Platform guide
Magento: what it costs, what it can do and when you outgrow it
Published on
Marco Lemmens
Magento is the open source e-commerce platform known in its paid form as Adobe Commerce. The software is free, owning it is not: a serious Magento store costs 500 to 2,500 euros a month in hosting, maintenance and developer hours. Below are the real costs, the strengths, the pain points and the honest answer to when switching pays off.
What exactly is Magento?
Magento is not a subscription service and not a plugin for a website, but a complete e-commerce framework that you host and manage yourself. It has been around since 2008, grew into the default platform for serious online stores and has been owned since 2018 by Adobe, which paid 1.68 billion dollars for it. Anyone saying "Magento" today means Magento 2: the first generation received its final update in June 2020.
The platform comes in two flavours. Magento Open Source is free to download and use. Adobe Commerce is the paid version with a B2B suite, support and cloud services, priced through a licence that scales with your revenue. Since June 2025 there is a third route: Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, a full SaaS variant in which Adobe runs the technology and customisation no longer happens in the PHP code itself. That newest branch says a lot about where Adobe is heading, and we will come back to it below.
The scale is still considerable. According to platform tracker Storeleads, over 104,000 active stores run on Magento as of mid 2026, more than 5,500 of them in the Netherlands. That makes the Netherlands the fourth-largest Magento country in the world, after the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. No coincidence: for a decade Magento was the default choice here for every store that outgrew its starter package, and a good share of that generation still runs on it.
What does Magento really cost?
Adobe does not publish a price list: the Adobe Commerce licence is quoted per merchant and scales with your revenue. The figures below are therefore partly market rates as we encounter them in quotes and benchmarks in August 2026, excluding VAT. For most stores the top half of the table applies: they run on the free Magento Open Source.
| Item | Expect | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Magento Open Source | € 0 | The software itself: open source, free to install |
| Hosting | € 50 to € 500+ p/m | Magento demands a heavy server with OpenSearch, Redis and preferably Varnish |
| Build or rebuild | € 25,000 to € 100,000+ | Agency hours; the amount of custom work sets the range |
| Extensions | € 0 to € 2,000+ p/y | Marketplace modules, increasingly on yearly licences |
| Maintenance and patches | € 500 to € 2,500+ p/m | Monthly security patches and quarterly upgrades are developer work |
| Adobe Commerce licence | from ± $ 22,000 p/y | Paid version only; the cloud variant starts around $ 40,000 and scales with revenue |
Added up: a well-kept Magento store costs between 500 and 2,500 euros a month in hosting, licences and maintenance, before any new functionality. Adobe Commerce plays in a different price class altogether and, with a licence from around 22,000 dollars a year, only makes sense for large stores with complex processes.
The item the table does not show is the most important one: on Magento, every change goes through a developer. Moving a block on the homepage, adding a shipping rule, a misbehaving integration: it is all billable hours of a specialist. That is not a flaw but a design choice, because precisely that openness enables the custom work Magento is praised for. You just have to pay for it every month.
Where Magento shines
An honest review starts with what is right, and Magento does things no rented platform will give you:
Unlimited custom work
Magento is a framework: every line of code can be changed, every process can be rebuilt. If your business works differently from the standard, the platform bends to you instead of the other way around. That is why such remarkable stores run on it.
Multiple stores on one installation
Multi-store sits at the heart of the system: different brands, countries and catalogues run from one backend with one product database. For companies with several labels this has been the selling point for fifteen years.
Built for complex catalogues and B2B
Customer groups, tiered pricing, configurable products and bundles are part of the core. Adobe Commerce adds a full B2B suite on top, with company accounts, quotes and requisition lists.
Full ownership and control
The code lives on your server, the database is yours and no platform can impose rules, retire features or raise prices on you. If you refuse to rent on principle, this is the argument.
No revenue share
Magento charges no percentage per order. You only pay your payment provider, at their own rate.
Do you have an in-house development team or a trusted agency, does your custom work demonstrably earn itself back, and does the store run fast and stable? Then there is little wrong with Magento and this article is mostly reassurance.
Where it starts to strain
Magento's pain points are not hidden defects. They are the flip side of the same openness, and unlike on most platforms you do not feel them only as you grow, but every single month:
Every change is developer work
What a merchant clicks together on a rented platform is a ticket to the agency on Magento. Small wishes wait for the next sprint, and the invoice counts in hours. The freedom of the framework is paid for in dependence on the people who operate it.
The patch cycle never stops
Adobe ships security patches monthly and larger updates quarterly, and someone has to test and apply them. The most notorious skimming attacks on online stores are called Magecart for a reason: outdated Magento stores are the favourite target of credit card skimmers worldwide.
