Is Adobe Commerce Still Right for Your Business? A Practical Guide to Your Options

Over the past two years, we've helped six merchants migrate from Adobe Commerce to Magento Open Source. Each had their own reasons, but a pattern has emerged that's worth discussing honestly.

Adobe Commerce remains a powerful platform. For enterprise merchants with complex B2B requirements, sophisticated multi-site needs, and the budget to match, it delivers genuine value. But for mid-market merchants - those in the £1-30 million online turnover range where we've built our expertise - the calculation has changed.

This isn't about Commerce being a bad product. It's about fit.

The Changing Value Equation

When we talk to merchants considering their options, several themes come up repeatedly:

License costs have increased significantly. What was once a justifiable investment has, for some merchants, become difficult to reconcile with the value received. When you're paying substantial annual fees, you need to see substantial returns.

Platform evolution hasn't matched expectations. Merchants who've been on Commerce for years often feel the product hasn't developed in ways that justify the ongoing investment. The gap between what Commerce offers and what Open Source provides has narrowed in many practical respects.

Support experiences vary. Some merchants have had excellent support from Adobe. Others have found the experience frustrating, particularly when dealing with complex issues that require deep platform knowledge.

Feature utilisation is often low. This is perhaps the most telling point. Many Commerce merchants, when we audit their stores, aren't actually using the features that differentiate Commerce from Open Source. They're paying for capabilities they don't need.

The shift toward black-box services. Adobe is increasingly pushing merchants toward their SaaS services for catalogue management, search, and product recommendations. These are opaque, closed systems where you have little visibility into how they work or ability to fine-tune them for your needs. And frankly, they often underperform compared to specialist providers like Algolia, Klevu, or Nosto. When you're tied to Adobe's ecosystem, you lose the flexibility to choose tools that actually excel at what they do. With Open Source, you pick the best solution for each job.

When Commerce Makes Sense

To be clear: Adobe Commerce is the right choice for some merchants.

If you're operating complex B2B with sophisticated pricing rules, customer-specific catalogues, and quote workflows, Commerce's B2B capabilities are genuinely valuable. If you're running multiple brands across multiple regions with complex inventory and fulfilment requirements, the enterprise features earn their cost. If you're processing hundreds of millions in transactions and need Adobe's enterprise support and SLAs, that investment makes sense.

Commerce is increasingly positioned for enterprise merchants, and for that segment, it delivers.

When Open Source Might Be Better

For mid-market merchants - and this is where most of our customers operate - Open Source often provides everything needed at a fraction of the cost.

Modern Magento Open Source, properly implemented and hosted, is a robust, scalable platform. The extensions ecosystem is mature. The community is active. Performance, when paired with quality hosting, is excellent.

The savings from moving off Commerce can be substantial. We've seen merchants redirect those funds into actual development - new features, better integrations, improved customer experiences. Money that was going to licensing now goes into growing the business.

What Migration Actually Involves

If you're considering a move from Commerce to Open Source, here's what the process looks like:

Detailed audit first. We start by thoroughly reviewing your existing Commerce store - customisations, extensions, integrations, data structures. This helps us understand the true scope and identify any Commerce-specific features you're actually using. We've developed AI-assisted tooling that accelerates this phase significantly.

Migration planning. Based on the audit, we create a detailed plan covering data migration, code adjustments, timeline, and resources. No surprises.

Environment setup and data migration. We establish your new Open Source environment on quality hosting - we partner with CoreFinity for Magento hosting and consistently see excellent results. Products, customers, orders, and historical data migrate across.

Code and extension work. Custom functionality gets refactored for Open Source compatibility. Extensions get replaced with Open Source equivalents where needed. This is where having Magento expertise matters - we know where the gotchas are.

Thorough testing. Functional testing, performance testing, user acceptance testing. We don't go live until everything works correctly.

Deployment and support. The new store launches, and we're there to handle any post-migration issues.

Throughout this process, low risk and minimal disruption are the priorities. Your store keeps running. Your customers don't notice the transition. Revenue continues flowing.

Real Performance Improvements

One thing worth mentioning: we've moved several Commerce stores to CoreFinity hosting during these migrations and seen significant improvements in performance, stability, and reliability.

This isn't necessarily a Commerce limitation - it's often about the hosting environment. But when you're re-evaluating your platform, it's an opportunity to get hosting right too.

The Migration Audit

If you're weighing your options, we offer a Migration Audit for a fixed fee of £995.

This gives you a clear picture of what migration would involve for your specific store: scope, timeline, challenges, and benefits. It's low risk with no strings attached. If you decide to proceed, we apply the audit cost toward the overall project. If you decide Commerce is still right for you, you've gained valuable insight into your store either way.

We can be discreet. We don't need access to your production environment or your current agency's involvement. Either provide us with a copy of your codebase and a PII-stripped database export, or simply add us to your Commerce Cloud staging environment and we'll fetch everything we need. No awkward conversations required until you're ready.

The audit typically reveals whether migration makes financial sense for your business. Sometimes it does, clearly. Sometimes Commerce remains the right choice. Either way, you'll have the information to decide confidently.

Making the Right Decision

We're not here to convince you to leave Adobe Commerce. We're here to help you make the right decision for your business.

For some merchants, that means staying on Commerce and getting more value from the features you're paying for. For others, it means migrating to Open Source and redirecting savings into growth.

What matters is understanding your options clearly and choosing based on your actual situation - not assumptions about what you should be doing.

If you'd like to explore this further, or if you're interested in the Migration Audit, get in touch. We'll give you an honest assessment of what makes sense for your business.