Why mid-market brands are ditching Adobe Commerce for Magento Open Source

The annual Adobe Commerce Cloud license now exceeds $40,000 for many mid-market ecommerce brands. Over the past 14 months, three of our clients faced this price hike and asked the same question: Is switching to Magento Open Source worth the effort?

After completing all three migrations, we found that two projects succeeded while one failed. The difference came down to hidden dependencies, overlooked schema changes, and underestimated infrastructure work. This is the unfiltered breakdown of what actually changes—and what doesn’t—when you leave Adobe behind.

The licensing shift forcing brands to reconsider

For years, Adobe Commerce Cloud offered a straightforward value proposition: pay the license fee, get enterprise-grade hosting, automatic deployments, B2B tools, AI recommendations, and Adobe’s support. Infrastructure headaches vanished overnight.

That equation flipped in 2026. License costs have surged from $22,000 to $40,000+ on renewals. Meanwhile, Adobe’s roadmap prioritizes Adobe Experience Manager integrations over core Commerce features. Self-hosted solutions like Hypernode, MGT, and Cloudways now rival Adobe Cloud’s uptime and scalability.

Merchants aren’t migrating to save a few thousand dollars. They’re leaving because Adobe’s offering no longer aligns with their needs.

What remains unchanged under the hood

Both platforms run on the same Magento 2 framework. If your team lives in the codebase daily, these elements stay identical:

• Module structure and dependency injection via XML
• GraphQL and REST API endpoints
• Composer-based dependency management
• Admin panel layout and UI components
• Frontend stacks (Luma, Hyvä, PWA Studio, headless setups)
• bin/magento CLI commands

Calling this process a "migration" is misleading. You’re stripping away Adobe’s proprietary layer, not switching platforms. The core stays intact.

Where the migration breaks—technical realities most guides ignore

Most articles paint this as a smooth transition. Reality is messier. Specific failure modes emerge, and pretending they don’t exist leads to blown deadlines and budget overruns.

1. The silent schema landmine: row_id vs entity_id

Adobe Commerce adds row_id in core catalog tables (catalog_product_entity, catalog_category_entity) to power staging and preview features. Open Source sticks with entity_id.

Code that bypasses Magento’s Repository pattern to query these tables directly will fail silently after migration:

-- This will break after migration
SELECT * FROM catalog_product_entity WHERE row_id = 12345;

-- This continues working because it uses the Repository pattern
$product = $this->productRepository->getById(12345);

Across three projects, we uncovered ~40 instances where developers bypassed the Repository for "performance" reasons. Each required manual audit and rewrite. Budget for a full code review, not a search-and-replace.

2. The B2B Suite trap: no migration path exists

Adobe’s B2B Suite isn’t just another feature—it’s a deep architectural dependency. Company accounts, shared catalogs, quote workflows, requisition lists, and tiered pricing for corporate structures all live here.

If your store relies on B2B Suite, your options are grim:

• Rebuild from scratch (8-12 weeks of senior engineering time)
• Replace with paid third-party modules (Aitoc, Wyomind, Magexperts offer partial coverage)
• Drop the functionality entirely (acceptable in some cases, disastrous in others)

There is no clean migration path. Data exports are incomplete. Schema mappings don’t align. We’ve seen teams abandon projects in week two when they realize the trap.

3. Adobe Sensei ghosts: orphaned AI remnants

Sensei, Adobe’s AI recommendation engine, leaves behind orphaned database tables and broken admin pages if not cleaned up. Replacing these widgets isn’t plug-and-play:

• Self-hosted machine learning models
• Open-source recommendation modules (e.g., mgt-commerce/related-products, amasty/recommendations)
• Native Magento related products engine rebuilds

None are drop-in solutions. Budget 2-4 weeks for cleanup and replacement, regardless of which path you choose.

4. Page Builder content drift

Most Page Builder content survives migration—Open Source includes Page Builder too. The real issue lies with Commerce-Cloud-exclusive widgets tied to customer segments or staged content. These render as empty divs after the switch.

Audit every CMS page before go-live. Replace dynamic blocks with static content or third-party segmentation tools.

5. Hosting abstraction: the hidden DevOps tax

Adobe Cloud hides infrastructure complexity behind Fastly, Platform.sh, cron jobs, deploy hooks, and secrets management. These "just work" in the background. Switching to Hypernode or another provider forces you to confront them:

• Fastly VCL configurations → rebuild or migrate to Varnish
• .magento.app.yaml → integrate into CI/CD pipelines
• Adobe Cloud environment variables → adopt Vault or similar
• Cron jobs → manual provisioning or container scheduling
• Deploy hooks → custom GitHub Actions or GitLab CI scripts

Plan for ~2 weeks of dedicated DevOps work. Skipping this step guarantees outages.

The real cost comparison: 5-year TCO breakdown

Consider a mid-market store with $2-3 million in GMV. Here’s the honest 5-year total cost of ownership:

Adobe Commerce Cloud:

• License: $30,000/year × 5 = $150,000
• Hosting included
• Adobe support included
• Total = $150,000

Magento Open Source (post-migration):

• License: $0
• Hosting: $8,000/year × 5 = $40,000
• Developer/partner support: $20,000/year × 5 = $100,000
• One-time migration cost: $40,000–80,000
• Total = $180,000–220,000

The savings only materialize if your store doesn’t depend on Adobe’s proprietary features. Two-thirds of mid-market merchants overpay for unused capabilities. The other third discover too late that their business model relies on functionality Adobe has made prohibitively expensive.

Final verdict: migrate only if the math works

Magento Open Source isn’t a drop-in replacement for Adobe Commerce Cloud. It’s a stripped-down version of the same platform, where you inherit infrastructure responsibilities Adobe once handled. The framework, APIs, and admin panel stay familiar—but the hidden costs and technical pitfalls are real.

Before committing, ask three questions:

• Does our store depend on B2B Suite, Adobe Sensei, or Commerce Cloud-exclusive widgets?
• Can we afford 2-4 weeks of cleanup and rebuild time?
• Do we have DevOps capacity to manage infrastructure in-house?

If the answer to any of these is "no," the migration isn’t viable. If all three are "yes," the savings are real—and the Hyvä frontend ecosystem has matured enough to make the switch worthwhile.