For Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce merchants
Magento or Shopify? We only sell one of them.
HeadlineHQ builds Shopify storefronts. We do not sell Adobe Commerce licences and we do not sell Magento development, so every commercial incentive on this page points one way. That is exactly why the longest section on it argues for staying where you are.
Every date below comes from Adobe’s, Shopify’s or PHP’s own documentation, read on 19 August 2026, and each one is linked at the foot of the page. There is not a single figure here that we generated.
If the honest answer is stay, you will get that answer, and we will say who to call instead.
The conflict of interest, up front
- What we sell
- Shopify storefronts, built headless
- What we do not sell
- Adobe Commerce licences. Magento development.
- What this page is
- Judgement, dated. Not a portfolio.
The decision is rarely yours. It is a date.
Almost nobody wakes up wanting to change ecommerce platform. What happens is that a support window closes, a renewal lands, or an upgrade quote arrives with a number on it that makes somebody ask whether this is still the right platform at all. So start with the actual dates rather than with anybody’s opinion, including ours.
Adobe Commerce release lines, from Adobe’s own released-versions page, read on 19 August 2026. Scroll the table sideways for the later columns.
| Release line | General availability | Regular support ends | Extended support ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4.9 | 12 May 2026 | 31 May 2029 | — |
| 2.4.8 | 8 April 2025 | 31 May 2028 | — |
| 2.4.7 | 9 April 2024 | 31 May 2027 | 31 May 2028 |
| 2.4.6 | 14 March 2023 | 11 August 2026 | 31 August 2027 |
Adobe’s policy is a three-year standard support window from the general-availability date, with extended support adding quality and security patches for the core application after it. Read your own row and stop. If you are on 2.4.6, regular support ended on 11 August 2026 — before this page was written. If you are on 2.4.7, you have until 31 May 2027 on regular support and 31 May 2028 with extended.
Extended support security patches are available to Adobe Commerce customers only. They are not available for the Magento Open Source code base.
Adobe Experience League, security patch release notes
That sentence decides more migrations than any feature comparison, and it appears on almost none of the pages ranking for this question. If your plan for the renewal is to drop to Open Source, this is the clause to read twice.
There is a second clock underneath the first.
Your Magento version pins a PHP version, and PHP has its own end dates that nobody renews for you. A store that is comfortably inside Adobe’s window can still be sitting on a branch that stops receiving security fixes first.
From php.net, Supported Versions, read on 19 August 2026. Scroll the table sideways for the later columns.
| Branch | Active support | Security support ends |
|---|---|---|
| PHP 8.2 | ended 31 December 2024 | 31 December 2026 |
| PHP 8.3 | ended 31 December 2025 | 31 December 2027 |
| PHP 8.4 | 31 December 2026 | 31 December 2028 |
Three different problems wear the same clothes.
Every merchant we speak to about this arrives with the same sentence — “we are thinking about moving off Magento” — and underneath it there are three completely different problems with three different answers. Work out which one is yours before you take a single call from anyone selling a platform.
01 · The bill
The renewal is the problem.
You are not unhappy with the storefront. You are unhappy with what it costs to be allowed to keep running it. This is the case most often solved without changing platform at all — by changing edition, hosting or contract — and it is also the case most often converted into a migration by whoever picks up the phone.
02 · The build
What was built on top is the problem.
Slow pages, a checkout nobody wants to touch, a release that takes a fortnight. None of that is Magento. It is a specification, a team and five years of decisions, and all three follow you to the next platform unless something else changes with them. A migration is an expensive way to discover that.
03 · The model
The operating model is the problem.
Your catalogue, your pricing rules, your number of storefronts, your B2B accounts. This is the only one of the three where the platform is genuinely the answer — and it is also the one that can point either way, because the same question that sends one merchant to Shopify keeps the next one exactly where they are.
The section a Shopify agency has every reason to leave out
Five times we would tell you to stay on Magento.
None of these is a reason Magento is better. Each one is a specific capability you are using today that does not survive the move intact, or a cost you would pay twice. If one of them describes you, the burden of proof sits with whoever wants to move you.
