Migrating from Magento (Adobe Commerce) to Commercefull

Magento earned its reputation the hard way: genuinely powerful, genuinely flexible, and genuinely expensive to run. Between Adobe Commerce licensing, specialist developer rates, infrastructure demands, and upgrade projects measured in months, the total cost of ownership is often the biggest line item in a merchant’s technology budget.

If you’re evaluating the exit, here’s the honest picture of moving to Commercefull.

Why Magento merchants leave

• TCO has outgrown the value. Adobe Commerce cloud licensing plus implementation partners plus hosting puts many stores into six figures annually — before a single feature ships.
• Specialist lock-in. Magento’s EAV data model, layout XML, and DI system mean only Magento-experienced developers can safely touch the codebase. That’s a shrinking, expensive talent pool.
• Upgrade treadmill. Each version jump is a project, not a patch. Merchants routinely run years-old versions because upgrading is scarier than staying vulnerable.
• Open Source edition uncertainty. Magento Open Source’s roadmap under Adobe is thin — the ecosystem’s attention has moved to Adobe’s paid cloud.

What Commercefull gives you instead

The uncomfortable truth about Magento is that most of its “enterprise” power is features merchants already need: multi-store, B2B pricing, customer segmentation, promotions, RMA. Commercefull ships all of that natively — in a TypeScript/Express/PostgreSQL stack that any mid-level web developer can work in.

The EAV complexity tax disappears too — Commercefull uses ordinary PostgreSQL tables with camelCase columns. Your data is queryable with plain SQL, not a four-table join through catalog_product_entity_varchar.

How migration works

The migration module supports Magento as a source. The job-based flow is the same as other platforms:

1. Export — Magento REST API or flat CSV exports of products, customers, orders.
2. Create an import job — source: "magento", start with dryRun: true.
3. Stream records — create each entity via the Business API, record the ID mapping, log errors.
4. Verify and cut over — compare counts, spot-check orders, redirect traffic.

Attribute-heavy Magento catalogs need the most planning: map EAV attributes to Commercefull product attributes/options before the import, not after.

Plan for the gaps

• Customer passwords — Magento’s hashing doesn’t port; customers reset on first login.
• Extensions’ data — third-party extension tables are yours to export, but map them deliberately into the right module.
• Complex pricing rules — cart price rules with unusual condition trees may need reimplementation as promotions rather than 1:1 import.
• Custom workflows — anything built in observers/plugins becomes Commercefull automation rules or tailored modules.

The bottom line

Magento made sense when the alternative was building from scratch. It doesn’t anymore. Commercefull delivers the enterprise feature set — B2B, multi-store, MSI-equivalent inventory, RMA — without the specialist tax, the upgrade treadmill, or the license fee.

Read the migration module documentation for the technical details, or talk to us about a managed migration — our tailored development team handles Magento exits end to end.

Also in this series: migrating from Shopify · migrating from WooCommerce