Magento to Adobe Commerce Migration in 2026: The Complete Guide

Still running Magento? You're not alone — and you're not out of time. But the window to migrate on your own schedule, rather than in response to a breach or a failed audit, is getting smaller every month.

This guide covers everything you need to make a confident decision: the four migration paths available in 2026, realistic cost ranges, honest timelines, what typically goes wrong, and how to pick the right approach for your situation.

No fluff. No upsell. Just the information that actually helps.

Why 2026 Is the Year Most Merchants Are Finally Moving

The honest answer isn't one thing. It's three pressures that have been building for years — and have now reached a tipping point.

1. The Security Situation Has Become Impossible to Ignore

Independent e-commerce security researchers who have tracked Magento and Adobe Commerce attacks since 2015 document an unbroken escalation of mass exploitation campaigns:

• Mid-2024 · CosmicSting (CVE-2024-34102): Seven competing attacker groups compromised 5% of all Adobe Commerce and Magento stores in a single summer campaign. High-profile brands across retail, manufacturing, and consumer goods were among the victims — names most merchants would recognise.

• Late 2025 · SessionReaper (CVE-2025-54236): Automated attacks probed or targeted over 50% of all Magento stores globally within weeks of public disclosure. By November 2025, security researchers showed 81% of all stores had been visited by a SessionReaper probe — unpatched stores faced near-certain exposure.

• March 2026 · PolyShell: Security researchers detected 471 stores compromised in a single hour as attackers exploited the vulnerability at scale.

Adobe ended all security patching for Magento 1 in June 2020. Every vulnerability discovered since is permanently unpatched on that platform. That's not a footnote in a compliance document — it's an active, documented business risk that compounds with every campaign that runs.

2. The Compliance Environment Tightened

PCI DSS 4.0 requirements came into full effect in 2025. Merchants running end-of-life or significantly outdated software now face genuine exposure during audits — not a theoretical risk that a sympathetic auditor used to be able to work around.

3. The Competitive Gap Is Now Visible in Revenue

Merchants who migrated two or three years ago are running AI-powered search, rep-free B2B buying workflows, personalised experiences, and deep marketing platform integrations that simply aren't replicable on legacy infrastructure. The gap has stopped being about future capability. It's showing up in conversion rates and customer retention right now, and the distance is growing, not shrinking.

The Four Migration Paths: Which One Is Yours?

"Migrating to Adobe Commerce" covers four meaningfully different projects. Getting clear on which path applies to you is the most important decision before any scoping or budgeting begins — and the one most merchants skip too quickly.

Path 1: Magento 1 → Adobe Commerce

Who this is for: Merchants still running Magento 1 in production — more common than you'd expect, particularly in B2B manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale sectors.

The most important thing to understand upfront:

This is a rebuild, not an upgrade.

Magento 1 and Adobe Commerce are architecturally incompatible. What migrates is your data — product catalogs, customer records, order history. What doesn't migrate is everything else: themes, extensions, custom modules, business logic. All of it must be rebuilt for Adobe Commerce's architecture from scratch.

Based on Vovance's experience across M1 migration projects, merchants who enter the project expecting an upgrade consistently overrun their initial budget by 40% or more — not because the platform is difficult, but because the scope was misunderstood at the outset. Scope it as a rebuild with data migration included, and you'll plan far more accurately.

What makes B2B migrations more complex:

• Customer-specific pricing and catalog rules

• Approval workflows and quote management

• ERP integration for real-time inventory and pricing

• Account hierarchies and role-based permissions

These need to be scoped explicitly from the start. They affect architecture decisions and timeline in ways that standard B2C migrations don't — and they're where project costs most commonly exceed initial estimates.

Typical timeline: 4–12 months

Path 2: Adobe Commerce Version Upgrade + Modernisation

Who this is for: Merchants already on Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) but running a version behind the current release line — more widespread than most teams want to admit.

Staying on older versions means missing security patches, PHP compatibility improvements, and access to newer platform features. The further behind you fall, the harder each subsequent upgrade becomes.

The single biggest risk: Extension incompatibility.

It's the leading cause of failed and overrun upgrade projects. In Vovance's project experience, extension-related issues are responsible for the majority of mid-build delays on upgrade engagements — and almost all of them were identifiable in advance with a proper pre-upgrade audit. Every extension needs to be checked against the target version before development starts, not discovered incompatible mid-sprint.

The front-end opportunity: Many teams use a version upgrade as the trigger to modernise the front end at the same time. The legacy Luma theme carries real performance limitations that affect Core Web Vitals scores and, consequently, conversion rates. Hyvä — a modern Adobe Commerce front-end framework — has become the go-to choice for merchants who want materially better performance without committing to a full headless architecture.

Typical timeline: 2–6 months for the upgrade; add 2–4 months if front-end modernisation is included

Path 3: Adobe Commerce PaaS → Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS)

Who this is for: Merchants on Adobe Commerce Cloud (PaaS) evaluating Adobe's newer, fully managed SaaS model.

Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS) is architecturally different from PaaS in one critical way that every merchant needs to understand clearly before committing: Adobe manages the core application entirely. The platform is versionless — no more major upgrade projects to plan, fund, and execute. In exchange, all customisations must be built using Adobe App Builder. In-process extensions are not supported; they must be rebuilt as out-of-process extensions.

The honest trade-off:

Neither the benefits nor the constraints are small. This decision deserves careful scoping — not a default yes because "managed sounds easier."

Typical timeline: 3–10 months depending on customisation depth

Path 4: Headless and Composable Commerce

Who this is for: Enterprise merchants who need distinct front-end experiences across multiple channels, front-end performance beyond what standard themes deliver, or the ability to iterate on the front end independently of back-end releases.

