What Is Magento? The Platform, the Editions and What It Takes

What is Magento – in brief?

Magento is an e-commerce platform you install and run yourself. It is written in PHP, first appeared in 2008 and was acquired by Adobe in 2018.

The version in use today is called Magento 2. Magento 1 reached its end-of-life in June 2020 and no longer receives security updates – if you are still running it, that is the most important job on your list.

Unlike a hosted solution such as Shopify, Magento gives you the software itself, not a service. You choose the hosting, you control the updates, and you can change very nearly anything. That is both the platform’s greatest strength and its greatest cost.

Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce?

Magento comes in two editions, and the difference is worth knowing before you decide anything.

Magento Open Source is free to download and use. It covers what a B2C webshop needs: products, categories, customers, customer groups, cart, checkout, orders and a full REST and GraphQL API. You pay for hosting, development and running costs, but not for the licence.

Adobe Commerce is the paid edition. The licence is priced according to your revenue and agreed with Adobe – there is no public price list. In return you get features that do not exist in Open Source:

• The B2B module with companies, where several users can sit under the same account, shared catalogs, requisition lists and negotiated quotes
• Customer segments and targeted content
• Advanced reporting
• Adobe support

There is also Adobe Commerce on Cloud, where Adobe takes care of the hosting.

If you sell B2B, it is almost always the B2B module that settles the choice. Those features are expensive to build yourself in Open Source.

What Magento is good at

It can be customised. Because the code is yours, you can change how the webshop behaves – not just how it looks. That is hard to appreciate until you have a business rule a hosted platform refuses to support.

It handles large assortments. Many thousands of item numbers with variants, attributes and customer-specific catalogues are exactly what Magento was built for.

It is strong on B2B. Price groups, quantity prices, per-customer catalogues and several users under the same account are not a plugin, but part of the platform in Adobe Commerce.

You own your data and your setup. You can change hosting provider, you can change agency, and you can take the code with you.

What Magento asks of you

These are the things that rarely make it into the sales material.

A developer or an agency. Magento can be run day to day without any knowledge of code – you can create products, campaigns and pages. But setup, upgrades and anything that departs from the standard call for a Magento developer. This is not a platform a marketing department runs on its own.

Proper hosting. Magento is heavy. It needs PHP with enough memory, MySQL or MariaDB, OpenSearch or Elasticsearch for search, and Redis or Varnish for caching. Cheap shared hosting is not enough.

Ongoing maintenance. Adobe releases security updates several times a year. Skip them and the debt accumulates, and the jump gets bigger next time. Count on setting aside time for it every quarter.

Keeping track of your modules. A typical Magento site has 20-60 third-party modules. Each one can break during an upgrade, and some of them touch prices, stock or orders – which is worth knowing if you later need to integrate with an ERP.

Is Magento fast?

Here is a claim that gets passed around and deserves correcting: Magento is not fast out of the box.

The platform is resource-hungry. A standard installation without caching and with the standard Luma theme is noticeably slower than a hosted competitor. On the other hand, it can become very fast when it is set up properly:

• Full page cache with Varnish in front
• Redis for sessions and cache
• Indexers set to “Update by Schedule” instead of “Update on Save”
• A lightweight theme. Many now use Hyvä instead of Luma, precisely because the frontend speed becomes markedly better
• Or a headless frontend via GraphQL

The point is that speed in Magento is something you buy and configure your way to – not something that comes included.

Magento 2 technically, in short

• Language and database: PHP, MySQL or MariaDB
• Search: OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, which is required from version 2.4
• APIs: REST and GraphQL, plus asynchronous bulk endpoints for large volumes of data
• Product types: simple, configurable, bundle, grouped, virtual and downloadable
• Stock: Multi Source Inventory, where stock can sit across several sources and be pooled into one sellable quantity per sales channel
• Multiple stores: a single installation can run several websites and store views, each with its own assortment, language and currency

The last three points are the ones that matter most when the platform has to be connected to an ERP.

Magento or Shopify?

There is no single right answer, but there are a couple of useful rules of thumb.

Magento makes sense when you have a large or complicated assortment, complex B2B agreements, several markets each with its own setup, or business rules a hosted platform refuses to support. And when you have – or want – a technical partner.

Shopify makes sense when you want to spend your time on sales and marketing rather than operations, and when your needs can be met by the platform plus apps. Read more about Shopify.

The honest version: Magento costs more to own, but gives you more options. If you do not need the options, you are paying for something you are not using.

Magento and your ERP

Whichever edition you run, sooner or later the webshop will have to talk to your finance system. Orders need to be posted, stock needs to add up, and the prices in the webshop need to be the same ones your sales team works from.

That is where an integration comes in. And precisely because Magento can be customised so much, two Magento webshops are rarely built alike – the integration has to start from your actual setup: which product types you use, whether you run MSI, which modules own the prices, and whether you have one website or several.

We have written about it in detail here: Magento and Business Central integration.

Should you choose Magento?

Four questions that usually settle it:

1. Do you have, or do you want, a technical partner? Without a Magento developer the platform becomes a burden.
2. Is your assortment or your world of agreements complicated? If the answer is no, simpler platforms exist.
3. Do you sell B2B? Then Adobe Commerce’s B2B features are a strong argument.
4. Do you have budget for running it, not just for building it? Hosting, upgrades and modules add up every month.

If you answer yes to most of them, Magento is a good choice. If you answer no, it is probably too big a machine for the job.