Magento 1 vs Magento 2: Which Is Better in 2026?

IT Updated on : August 21, 2026

Even years after Magento 1’s official retirement, the phrase “Magento 1 vs Magento 2” remains one of the most searched terms among online store owners. That is not an accident.

Thousands of merchants built their businesses on Magento 1 during the 2010s, and a surprising number of them are still running stores on that legacy codebase today, either because migration felt expensive, because a heavily customized store seemed too risky to touch, or simply because nobody flagged how urgent the switch had become.

This guide walks through everything a store owner, developer, or marketing team needs to know before making a decision: what separates the two platforms technically, how each performs under real traffic, what the current adoption numbers look like, and what a realistic migration budget and timeline actually involve.

What Is Magento 1?

Magento 1 was launched in 2008 and quickly became the go-to open-source ecommerce platform for merchants who required more flexibility than hosted solutions like Shopify could offer at the time. It introduced a highly extensible, modular-in-theory architecture built on the Zend Framework, along with an enormous library of third-party extensions that let store owners bolt on almost any functionality imaginable.

For nearly a decade, Magento 1, later split into Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition, was considered the enterprise-grade choice for merchants who had outgrown simpler platforms. However, Adobe officially ended support for Magento 1 in June 2020, which means the platform no longer receives security patches, PCI DSS compliance updates, or bug fixes of any kind.

What Is Magento 2?

Magento 2 is a ground-up rebuild of the original platform, first released in 2015 and now maintained by Adobe under the Adobe Commerce and Magento Open-Source product lines. Rather than patching the limitations of Magento 1, Adobe rewrote the core architecture using modern PHP practices, a true modular design, and a service-oriented approach to how modules interact with each other.

Magento 2 is not simply an incremental update; it is a different technology stack that happens to share a name and a general philosophy with its predecessor. Extensions, themes, and custom code written for Magento 1 are not compatible with Magento 2, which is precisely why “migration” rather than “upgrade” is the accurate term for moving between the two.

Magento 1 vs Magento 2 Usage Statistics (2026)

The adoption numbers make the direction of the market unmistakable.

• Magento (all versions combined) currently powers roughly 95,000–99,000 live websites globally, down from previous years as the platform’s overall footprint contracts and market share shifts toward Shopify and other hosted solutions.
• Magento 2 accounts for the overwhelming majority of that live usage, with close to 77,000 live websites currently running some version of Magento 2, compared with effectively zero live sites still officially tracked on early Magento 1.x builds.
• Roughly 75% of active Magento sites today run on Magento 2, according to Adobe partner and industry analysis, showing how far the migration has already progressed across the merchant base that has moved on.
• Magento 2.4 alone accounts for around 33,000–40,000 of the live Magento 2 sites tracked by BuiltWith, making it the single most widely deployed version branch.
• The United States leads global adoption with roughly 23,500–24,000 live Magento 2 sites, followed by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.
• Magento holds around 8.5% of the global ecommerce platform market and remains disproportionately strong among the top 10,000 and top 100,000 websites by traffic, meaning its real influence is concentrated in larger, more complex stores rather than spread evenly across the web.
• Magento’s ecosystem includes more than 350,000 developers and over 5,500 extensions on the Magento Marketplace, giving Magento 2 stores a substantial talent pool and plugin library to draw on.
• Migration to Magento 2 typically costs anywhere from $10,000 for a simple store to $250,000 or more for complex, heavily customized enterprise implementations, with standard projects taking 3 to 6 months and complex, multi-integration projects taking 9 to 12 months.

(Source: Builtwith, amasty)

Magento 1 vs Magento 2: Core Differences at a Glance

Magento 1 vs Magento 2: Architecture and Technology Stack

The single biggest structural difference between the two platforms is modularity. Magento 1’s codebase, while technically organized into modules, was tightly coupled in practice: a change in one area of the store could unexpectedly break something unrelated, which made customization risky and time-consuming for developers. Magento 2 addresses this with a genuinely service-oriented architecture, where modules communicate through well-defined APIs rather than reaching directly into each other’s code.

This means developers can add, remove, or modify functionality with far less risk of destabilizing the rest of the store. Magento 2 also introduced Composer-based dependency management, a proper testing framework covering unit, integration, and functional tests, and support for current PHP versions, whereas Magento 1 is permanently locked to PHP 5.x, a version line that reached its own end of life years ago and is no longer patched for vulnerabilities by the PHP project itself.