01
You run several storefronts out of one catalogue.
Magento was built around websites, stores and store views inside a single installation, and merchants running a dozen locales or brands lean on that model hard. Shopify sells a store. Shopify Plus publishes nine online stores in the platform fee and charges a further monthly fee per store beyond that. If your answer to “how many storefronts?” is a number rather than one, price both sides before anyone shows you a demo.
02
Your pricing rules are the product.
Customer-group pricing, tier breaks, ERP-driven price books, quote-to-order, a rule that only applies to eleven accounts in the north. Shopify B2B gives you companies, catalogs, price lists and payment terms, and for a large share of wholesale businesses that is genuinely enough. If your rules do not fit that shape, you are not migrating them — you are rebuilding them as apps and Functions and then maintaining them forever.
03
Somebody in your building writes SQL against the database.
Not an integration. A person, with a query, answering a question the reporting screen cannot. Shopify is software as a service: you get APIs and exports, and you do not get the database. That capability does not migrate, and the people who rely on it are usually not in the meeting where the decision is made.
04
Checkout is where you actually differentiate.
Regulated flows, unusual duty and tax handling, a fulfilment promise that has to be computed before payment. Shopify’s checkout is Shopify’s. It is fast, it converts, and it is theirs: checkout.liquid and additional scripts were sunset for the Thank you and Order status pages on 28 August 2025, and script tags on those pages for non-Plus stores on 26 August 2026. You extend inside their boundary, on their schedule.
05
You are already on the newest release line.
2.4.9 reached general availability on 12 May 2026 and its regular support runs to 31 May 2029. If that is your version, the clock is not your reason to move, and a migration decided this quarter spends money to buy time you already own. Come back to the question when there is a second reason on the list.
Shopify’s nine-store allowance, the per-store fee beyond it and the 0.20% charged on third-party payment processors are published on Shopify’s own Plus pricing page, linked below, and were read on 19 August 2026 from India — the page is geo-resolved, so check the figure in your own market before you model anything.
Four times we would tell you to move.
Shorter than the list above, deliberately. These are the patterns where the platform really is the constraint rather than a symptom of something else.
01
Most of the spend keeps it alive rather than changing it.
Add up last year: patching, upgrade, hosting, security, extension renewals, the retainer that exists so somebody answers at 2am. Then add what you spent changing something a customer would notice. When the first number dwarfs the second for two years running, you are funding a platform rather than a business.
02
Nobody left can read the codebase.
The person who wrote the custom modules has gone, the agency that wrote the rest has moved on, and every quote you get now carries a discovery phase because nobody will price the unknown. That is not a platform problem in theory. In practice it is the most common real reason a Magento estate ends.
03
Your catalogue is ordinary and your traffic is spiky.
Simple products, a handful of variants, ordinary pricing, and three days a year where everything depends on the store staying up. You are paying for a platform whose entire advantage is handling complexity you do not have, and carrying the infrastructure risk yourself on the only days that matter.
04
The extension estate has become the platform.
Thirty paid modules, each with its own renewal, its own compatibility matrix and its own reason your last upgrade slipped. Before you move, list them and mark which are native on the other side. That list is the honest cost comparison, and it is the one nobody builds because it takes an afternoon.
If you have already decided and the question is now who does it, the practical problems start with the data a migration tool quietly drops — configurable products, tier pricing, customer group logic, the redirect map. That is a different page: what a Magento to Shopify migration actually involves.
On cost, the useful fact is which side publishes one.
Adobe publishes no list price.
There is no public price list for Adobe Commerce. Your figure depends on sales volume, deployment and negotiation, which means every licence number you have read in an agency blog came from somebody else’s contract — or from nobody’s. Treat all of them, including the ones with a chart attached, as hearsay until Adobe puts a number in front of you.
Shopify publishes one, with the term attached.
