Still on Magento 1? Here are the actual options
Magento 1 lost security patches in June 2020. A practical comparison of Magento 2, Shopify and BigCommerce, plus the real cost of staying put.
Adobe ended official support for Magento 1 in June 2020. That means no security patches, no compliance updates, and a growing gap between what your store does and what payment providers and browsers expect of it.
Stores still running it in 2026 are usually not there through neglect. They are there because the store works, the migration quote was large, and nothing has visibly broken yet. That is a defensible position right up until it is not, and the failure mode is typically a failed PCI assessment or a payment provider deprecating an integration, both of which arrive with a deadline attached.
What staying actually costs
The cost of staying is not zero, it is just deferred and hard to see on a budget line. Unpatched platforms accumulate known vulnerabilities, and Magento 1 vulnerabilities are extensively documented and actively scanned for. Third-party patch services exist and are genuinely useful, but they patch the core, not the extensions, and extensions are where a large share of real-world compromises originate.
The second cost is compounding integration debt. Payment providers, shipping carriers, and tax services deprecate old API versions on their own schedules. Each deprecation becomes a small emergency project, and the pool of developers willing to do Magento 1 work keeps shrinking while their rates keep rising.
Option one: Magento 2 or Adobe Commerce
The natural path if your requirements are genuinely Magento-shaped: complex catalogues, B2B pricing and requisition workflows, or heavy customisation you are not willing to give up.
Be clear that this is a rebuild, not an upgrade. Magento 1 and Magento 2 differ enough in architecture that themes and extensions do not carry over; data migrates, code does not. The official migration tooling handles catalogue, customer and order data reasonably well. Everything else is new work.
The version choice within Magento matters too. Magento Open Source is free to license and self-hosted. Adobe Commerce is licensed against gross merchandise value and adds B2B Commerce features, Page Builder, customer segmentation, and optional managed cloud hosting. For most merchants below a few million in annual online revenue without complex B2B requirements, Open Source is sufficient.
Option two: Shopify or Shopify Plus
A Magento to Shopify migration is the most common path for Magento 1 stores that have concluded their catalogue was never as unusual as their extension list suggested.
What you gain is that hosting, patching, PCI scope, and platform upgrades stop being your problem. What you give up is deep control over checkout (Shopify Plus offers Checkout Extensibility with defined extension points, not arbitrary override) and you accept a per-transaction cost structure if you do not use Shopify Payments.
This is a good fit for DTC and moderately complex B2B. It is a poor fit if your business logic genuinely requires overriding the order pipeline.
Option three: BigCommerce
Worth evaluating specifically if you are B2B-heavy, or if you want headless flexibility without operating the whole stack yourself. BigCommerce's B2B Edition covers company accounts, quoting and requisition lists natively, which on other platforms is often an extension or a custom build.
The trade-off mirrors Shopify's: a fixed core you cannot arbitrarily override, in exchange for not maintaining the platform.
How to choose without a six-month evaluation
The decision usually collapses to three questions, and they are worth answering honestly before anyone books a demo.
| Question | If yes | If no |
|---|---|---|
| Does your business logic require overriding checkout? | Magento 2 or Adobe Commerce | A SaaS platform is viable. Keep reading |
| Do you need company accounts, quoting, or contract pricing? | BigCommerce B2B Edition, or Adobe Commerce | Shopify becomes a strong candidate |
| Do you have in-house engineers to run a platform? | Self-hosted Magento is sustainable | SaaS removes a category of work you cannot currently staff |
Whichever way you go, protect the rankings
Magento 1 stores tend to have accumulated a decade of URLs, and a meaningful share of them still carry links. Crawl the site properly before designing the new URL structure, keep redirects to one hop, and verify product structured data survives the template rebuild.
This applies identically whether you move to Magento 2, Shopify, or BigCommerce. It is the most commonly skipped step and the most expensive one to fix afterwards.
Common questions
Is it safe to keep running Magento 1 with a third-party patch service?
It is safer than running unpatched, and it is not equivalent to being supported. Third-party services patch known core vulnerabilities, often quickly, and for some merchants they have genuinely bridged several years. The limitation is scope: they patch Magento core, not your extensions, and extension vulnerabilities account for a large share of real compromises on Magento 1 stores. There is also a compliance dimension separate from the technical one. If you are subject to PCI DSS, an assessor may treat an end-of-life platform as a finding regardless of what patching you have layered on top, and some payment providers now ask directly. Treat a patch service as a way to buy a controlled migration timeline rather than as an indefinite alternative to migrating. If you have been on one for more than about two years, you are no longer buying time, you are deferring a decision.
How much of our Magento 1 data actually migrates?
Catalogue, customers, and order history migrate reliably. Adobe's official Data Migration Tool handles these for a Magento 2 move, and every SaaS platform offers import routes for the same three entity types. What does not migrate is code: themes, custom modules, and extensions have to be rebuilt or replaced, because Magento 2 changed the architecture substantially and other platforms are different systems entirely. The awkward middle category is data your extensions created. Loyalty balances, subscription states, custom customer attributes, and anything stored in extension-specific tables all need individual decisions, and they are frequently discovered late because nobody thinks of them as data. Inventory those tables before you scope the project. In practice this category, not the core catalogue, is what makes migration estimates move after work has started.
Can we improve SEO during the migration rather than just preserving it?
Yes, and a replatform is one of the few moments where structural SEO changes are cheap because the templates are being rebuilt anyway. Sensible improvements to fold in: flattening deep category URL nesting, fixing faceted navigation that currently generates crawlable duplicate URLs, adding or correcting Product and Offer structured data, and moving content that was rendered client-side into the server response. What you should not do is redesign the URL structure and the content at the same time as changing platform, because if traffic moves you will not know which change caused it. Sequence it: migrate with URL parity and a clean redirect map, confirm rankings hold for a few weeks, then make structural changes deliberately. Doing both at once is the most common way a technically successful migration still produces a traffic drop nobody can explain.
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