Upgrades are projects
A version jump on Magento is not a button but a project: extensions have to come along, custom code has to be rewritten and tested. Expect days to weeks of agency hours per major upgrade. Postpone that for a few years and you are effectively facing a rebuild.
The standard frontend is from another era
The bundled Luma frontend dates from 2015 and is slow by any modern standard. The alternative Hyvä makes Magento stores demonstrably fast, but it is a rebuild of your entire frontend, and therefore another investment of thousands of euros.
Hosting and speed are a specialist trade
OpenSearch, Redis, Varnish, cron jobs and indexers: the stack that keeps Magento running demands serious servers and someone who understands them. A slow Magento store is the rule rather than the exception in practice, and slow demonstrably costs conversion.
Adobe's attention sits at the top end
The innovation goes to Adobe Commerce and, since June 2025, mainly to the SaaS variant, in which the PHP customisation layer does not even exist. Magento Open Source mostly receives security maintenance; new features have become rare. The fact that the community started its own fork, Mage-OS, to safeguard the open source platform says enough.
Magento specialists are getting scarce and expensive
The pool of developers who truly master the platform shrinks along with the market, and rates rise accordingly. Lose your regular Magento developer and you will notice how few people can take over.
How is the platform doing?
Two things are true at once, and you deserve to know both. Magento is maintained and the world around it is alive: Adobe ships its patches and releases on schedule, the frontend renewal Hyvä has been free and open source since November 2025, and the community fork Mage-OS publishes its own releases that develop the platform independently of Adobe. This is not a dead platform; over a hundred thousand stores run on it.
At the same time, every number points the same way. Storeleads counts fourteen percent fewer active Magento stores in mid 2026 than a year earlier, the sharpest decline among the major platforms, and the slide has been going on for years. Meanwhile Adobe steers its customers towards its own cloud, where the revenue is and where classic Magento custom code cannot follow. For you as a merchant that is no reason to panic, but it is a direction to weigh: developers are getting scarcer, extension builders are shifting their attention, and new features from payment providers and marketplaces land on the growing platforms first.
Magento or Shopify?
The question is not which platform can do more, but who does the work and what that costs. Side by side:
| Magento | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Open source, free; Adobe Commerce from ± $ 22,000 p/y | € 21 to € 289 p/m, Plus from € 2,100 |
| Hosting and security | Your responsibility, heavy stack | Included, scales automatically |
| Transaction fees | Only your payment provider | Payment provider plus 0.2 to 2% surcharge with an external PSP |
| Maintenance and updates | Monthly patches, developer work | Handled by the platform |
| Custom work | Unlimited, everything is code | Within theme and apps; checkout customisation on Plus |
| Multiple stores and countries | Multi-store from one backend, self-managed | Markets, currencies and languages built in |
| B2B | Strong: built into Adobe Commerce, via extensions on Open Source | Built in on Plus, with custom work below it too |
| Making a change | A ticket to your agency | Mostly yourself, no developer needed |
| Data ownership | Full, your own database | Platform manages it, export always possible |
Where Magento wins: unlimited custom work, multiple stores from one backend, full control over code and data, and on Adobe Commerce a B2B layer that handles the heaviest requirements. Where Shopify wins: all the upkeep off your plate, a checkout built for conversion, changes you make yourself and international selling without your own server park.
And total cost? Here the gap is larger than the price tags suggest, just the other way around than you would think. "Free" Magento easily costs a serious store double a Shopify subscription with apps, because hosting, patches and developer hours count through every month. The real difference is what a change costs: on Magento, hours of a specialist; on Shopify, usually an afternoon of your own time. What required custom work in 2016, B2B, multilingual, filters, bundles, sits in a standard platform in 2026, with a B2B layer on top.
Stay or switch: how to decide
Stay on Magento if you have an in-house development team or a trusted agency and the custom work is your store's reason for being, if you run Adobe Commerce and the B2B suite earns its licence, or if you have just invested in a Hyvä frontend and the store runs fast and stable. A migration costs 8,000 to 20,000 euros with us, and that investment has to solve a problem you actually have. Without that problem, switching is a waste of money, however much we would like you as a client.
Switching becomes logical as soon as one of these situations sounds familiar:
- You pay structurally for standing still: invoices every quarter for patches and upgrades that bring your store nothing new, they only keep it running.
- The developer or agency from back then has left and nobody fully oversees the system anymore; every change feels like operating without an X-ray.
- You are facing a rebuild anyway, because the outdated frontend needs replacing or a major version jump has been postponed too long. If it has to be redone regardless, this is the moment to compare platforms.
