Magento Open Source is a free, open source e-commerce platform written in PHP. The paid edition is called Adobe Commerce and runs the same codebase with extra modules and services on top. You still own the code, the database and the data — and you pay no percentage of sales to the platform vendor.
Out of the box it ships configurable, grouped, digital and virtual products; promotion and pricing rules; multi-store, multi-language and multi-currency in a single install; a CMS; unlimited custom attributes; and full REST and GraphQL APIs. That is why large operations and B2B keep choosing it: when the process is complicated, you can model the process instead of simplifying the business.
The honest counterweight: Magento is not the platform for putting a store online over a weekend. It needs a real server, someone who knows how to operate it, and update discipline. If your operation is simple and will stay simple, a SaaS platform is probably cheaper. If you already run an ERP, customer-specific pricing, marketplaces and three sales channels, the maths changes.
Where the platform stands right now
With dates, because posts about Magento versions age fast and almost nobody goes back to fix them:
- Current version: 2.4.9, released 12 May 2026. It requires PHP 8.5, OpenSearch 3, Valkey 9 instead of Redis, and MariaDB 11.8 or 12.3. Anyone still saying "Magento uses Elasticsearch and Redis" is describing the previous generation.
- Lines still alive: 2.4.8-p5, 2.4.7-p10 and 2.4.6-p15, all patched on that same 12 May 2026. Being "on 2.4.7" means nothing without the
-pN suffix.
- End of support: regular support for 2.4.6 ended on 11 August 2026. 2.4.7 runs to 31/05/2027, 2.4.8 to 31/05/2028 and 2.4.9 to 31/05/2029. The extra year of extended support is an Adobe Commerce benefit — on Open Source, when it ends, it ends.
- The cadence changed: one full release a year, in May, with security shipping as isolated patches through the year. There is no Magento 2.5 announced: the 2.4.x line became LTS.
- Internal cleanup in 2.4.9: TinyMCE became HugeRTE, Zend_Cache became Symfony Cache, Laminas MVC was dropped and OAuth moved to native PHP functions. That is where old modules break during an upgrade.
- Security: four Adobe bulletins so far in 2026, the latest (APSB26-92, 11 August) with 5 critical flaws. The full detail, with sources, is in my guide on versions, patches and end of support (in Portuguese).
- Today, 07/09/2026: there is an unpatched 0-day in the wild. StyleSmuggler, disclosed by Sansec on 5 September, gives unauthenticated remote code execution and affects even 2.4.9. The first documented victim was fully patched. What you can do right now is here.
Is the community still there?
This is the question that comes up whenever someone is deciding whether to invest in Magento. I went looking for numbers instead of opinions. The official repository had its last commit on 4 September 2026 and, this year alone, took 93 community fixes from 52 different people. It is not a handful of volunteers holding the roof up.
On the organised side: Mage-OS — a community distribution run by a non-profit registered in Poland since 2022, with an elected board — shipped three releases between July and August 2026 and backports Adobe security patches. And the Hyvä theme, which fixes Magento's slow front end, became free in November 2025: it went from 6,400 live stores in January 2026 to over 7,600 by July.
In Brazil, Meet Magento took place on 15 May 2026 in São Paulo. The modules that actually matter for selling here are maintained by companies, not by tired volunteers: Mercado Pago shipped a release on 20 August and PagBank had already delivered support for the new alphanumeric CNPJ tax ID on 3 August 2026.
The honest counterpoint, because nobody gains from a sales pitch: the contribution queue on the official repository grows faster than Adobe can process it, and the loose community side in Brazil has cooled off — several niche modules for invoicing, shipping and Pix have been dormant for years. If your store depends on one of them, check the last commit date before installing.
Figures checked on 7 September 2026. All sources are in the full guide (in Portuguese).