Magento

Open core commerce platform, free as Magento Open Source and licensed by revenue as Adobe Commerce

As of 30 August 2026, Magento is free to use. A self-hosted PHP commerce platform with a free edition and a paid Adobe edition that holds back B2B, merchandising and analytics. Softwr lists it under E-Commerce. Magento is made by Adobe Commerce (Magento), launched in 2008, available on Web.

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Overview

What Magento does

Magento is a PHP commerce platform now owned and published by Adobe. It exists in two editions. Magento Open Source is free to download and self-host. Adobe Commerce is the paid edition, licensed on bands of gross merchandise value rather than per seat or per server, and it is what most enterprise deployments actually run. This is open core rather than open source in the plain sense, and the distinction is the first thing to establish when someone says their store runs on Magento. What the paid edition holds back is not cosmetic. B2B functionality including company accounts, requisition lists and quoting, customer segmentation and targeted merchandising rules, content staging and preview, the Adobe analytics and business intelligence layer, and Adobe's search and product recommendation services are Commerce features. A merchant who builds on Open Source and then needs B2B is looking at a licence, not a module. The technical footprint is equally serious. A production Magento installation is not one PHP application but a stack including a search engine, a cache, a reverse proxy and a message queue, and sizing, running and upgrading that is a DevOps role rather than a hosting plan. It is bought by large catalogues, multi-brand and multi-region retailers and B2B sellers whose requirements genuinely exceed what SaaS will allow. The trade-off is total cost of ownership and the labour market. Minor version upgrades routinely break third party modules, so every upgrade is a regression testing project; the developer pool is small and expensive, so a specialist agency becomes a permanent line item; and Magento 1's end of life left merchants stranded on unsupported software, which is the precedent to keep in mind when assessing how long an Adobe-owned platform will support the edition you are on. The community has responded with the Mage-OS fork and with Hyva, a commercially licensed replacement front end that many agencies now treat as the default because the stock storefront stack is slow to work with.

What people use it for

A retailer with tens of thousands of SKUs and attribute-heavy catalogue logic that SaaS platforms restrict
A multi-brand or multi-region group needing separate websites, currencies and tax treatment from one back office
A B2B seller needing company accounts, negotiated pricing and quoting inside the storefront
An enterprise with an in-house or retained development team that treats commerce as owned software

The honest half

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Magento.

It is open core rather than open source, so B2B, customer segmentation, content staging and the Adobe analytics and recommendation services sit behind the Adobe Commerce licence, and discovering that mid-project converts a free platform into a revenue-banded contract.
The Adobe Commerce licence is priced on bands of gross merchandise value, so the platform bill increases as the store succeeds and is largely unrelated to the infrastructure or support you consume.
A production installation needs a search engine, a cache, a reverse proxy, a message queue and a database tuned together, so hosting is a DevOps engagement rather than a plan, and the first serious traffic event is where under-sizing becomes visible.
Minor version upgrades regularly break third party modules, so staying current means a regression testing and remediation project several times a year, and merchants who skip upgrades to avoid that end up running software with unpatched vulnerabilities.
The specialist developer market is small and expensive relative to other platforms, so an agency retainer becomes a permanent operating cost and losing that agency is a genuine business continuity problem rather than a procurement inconvenience.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Magento

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Magentovs
BigCommerce
BigCommerce: Enterprise ecommerce platform for ambitious merchants
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Square
Square: Powering the economy
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Shopkeep
Shopkeep: Cloud-based POS for small businesses
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Heartland Retail
Heartland Retail: Omnichannel retail management platform

Pricing

What Magento costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Magento Open Source

Free

Unlimited products
Multiple storefronts
Advanced marketing
Community support

Adobe Commerce

$20,000 /yr

All Open Source features
24/7 enterprise support
Managed cloud hosting
Advanced analytics
AI-powered recommendations

Capabilities

Features

Two editions
Magento Open Source is free and self-hosted; Adobe Commerce is licensed by gross merchandise value
Complex catalogue handling
Configurable, bundled and grouped products with attribute sets for large catalogues
Multi-store and multi-website
Several websites, stores and store views with separate pricing and content from one installation
Native B2B in the paid edition
Company accounts, requisition lists and quoting available only in Adobe Commerce
Multi-currency and multi-region
Per website currency, tax rules and price scope rather than a single global price list
Composer module system
Third party extensions installed and versioned through Composer
GraphQL and REST APIs
API coverage sufficient to run the platform headless behind a custom front end
Hyva and Mage-OS ecosystem
A commercial replacement front end and a community fork exist alongside the Adobe releases

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Magento free?

Magento Open Source is. Adobe Commerce is not, and it holds back B2B, segmentation, content staging and the Adobe analytics and recommendation layer. Establish which edition a requirement needs before you commit.

How is Adobe Commerce priced?

On bands of gross merchandise value, so the licence grows with revenue rather than with usage. Model it against your three year forecast, not this year's turnover.

What does it really cost to run?

Licence if applicable, plus tuned infrastructure, plus a specialist agency or in-house team. For most deployments the people and hosting exceed the licence.

Why do agencies keep mentioning Hyva?

The stock front end stack is slow to develop against, so Hyva, a commercially licensed replacement front end, has become a common default. It is another licence to budget for.

What happened with Magento 1?

It reached end of life and left merchants on unsupported, unpatched software facing a full replatform. It is the reference point for how long to assume support for any edition you adopt.

Behind it

Who makes Magento

Company: Adobe Commerce (Magento)
Based in: Los Angeles, CA

Keep looking

Where to go from Magento

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Magento, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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