Magento 1 vs Magento 2: Performance and Speed Benchmarks

Performance is where Magento 2’s rebuild shows up most clearly in day-to-day operation. Independent benchmarking and Adobe partner testing have repeatedly found that Magento 2 loads roughly 50% faster on homepage and product pages compared with Magento 1, largely due to native Full-Page Caching and Varnish integration that Magento 1 never had out of the box. Checkout completion is also measurably faster, with Magento 2 processing checkouts around 38–51% quicker than Magento 1’s older, heavier checkout flow.

Under load, Magento 2 has been shown to process roughly 39% more orders per hour than Magento 1 on comparable hardware and add-to-cart response times improve by around 66%. Store owners running Hyvä, the lightweight frontend theme built specifically for Magento 2, have reported page loads dropping from roughly 6 seconds on the default Luma theme to under 2 seconds, a difference that directly affects Core Web Vitals scores and, by extension, both conversion rate and organic search rankings.

Magento 1 vs Magento 2: Security

This is the part of the Magento 1 vs Magento 2 conversation that deserves the most attention. Magento 1 has not received a single security patch since June 2020. Every vulnerability discovered since then, including anything tied to payment data, admin access, or customer records, remains permanently unpatched on any store still running the platform.

Industry analysis combining BuiltWith adoption data with security scans found that 93% of live Magento 1 websites now carry a high or critical security risk rating. Beyond the direct risk of a breach, running Magento 1 also means the store cannot maintain PCI DSS compliance, which creates legal and financial exposure around how payment card data is processed and stored. Magento 2, by contrast, now uses Adobe’s 2026 patch model: monthly isolated security fixes for faster remediation, with aggregated security patch bundles released in May and November. It is also built with a more isolated directory structure that prevents direct web access to core configuration files, meaningfully reducing common attack vectors.

Which One Should You Choose in 2026?

For any merchant starting fresh, this is no longer a genuine debate: Magento 2 is the only viable choice, since Magento 1 cannot legally or practically support a new PCI-compliant store. For merchants who are still running Magento 1 in production, the real decision facing most businesses is timing, not platform.

Every month spent on the old platform adds security exposure, makes future migration more expensive as customizations pile up, and leaves performance and conversion gains on the table that competitors on Magento 2 are already capturing.

Businesses with large B2B catalogs, multi-store or multi-currency operations, and heavy customization needs tend to see the clearest ROI from migrating, while smaller merchants weighing Magento 2 against simpler hosted platforms like Shopify should factor in that Magento 2 still demands more technical resources to run well, even though it resolves nearly every structural weakness of Magento 1.

And if you are already on Magento 2 but running an older release line, don’t stop at “migrated”: check your specific version support end date on Adobe’s lifecycle policy page and plan your next upgrade before it lapses.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Is Magento 1 still usable in 2026?

Ans. Technically, a Magento 1 store can still run, but it receives no security patches, cannot maintain PCI DSS compliance, and carries a high or critical security risk rating on the vast majority of live installations. It is not a safe or advisable choice for processing customer payment data.

Q2. How long does a Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration take?

Ans. Standard migrations typically take 3 to 6 months. Complex stores with heavy customization, multiple third-party integrations, or large product catalogs often need 9 to 12 months.

Q3. How much does migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 cost?

Ans. Costs range from around $10,000 for a simple store with minimal customization to $250,000 or more for large, heavily customized enterprise implementations. The main cost drivers are custom code rewrites, extension replacements, data migration, and QA testing.

Q4. Will my Magento 1 extension work on Magento 2?

Ans. No. Magento 2’s modular architecture is fundamentally different from Magento 1’s, so extensions, themes, and custom code must be redeveloped or replaced with Magento 2-compatible equivalents rather than transferred directly.

Q5. Is there going to be a Magento 3?

Ans. There is currently no Magento 3 on Adobe’s public roadmap. Magento 2 and its enterprise tier, Adobe Commerce, represent the platform’s long-term direction.

Q6. Which is faster, Magento 1 or Magento 2?

Ans. Magento 2 is significantly faster across every major benchmark. See the Performance and Speed Benchmarks section above for the full page-load, checkout, and order-throughput figures.