activity log. Together with Hyvä going open source, this shows that Magento Open Source keeps evolving beyond Adobe's own roadmap.

Our conclusion. With Hyvä giving it a modern frontend and a community that keeps developing the platform, we keep Magento Open Source in Adopt for projects where its strengths really pay off:

• large or complex catalogs;
• multiple websites, stores or languages;
• B2C and B2B operations on one platform;
• complex pricing and business logic;
• many integrations and customizations.

Looking to build or scale your Magento store? We'd love to help. Visit our Magento Development services page to learn more about how we work and get in touch.

Magento Open Source continues to be a mature and an extensible platform, suitable for everything from mid-sized online stores to complex, highly customized eCommerce solutions.

The default frontend stack remains relatively simple, based on PHTML, LESS, RequireJS, and jQuery, while still providing a solid base for functional sites.

For more demanding projects, it's possible to implement a Progressive Web Application storefront leveraging either REST or GraphQL APIs, built with either Magento's own React-based PWA Studio or with one of the 3rd-party frameworks (React, Vue.js).

However, all this comes at a higher baseline cost of development, maintenance, and operations, especially in comparison to smaller, less capable platforms. Still, Magento Open Source is in our top technology recommendations for projects where scale justifies cost, and where more sophistication is needed than lighter platforms may provide.

Magento 2.3 is a mature, fully-featured, open-source eCommerce platform with a vast community of developers, module vendors, and service providers.

Built on top of Zend Framework, it provides a stable, extensible base for building anything from a medium-sized, typical e-commerce store to a heavily customized shopping experience. Multiple integration options are available for integrating with external services, such as PIM, WMS, or ERP, using either SOAP or REST APIs. High scalability can be achieved with out-of-the-box support for multi-layer caching (Redis, Varnish) and asynchronous operations (RabbitMQ).

The default frontend stack relies on PHTML with LESS, jQuery, RequireJS, and Knockout.js, providing theme inheritance and allowing modules to easily plug into specific views. Implementing a Progressive Web Application storefront is also possible, leveraging either REST or GraphQL API, built with either Magento's own PWA Studio (React) or with one of the 3rd-party frameworks (React, Vue.js).

Magento comes with multiple extensive test suites, providing a solid solution for unit, integration, functional/acceptance, and performance test automation.

All this comes, however, at a fairly high operational cost - especially in comparison to smaller, less capable platforms. While Magento 2 can be run on cheap shared hosting, we wouldn't recommend such a setup for anything more than a test drive. For production deployment, a proper dedicated server (or multiple servers) should be configured with all supporting services (Redis, Varnish) to unleash the platform's full potential.