The answer in one paragraph
Magento and Adobe Commerce are not two rival platforms: they are two editions of the same product. Magento Open Source is the free edition and Adobe Commerce is the commercial one. They run on the same core and share architecture, APIs and module ecosystem. The difference is what each one gives you out of the box: Adobe Commerce includes native B2B, Page Builder, Business Intelligence, AI-powered Live Search and official Adobe support with an SLA. In Magento Open Source, all of that is solved with third-party modules you have to integrate and maintain.
Why there are two names: the timeline
Nearly all of the confusion comes from the fact that for thirteen years “Magento” named both the product and the company, and since 2021 it names only one of the two editions. Here is the sequence.
Magento launches as an open-source ecommerce platform and becomes the de facto standard for stores that needed more flexibility than the closed solutions of the day could offer.
Magento 2 ships, a deep rewrite of the architecture. Migrating from Magento 1 was anything but trivial, and that break still explains why legacy stores are out there running today.
Adobe acquires Magento for 1.68 billion dollars and begins integrating it into Adobe Experience Cloud.
Magento 1 reaches end of life in June. It stops receiving security patches.
Adobe rebrands the commercial edition as Adobe Commerce. The free edition keeps the name Magento Open Source. This is the moment the two names stop being synonyms.
Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce coexist on the same core, alongside the deployment options (Cloud or self-hosted) and the SaaS line with Edge Delivery Services.
The three things with confusingly similar names
Two editions and one deployment model. Telling them apart is half the decision.
Magento Open Source
FreeThe edition with no license fee. It ships the full ecommerce core: catalog, checkout, promotions, multi-store, API. Operations — hosting, patching, upgrades, monitoring — are on you or on your partner.
When it applies: Catalogs and volumes that do not demand native B2B or advanced analytics, with the technical capacity to sustain the maintenance.
Adobe Commerce
CommercialThe same core plus the capabilities Adobe reserves for the paid edition: native B2B, Page Builder, Business Intelligence, AI-powered Live Search and Product Recommendations, content staging and official support with an SLA.
When it applies: B2B or mixed operations, large catalogs, personalization at scale, and teams already running other pieces of Adobe Experience Cloud.
Adobe Commerce Cloud
Deployment modelNot a third product: it is Adobe Commerce with the infrastructure operated by Adobe on AWS — provisioning, scaling, platform patching and infrastructure support included.
When it applies: Teams that would rather not sustain an in-house DevOps practice and accept less control over the infrastructure in exchange.
On top of this sits Adobe's SaaS line, with Edge Delivery Services and Adobe Commerce Optimizer, which changes both the deployment and the frontend model. We cover it separately in Adobe Commerce SaaS and Edge Delivery.
Comparison table: Magento Open Source vs Adobe Commerce
| Feature | Magento Open Source | Adobe Commerce |
|---|---|---|
| License | Free (OSL-3.0) | Commercial, quoted by GMV |
| Code core | The same | The same |
| B2B: corporate accounts and quotes | Third-party modules | Native |
| Customer-specific price lists | Third-party modules | Native |
| Purchase approval workflows | Third-party modules | Native |
| Visual Page Builder | No | Yes |
| Adobe Business Intelligence | No | Yes |
| Live Search with Adobe Sensei | No | Yes |
| AI Product Recommendations | No | Yes |
| Content and price staging | No | Yes |
| Official support | Community | Adobe, with a contractual SLA |
| Security patches | Community, with variable lag | Prioritized, with an SLA |
| Third-party module ecosystem | Massive | The same, massive |
| Multi-store and multi-site | Yes | Yes |
| Native Experience Cloud integration | Limited | Analytics, Target, RT-CDP, AEM |
| Typical profile | Teams with in-house engineering or a partner | Enterprise and complex B2B |
What actually changes when you move to the commercial edition
The table says what is missing; this explains how much it weighs. Ordered by the impact we see in real projects, not by the order of Adobe's feature list.
Native B2B. This is the difference that settles the decision most often. Corporate accounts with several buyers, negotiated price lists per customer, restricted catalogs, quotes and approval workflows. In Magento Open Source all of it exists through third-party modules, and the cost is not the module license: it is sustaining that integration through every core upgrade.
Search. Live Search with Adobe Sensei replaces native search, which on large catalogs is one of the first places conversion leaks. The Open Source alternative is an external search service — it works well, but it adds one more vendor and one more integration.
