Magento (Adobe Commerce) vs Medusa: licence, upgrades and B2B

For years Magento was the standard for serious webshops with large catalogues, multiple stores and B2B. Since Adobe's acquisition the paid edition is called Adobe Commerce; the free edition is Magento Open Source. Many European shops still run on it, often for ten years or more. The question we hear in intro calls is rarely "is Magento bad?" but rather: "do we do another expensive upgrade, or is this the moment to switch?"

In this article we compare Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source with Medusa on licence, extensions, hosting, cost over three years and flexibility for B2B, multiple stores and regions.

The comparison in one table

Licence: what does Adobe Commerce cost?

Adobe does not publish a price list. Its pricing page names three options: Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (SaaS), Adobe Commerce on Cloud (PaaS) and an on-premise licence. For all three you request a quote (Adobe Commerce pricing). The licence depends mainly on your revenue (GMV).

What partners report, and these are estimates, not Adobe figures: an on-premise licence starts at around €19,600 per year for shops under about €0.9 million in revenue and rises to more than €111,000. Adobe Commerce on Cloud, with hosting included, starts at around €35,600 and can exceed €169,000 per year. According to Stagebit, the licence is usually only 20 to 40 percent of total annual spend. With hosting, implementation, extensions and maintenance, they put the total annual cost often between €109,000 and €401,000+ (Stagebit, MGT Commerce).

Magento Open Source has no licence fee. You pay for hosting, development and maintenance, but you miss, among other things, the B2B module, Page Builder and content staging of Adobe Commerce (Stagebit).

Medusa has no revenue-based licence. The core is under MIT. Medusa Cloud costs €26 (Develop), €88 (Launch) or €266 (Scale) per month with a 0% fee on your revenue. Enterprise, with RBAC, SSO and audit logs among other things, is quoted on request (Medusa pricing).

Magento's upgrade clock

A cost item often missing from comparisons: upgrades. Adobe gives each Adobe Commerce version three years of standard support. According to Adobe's lifecycle page (updated 18 September 2026):

• standard support for 2.4.6 ended on 11 August 2026; extended support runs until 31 August 2027;
• extended support for 2.4.7 runs until 31 May 2028;
• 2.4.9 was released on 12 May 2026;
• from 1 June 2027 Adobe will interrupt traffic to Cloud environments running an unsupported version;
• PHP 8.2 reaches end of life on 31 December 2026.

Source: Adobe Experience League, lifecycle policy.

Every major upgrade touches theme, extensions and custom work. For a shop with many extensions that is a project, not a click. If that upgrade is on the roadmap anyway, it is a logical moment to look at an alternative as well.

Extensions and custom work

The Magento ecosystem is large. There is an extension for almost every problem, and many agencies with years of Magento experience. That is a real strength. The flip side is that Magento extensions reach deep into the core. They can clash and have to be retested with every upgrade.

Medusa works with separate commerce modules and workflows (Medusa documentation). Custom work lives in your own modules, not in changes to the core. That makes updates more predictable. It also means you can buy less off the shelf.

Hosting and operations

Magento is heavy to host. On-premise you manage servers, database, cache, search engine and CDN. With Adobe Commerce on Cloud, Adobe runs the infrastructure, but your team remains responsible for upgrades, custom work and extensions (Stagebit).

Medusa is lighter: a Node.js application with Postgres, self-hosted or on Medusa Cloud, with a separate storefront. Maintenance is still needed. How we handle it is described under Medusa maintenance and support.

What does it cost over three years?

A comparison for a B2B shop with €2 million in annual revenue. Licence and platform costs only, based on the estimates and prices above:

Build and maintenance are not included here. A Medusa implementation with a B2B portal and ERP integration is not a small project. But the licence and mandatory upgrades are such a large item with Adobe Commerce that Medusa often comes out cheaper over three years. Against Magento Open Source the difference is smaller, and then it is mainly about which stack your team wants to maintain.

Flexibility: B2B, multiple stores and regions

Adobe Commerce is strong here. Its B2B module has company accounts, shared catalogues, quotes and approvals built in. Multiple websites and store views in one installation is a core feature. If you need exactly that, Adobe Commerce gives it to you ready-made.

Medusa takes a different route. Regions, currencies, sales channels, customer groups and price lists are in the core. You build the B2B processes themselves on those building blocks, or start from the official B2B starter. That is more work up front. The benefit: you build your process, rather than squeezing it into the way a standard module works.

Medusa customer stories show why companies moved away from Magento:

• EKI, a 150-year-old Dutch company and, according to Medusa, Europe's leading producer of foam and rubber, serves more than 9,000 B2B customers in 42 countries with more than 20 million product configurations. By migrating from Magento to Medusa, implementation partner rb2 was able to handle that product and pricing complexity, including customer-specific prices and discounts (Medusa: EKI).
• Good Chef (via Webbers): "We had used Magento and WooCommerce in the past, but they were not ideal for a modern headless stack. We tested Shopify, but quickly hit a limit" (Medusa: Good Chef).
• Viessmann Climate Solutions looked at commercetools, Shopify and Magento for a rental platform, but "none of those platforms met our requirements" (Medusa: Viessmann).

These are Medusa customer stories, in the words of Medusa and those customers. They are not Alpha Digital projects.

When should you choose Adobe Commerce or Magento?

Stay on Magento or choose Adobe Commerce if:

• you use the Adobe Commerce B2B module largely as intended and build little around it;
• you are already in the Adobe ecosystem (Experience Manager, Analytics, Target) and that integration is valuable;
• you have your own Magento team or a regular Magento agency that knows the upgrades inside out;
• your shop is stable and you have just upgraded to a supported version;
• you use many ready-made extensions that would be custom work in Medusa.

When should you choose Medusa?

Medusa fits if:

• the Adobe Commerce licence is a large and growing cost item;
• a mandatory upgrade to 2.4.8 or 2.4.9 is going to be a project anyway;
• your B2B logic does not fit a standard module: configurable products, customer-specific prices, non-standard approvals;
• you want to move to a headless storefront, for example a Next.js storefront;
• your team prefers working in TypeScript over PHP.

Where Medusa is not the best choice

• Ready-made B2B. Adobe Commerce delivers more B2B features out of the box. With Medusa you build more yourself.
• Ecosystem. The number of extensions, agencies and developers for Magento is much larger.
• Enterprise requirements. RBAC, SSO and audit logs fall under Medusa Enterprise, with its own price.
• Migration effort. Moving a Magento shop with years of custom work is a substantial project. It only pays off if you really feel Magento's costs and limitations.

From Magento to Medusa

A move from Magento works best in phases: first the data model and integrations, then the storefront, and a cut-over with redirects. How that works is described in Migrating to Medusa and under Migrating to Medusa. For B2B shops: Medusa B2B webshop and Medusa integrations. Other comparisons: Shopify vs Medusa and PrestaShop vs Medusa. Request a callback or book an intro call.

Sources

Dollar amounts from the sources are converted to euros at the ECB rate of 5 November 2026 (1 euro = 1.1224 US dollars) and rounded.