The Plus platform fee, the difference between the one-year and three-year term, the nine stores included, the monthly fee per store after that and the 0.20% on third-party payment processors are all on Shopify’s pricing pages. That does not make Shopify cheaper. It makes one side of your model readable and the other side a negotiation, and you should know which is which before you build the spreadsheet.
What is deliberately missing from this page
There is no migration price here, no timeline in weeks and no hours estimate.
We have not published one because we have not delivered a Magento project we could base it on, and a range copied out of another agency’s article is not evidence — it is their negotiation, reprinted. When we have a project of our own to instrument, the numbers will appear here with the instrument attached.
If the answer is stay, we are the wrong supplier.
We build on Shopify. We have not delivered a Magento or Hyvä project, and this page would be worth less if we pretended otherwise at the end of it. So here is what we would ask a Magento partner if we were hiring one on your behalf — three questions that separate the people who have finished an upgrade from the people who have quoted for one.
01
Ask which release line they would put you on, and why.
A supplier who answers with the newest number and nothing else has not read your extension list. The right answer names your version, your PHP, your paid modules and what each one does to the date.
02
Ask who owns the patch cadence after go-live.
Security patches arrive whether or not anyone has budgeted for them. Get the answer in the contract, with a named interval, before the first invoice rather than after the first advisory.
03
Ask them to walk you through an upgrade they finished.
Not a case study. A version, a month, what broke, and which vendor package fixed it. Anyone who has genuinely done one will enjoy the question.
And if the answer is move, the two things worth reading before you shortlist anyone are what we publish about headless Shopify builds and how we scope them and, because we are not in your country, what happens if it goes wrong across a border.
The questions that come up every time.
Is Magento being discontinued?
No. Adobe publishes release lines with dated support windows: 2.4.9 reached general availability on 12 May 2026 with regular support to 31 May 2029. What ends is support for the version you are on. That is a different question and it has a different answer for every merchant.
Can I drop the licence by switching to Magento Open Source?
You can drop the licence. Read what goes with it first. Adobe states that extended support security patches are available to Adobe Commerce customers only, and are not available for the Magento Open Source code base. Whether that trade is right depends on who patches your store and how quickly.
Does moving to Shopify make the upgrade problem go away?
It moves it rather than removing it. Shopify upgrades the platform for you, and it also deprecates on its own schedule without asking. checkout.liquid is the worked example: sunset for the Thank you and Order status pages on 28 August 2025, with script tags on those pages ending for non-Plus stores on 26 August 2026. You trade upgrade projects for deprecation notices.
Will Shopify handle our B2B pricing?
Shopify B2B gives you company profiles, catalogs, price lists and payment terms. Whether that covers your pricing is a question about your rules, not about Shopify. Write your five most awkward pricing rules on one page and test them against that list before anyone builds a proof of concept.
You sell Shopify. Why would you tell me to stay on Magento?
Because the decision is expensive in both directions, and a migration sold to a merchant who did not need one ends badly for both of us. If your answer is stay, we would rather be the second opinion you remember than the invoice you regret.
What does a migration cost?
We do not publish a number on this page, and we would be suspicious of one that appeared without your catalogue in front of it. Adobe publishes no list price for Adobe Commerce, so any licence figure quoted to you comes from a negotiation the author was not in. Shopify does publish its platform fee, which means one side of your model can be read rather than guessed.
Every dated claim on this page, and where it came from.
What it supports
Source
Read
Release dates and support end dates for 2.4.6 to 2.4.9
Adobe Experience League — Released versions
19 Aug 2026
The three-year standard support window, and what extended support adds
Adobe Experience League — Software lifecycle policy
19 Aug 2026
Extended support security patches exclude Magento Open Source
Adobe Experience League — Security patch release notes
19 Aug 2026
Support dates move when a vendor decides they move. Check your own row against the source before you spend anything on the strength of it.
Send the version number and the extension list.
Two things, in one email: which release line you are on, and the list of paid modules you renew. That is enough for us to tell you whether the date is actually forcing your hand, and it costs you nothing whichever way the answer falls.
You will get a written answer with the dates in it. If it says stay, it says stay.