In a headless setup, Adobe Commerce handles the back end — catalog, pricing, checkout, order management — while a separately built front end connects via APIs. Composable commerce extends this further, assembling best-of-breed services via API rather than relying on a single platform for everything.

What actually changes: Everything about how the front end is built, deployed, and operated. This isn't a conventional platform migration — it's an architectural transformation requiring mature DevOps practices, experienced front-end engineering, and sustained operational investment.

The thing most vendors won't say plainly: If your primary driver is security, compliance, or access to better B2B features, a well-executed version upgrade or ACCS migration will serve you better than a headless transformation. Headless earns its complexity only when the use case genuinely demands it — not because it sounds more forward-looking.

Typical timeline: 6–18 months

What Actually Goes Wrong (And How to Prevent It)

Every experienced migration team has a version of this list. These are the patterns that most reliably cause overruns — drawn from Vovance's delivery experience across Adobe Commerce projects of varying complexity.

Extensions take longer to replace than anyone plans for. 

Not every Magento 1 extension has a direct Adobe Commerce equivalent. Evaluating, selecting, configuring, and testing replacements — or building custom modules where no equivalent exists — is consistently underestimated at scoping. Audit your full extension list before scoping begins, not during the build.

Integration complexity surfaces late. 

ERP and OMS integrations that appeared straightforward often reveal undocumented edge cases during development. A business rule that exists as tribal knowledge rather than documented logic is one of the most common culprits. The earlier integration complexity gets scoped in detail, the fewer expensive surprises mid-build.

SEO continuity isn't planned until it's too late. 

URL structure changes, 301 redirect mapping, metadata parity, sitemap handling — all of it needs to be explicitly scoped and executed. Merchants who treat SEO migration as an afterthought can see significant, sometimes prolonged, drops in organic traffic in the weeks following launch.

QA gets compressed when timelines slip. 

It happens on nearly every project that runs late: testing gets squeezed to hit the launch date. Budget QA as a fixed, protected allocation from day one — not whatever time happens to be left at the end.

"It's just a data migration" is never true. 

Data migration is one workstream. Theme rebuilds, extension replacements, integration re-architecture, and testing typically represent 70–80% of total project effort. The data is often the easy part.

How to Choose the Right Path

Start with one honest question: what is actually forcing this migration right now?

• Security or compliance pressure → Magento 1 migration or version upgrade, scoped for the shortest defensible path to a supported, patched platform

• Version obsolescence on Magento 2 → Version upgrade, with front-end modernisation evaluated separately based on the actual performance gap

• Infrastructure overhead and upgrade fatigue → ACCS migration, with an upfront assessment of customisation refactoring scope

• Multi-channel expansion or front-end performance ceiling → Headless evaluation — but only after an honest DevOps capability assessment first

• B2B self-serve or AI personalisation requirements → Any path above can support these; they shape architecture choices, not the fundamental path selection

The path that looks most ambitious is rarely the most appropriate. The path that gets you to a supported, well-maintained platform — fastest, with the least risk — typically delivers more measurable business value in year one than the path optimised for year three.

Planning a Magento to Adobe Commerce migration? Vovance works with B2B and enterprise merchants on migrations of every complexity — from straightforward version upgrades to full enterprise rebuilds with ERP integration. Get in touch and let's scope your specific situation before you commit to anything.

FAQ: Magento to Adobe Commerce Migration in 2026

Is Magento 1 still receiving security updates from Adobe? 

No. Adobe ended all official support and security patching for Magento 1 in June 2020. Every vulnerability discovered since is permanently unpatched on that version. Sansec's ongoing research confirms that legacy Magento installations remain active, high-priority exploitation targets in 2026.

Can my data be migrated from Magento 1? 

Yes — products, customers, and order history can be migrated using Adobe's Data Migration Tool and compatible third-party utilities. Themes, extensions, and custom code cannot be migrated; they must be rebuilt for Adobe Commerce's architecture. This is why experienced partners scope M1 projects as rebuilds, not transfers.

What is the difference between Adobe Commerce PaaS and ACCS? 

PaaS is a shared-responsibility model — Adobe hosts the infrastructure, but merchants manage application code, upgrades, and patching. ACCS is fully managed by Adobe — versionless and continuously updated — with all customisations built via Adobe App Builder. Adobe's official migration documentation covers the full architectural comparison.

What is the most common cause of migration cost overruns? 

Extension incompatibility and integration complexity — consistently, across project types and team sizes. Based on Vovance's project experience, these two factors are responsible for the majority of budget overruns on Adobe Commerce migration engagements. Both are manageable when surfaced in a pre-migration audit before development begins.

Do I need to go headless to get the most from Adobe Commerce? 

No. Headless delivers real benefits for specific, well-defined use cases — multi-channel experiences, front-end performance at scale, independent front-end iteration. For most merchants, a well-executed version upgrade or ACCS migration with modern tooling like Hyvä delivers significant, measurable improvements without the operational complexity headless introduces.

How does B2B migration differ from B2C? 

B2B migrations are more complex in almost every dimension: customer-specific pricing and catalogs, approval workflows, quote management, account hierarchies, and ERP integrations for real-time inventory and pricing. These must be scoped explicitly at the start — they affect architecture decisions and timeline in ways standard B2C migrations don't.

Is there a way to migrate in phases rather than all at once? 

Yes — and for complex environments it's often the right approach. Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service supports phased and incremental migration approaches. You can migrate data, customisations, and integrations in stages rather than as a single big-bang cutover. This reduces launch risk but requires careful orchestration to manage data synchronisation between environments during the transition period.