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May 28, 2026, Luboš Zápotočný

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

Three live branches of one platform: where they came from, what each buys you, and how to choose without tying the store to someone else's roadmap.

If you run a store on Magento, you are choosing between three options 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.

Every vendor fact below links to the vendor’s own documentation, checked on 13 July 2026.

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. Adobe now ships one Magento release line a year, 2.4.8 in April 2025 and 2.4.9 in May 2026, with security patches in between (Adobe’s released versions), and the roadmap follows Adobe’s commercial interests (understandably, from Adobe’s perspective).

In 2022, part of the community responded by founding the Mage-OS Association, which publishes Mage-OS: a community-governed distribution of Magento Open Source with its own release process. The distribution is deliberately compatible: a Mage-OS store is still a Magento store, extensions still work, developers do not need retraining. What changed is who decides, and how fast fixes land.

What each one offers

Magento Open Source is the default you get by not deciding. It is free and it works, at whatever pace Adobe assigns it. The risk is a slow drift, where the fixes you need sit behind releases scheduled around a product you did not buy.

Mage-OS is the same platform under community governance. The association’s stated policy is to ship patches once the community has validated them rather than wait for a corporate release schedule, and the project’s incentives point at open-source merchants rather than enterprise licensing (Mage-OS FAQ). We have not measured that against Adobe’s cadence ourselves. The trade-off is that Mage-OS is younger as an institution: you are trusting an association instead of a corporation, which carries different risks rather than fewer.

Adobe Commerce is a different commercial proposition: managed cloud hosting with SLAs, enterprise support contracts, and extensions Adobe ships to nobody else. The largest of those is Adobe Commerce B2B, which covers company accounts, shared catalogs, negotiable quotes and requisition lists. Read the licensing carefully: Adobe lists B2B as an Adobe Commerce extension that requires a separate license, so it is not something the base Adobe Commerce fee already includes (Extensions from Adobe). If your requirements genuinely use all this (real B2B purchasing, procurement demanding a vendor SLA), the licenses buy concrete capabilities. If they do not, you are paying an enterprise license fee for the open-source platform plus features you will disable.

How to choose

Three questions settle most cases:

  1. Do you need Adobe Commerce B2B or a contractual SLA? If yes, that is Adobe Commerce, and the licenses are the cost of those requirements.
  2. Are you on Magento Open Source today? Moving to Mage-OS is a small, low-risk step (same extensions, same developers) that hands the release schedule to a project whose priorities are the same as yours. 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 is usually the cheaper answer, and this question becomes irrelevant.

One thing we would warn against: staying on an old Magento Open Source version to defer the decision. Adobe’s Magento security bulletins include vulnerabilities that need no login and that Adobe has confirmed were exploited in the wild, CVE-2024-34102 among them (APSB24-40). An unpatched store stays exposed to those until it is upgraded, and the upgrade gets more expensive every quarter you wait, the same dynamic that made Magento 1 stores such a risk after support ended in June 2020.

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. If you want it applied to your specific store, extensions and all, that is a conversation we are happy to have; book an intro call.