Marketing team autonomy. Page Builder plus content and price staging let the team build campaigns and schedule changes without going through engineering. That is the difference between launching a promotion the same day or waiting for the next sprint.
Patching and support. With Adobe Commerce, security patches arrive with priority and there is a contractual SLA behind them. In Open Source the patch depends on the community and the time to apply it is yours. In an operation that processes payments, that window is a named risk.
Analytics. Business Intelligence ships with the ecommerce data models already built. Without it, analytics gets assembled outside the platform — perfectly viable, but it is a project of its own.
Adobe Commerce Cloud or self-hosted
This decision is independent of the edition, and the two get conflated all the time. Adobe Commerce Cloud adds no ecommerce functionality: it changes who operates the infrastructure. Adobe provisions on AWS, scales, patches the platform and carries infrastructure support.
Self-hosted runs the same Adobe Commerce on your own infrastructure, or on infrastructure managed by your partner. You gain control over topology, backup policy and tuning, and you take on the full operational responsibility. The useful question is not which one is better, but whether you want to sustain a DevOps practice at that level of demand or would rather delegate it.
We operate both models. When the client's team has no established infrastructure practice, Cloud takes a problem off their plate; when they do have one, self-hosted almost always gives them a better balance of control and cost. We go into detail in hosting and cloud.
Which one to choose
Magento Open Source if…
- • Your operation is B2C and you do not need native B2B
- • You have an in-house team or a partner who sustains maintenance
- • You want full control over the code and the stack
- • You can take on patching on your own schedule
- • You solve analytics and search outside the platform
Adobe Commerce if…
- • You sell B2B or run a mixed B2B/B2C operation
- • The catalog is large and search is already costing you conversion
- • Marketing needs to publish without going through engineering
- • A security SLA is a requirement, not a nice-to-have
- • You already use other pieces of Adobe Experience Cloud
One criterion that helps cut through: add up what you pay today for third-party modules covering B2B, search and analytics, plus the hours spent keeping them alive through every upgrade. If that number already looks like the cost of the commercial edition, the comparison stopped being free versus paid a while ago.
The five components of cost
The Adobe Commerce license is quoted directly with Adobe based on GMV and scope, and those figures are part of the commercial agreement, so we do not publish them. What can be planned up front is the structure of total cost over three years, which always has these five lines.
License
Only in Adobe Commerce. Quoted with Adobe based on GMV and contract scope.
Implementation
The initial project: architecture, development, ERP and CRM integrations, data migration, QA and go-live.
Infrastructure
On Cloud it sits inside the Adobe contract. Self-hosted it is a line of its own: compute, database, CDN, search, backups.
Maintenance
Corrective support, monitoring, security patches, and the technical debt that piles up when nobody tends to it.
Upgrades
Adobe Commerce ships minor releases twice a year. Planning for them costs less than absorbing one big, overdue jump.
What changes in Mexico
The edition comparison is global; the implementation is not. On either edition, an operation selling in Mexico has to solve four things the platform does not ship configured:
- Local payments. Interest-free installments (meses sin intereses), OXXO Pay, SPEI and the regional gateways. Reconciliation and bank-promotion handling have specifics that global integrations do not cover.
- CFDI 4.0 invoicing. Issuing from the store requires integration with a certified provider (PAC). It is a legal requirement, not an optional improvement.
- Logistics. Local carriers have different APIs and rate models from one another; the native shipping module assumes global configurations.
- Seasonality. Buen Fin and Hot Sale concentrate the peaks that define infrastructure sizing for the year.
None of these four depend on the edition you pick. They do depend on the team implementing having solved them before.
If you are already on Magento and want to move to Adobe Commerce
The shared core is the good news: catalog, data, integrations and most of the custom code carry over. This is not a replatforming, it is an edition change.
The real work is in the third-party modules that had been covering functions the commercial edition ships natively. Keeping the old B2B module alongside native B2B is the fastest way to end up with the worst of both worlds. The process is laid out in migrating from Magento to Adobe Commerce, and if you are coming from Magento 1 — end of life in 2020, no patches — the case is different and considerably more urgent.
Which edition fits your case?
At WolfSellers, an Adobe Gold Partner in Mexico, we size your operation, projected GMV and technical needs in a single call, and we tell you which edition fits — objectively, even when the answer is that you should not move anything right now.
Book a consultation →