- Your custom work of the past has become standard: what once justified a framework, a modern platform now does out of the box.
- You want to run a business, not infrastructure. The hours and euros now going into servers and patches, you would rather put into buying, marketing and customers.
What comes along in a switch, and what does not?
The question behind every migration is what you lose. The honest answer: less than you fear, but not nothing.
Products come along
Including variants, prices, stock levels, images and copy. Categories become collections, and configurable products get their Shopify equivalent.
Customers and order history come along
Your customers find their details and previous orders in the new store, including customer groups where they exist.
Passwords do not come along
They are stored encrypted and cannot be transferred in any platform migration. Customers set a new password at their first login; we prepare that message together.
Multi-store is redesigned
If you run several stores or countries from one Magento backend, we determine up front what becomes a market within one Shopify store and what deserves a store of its own. This is the most important design decision of the project.
Your rankings come along, provided you arrange it
Magento URLs and Shopify URLs differ fundamentally, so every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new address. With us that redirect plan is a fixed part of every migration, not an option.
Extensions do not come along, their function does
We list every extension and every piece of custom code: what Shopify does out of the box, what becomes an app and where custom work remains. Usually less is left than you think.
Your theme deliberately does not come along
A Magento theme cannot be transferred. That is not a loss but the moment to build a store that does not look like the platform it runs on.
The full approach, from extension audit to launch, is on our page about migrating from Magento to Shopify.
What a switch costs and how it works
A migration is not a matter of an export button. We first take stock of your extensions, your custom code, your store structure and your URLs, and determine the Shopify equivalent for each part. Then we build the store, migrate products, customers and orders, and give every old URL its 301 redirect. Your Magento store keeps selling until launch day; you do not miss a day of revenue.
Expect 8,000 to 20,000 euros for a regular store, and up to 60,000 euros once B2B functionality, an ERP integration or a very large catalogue is involved, and with Magento stores that is the case more often than not. After the audit you get one fixed price. Our platform-by-platform approach is on the page about migrating your store to Shopify, and the complete story of this specific switch, with pricing and frequently asked questions, is on the page about the Magento to Shopify migration.
Not sure your current store is the problem? Have it checked first, free of charge. Our free store analysis scans your store live for speed, SEO, accessibility, security and checkout, and works on any store, Magento included. Within two minutes you have a report with concrete improvements.
Frequently asked questions about Magento
The software is free, owning it is not: for a serious store, expect 50 to 500 euros a month for hosting and 500 to 2,500 euros a month for maintenance, patches and developer hours. Adobe Commerce, the paid version, starts on top of that at around 22,000 dollars a year in licence fees.
Magento Open Source is: the software is free to download and use. Owning it is not: hosting, extensions, security patches and above all developer hours cost money every month. The paid version, Adobe Commerce, uses a revenue-based licence starting around 22,000 dollars a year.
The same technical base, a different box. Magento Open Source is free and bare; Adobe Commerce is the paid version with a built-in B2B suite, extra marketing features, support and cloud services. Since June 2025 there is also Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, a SaaS variant in which Adobe manages the entire stack.
According to platform tracker Storeleads, over 104,000 active stores worldwide as of mid 2026, fourteen percent fewer than a year earlier. More than 5,500 of them are in the Netherlands, making it the fourth-largest Magento country after the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
There is no announcement that Magento is stopping, and Adobe ships security patches monthly. But the innovation goes almost entirely to Adobe Commerce and the 2025 SaaS variant; Magento Open Source mostly receives maintenance. That is why the community founded Mage-OS, a fork that develops the open source platform independently of Adobe.
Mage-OS is the community fork of Magento Open Source, founded to give the platform a future that does not depend on Adobe's priorities. It follows Adobe's security patches within days with releases of its own and adds improvements itself, such as support for newer PHP versions. For merchants it is a safety net, not an obligation.
Hyvä is a modern frontend for Magento 2 that replaces the outdated default frontend Luma and makes pages four to five times faster. Since November 2025 it is free and open source. It genuinely fixes the speed problem, but it is a rebuild of your entire frontend, and therefore an investment of thousands of euros in agency hours.
Technically yes, practically rarely. The maintenance burden is the same for every Magento store: the same patches, the same heavy hosting, the same developer dependence, whether you ship ten orders a day or a thousand. A small store carries those fixed costs without the revenue to justify them, and is almost always better off on a rented platform.
Magento is ownership: open source software on your own server, unlimited custom work and multi-store, but also your own responsibility for hosting and patches, with every change going through a developer. Shopify is rent: the platform does the upkeep, you make most changes yourself, and custom work moves within theme and apps. The choice is between freedom with a maintenance burden and convenience within limits.
