---
title: "Magento Open Source vs. Mage-OS vs. Adobe Commerce"
description: "Three live branches of one platform: where they came from, what each buys you, and how to choose without tying the shop to someone else's roadmap."
author: "Luboš Zápotočný"
published: "2026-05-28"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://zapolu.com/blog/magento-vs-mageos-vs-adobe-commerce/"
---

# Magento Open Source vs. Mage-OS vs. Adobe Commerce

If you run a shop on Magento, you're choosing between three
editions that share a codebase and a name: Magento Open Source, Mage-OS,
and Adobe Commerce. The differences are less about features than about
governance: whose priorities decide what the platform becomes. That
makes this more a business decision than a technical one.

## How the three branches emerged

Adobe bought Magento in 2018. The commercial edition became Adobe
Commerce; the free edition stayed available as Magento Open Source,
but its release cadence slowed and its roadmap now follows Adobe's
commercial interests (understandably, from Adobe's perspective).

In 2022, part of the community responded by founding
[Mage-OS](https://mage-os.org): a community-driven distribution of
Magento Open Source with its own release process and community
governance.
It is deliberately compatible: a Mage-OS shop is still a Magento shop,
extensions still work, developers don't need retraining. What changed
is who decides, and how fast fixes land.

## What each edition offers

**Magento Open Source** is the default you get by not deciding. It's
free, it works, and it moves at whatever pace Adobe assigns it. The
risk isn't abandonment tomorrow; it's a slow drift where the fixes
you need sit behind releases scheduled around a product you didn't
buy.

**Mage-OS** is the same platform under community governance.
Releases come faster, performance patches from the community land
sooner, and the project's incentives point at open-source merchants
rather than enterprise licensing. The trade-off is that it's younger
as an institution. You're trusting an association instead of a
corporation, which carries different risks rather than fewer.

**Adobe Commerce** is a different commercial proposition: the B2B
suite (company accounts, shared catalogs, quote workflows), managed
cloud hosting with SLAs, and enterprise support contracts.
If your requirements actually use those (genuine B2B workflows,
procurement demanding a vendor SLA), the license pays for concrete
capabilities. If they don't, you're paying an enterprise license
fee for the open-source platform plus features you'll disable.

## How to choose

Three questions settle most cases:

1. **Do you need the B2B suite or a contractual SLA?** If yes, that's
   Adobe Commerce, and the license is the cost of those requirements.
2. **Are you on Magento Open Source today?** Migrating to Mage-OS is a
   small, low-risk step (same extensions, same developers) that
   swaps a slowing roadmap for a faster one. This is why our new
   open-source builds go to Mage-OS by default.
3. **Are you choosing the platform fresh?** Then first decide whether
   Magento's model fits at all: complex catalogs, B2B, multi-store.
   If your requirements are simpler, [Shopify](/services/shopify/) is
   usually the cheaper answer, and this question becomes irrelevant.

One thing we'd warn against: staying on an old Magento Open Source
version to defer the decision. Unpatched commerce platforms are a
frequent target for card-skimming campaigns, and the upgrade gets more expensive
every quarter you wait, the same dynamic that made
[Magento 1 shops](/services/platform-migration/) such a risk after
end-of-life.

We work with both Mage-OS and Adobe Commerce and have no license
revenue tied to your choice; the reasoning above is the same
reasoning we walk clients through on our
[Magento service page](/services/magento/). If you want it applied to
your specific shop, extensions and all, that's a conversation we're
happy to have; [book an intro call](/contact/).