It's 2023: Is Magento Dead?

I've heard it about php, I've heard it about Docker, and of course I've heard it about Magento. All of these rumors about Magento being dead, they're so far from the truth. And these are five indisputable reasons why Choosing Magento for your next e Commerce project may be an absolutely great idea. Magento has been around for over a decade, which means it's been a bit through the wringer. But this longevity adds a level of trust to anyone using it. So many merchants rely on Magento as their premium primary sales channel as it's such a crucial aspect of their underlying business model. The Lindy Effect can predict how long something will be around in the future. It says that something like a technology or idea will be around for as long as it's already existed. This means that the longer something survives, the more likely it is to be around in the future. Magento 1 was released exactly 15 years ago at the time of this recording. So that means that we have at least another 15 years in the bank. I've been hearing Magento is dead or dying for at least a decade now, so that tells you a lot about how people can accurately predict the death of something. At the moment, over 150,000 websites run Magento. That's a vast number of installs and it's a clear indication that there is some popularity, reliability, trustworthiness in the Magento ecosystem. These businesses can't all be wrong about Magento's performance and ability, and it's safe to say that they won't all vanish in the next few years. Magento also has a huge market share of around 9% and that makes it one of the most popular e commerce platforms on the market. This is a huge market share and it's really impressive, especially considering how many other e commerce options are out there in today's market and all the changes that have happened during the pandemic. Magento is also used by some of the biggest brands globally, including Nike, Coca Cola, Ford and Nestle. These big name brands trust Magento's capabilities and actively rely on them to run their online stores. If Magento were a dying platform, would these brands stick with Magento? Of course not. The fact that they continue to use Magento demonstrates that it is still a very valuable platform for big businesses. The Magento community is made up of developers who actively work on developing and contributing back to the platform, continually working on improving and adding in new features. The community's contribution to Magento is also highly significant. Bug fixes and Improvements regularly come in the form of GitHub contributions, and it's hard to take the open source culture out of Magento if you aren't familiar with Mageos. This is a community driven initiative to ensure that the Magento core code continues to receive updates from the community and remain open source. It also allows innovation to happen at a much faster pace than through GitHub PRs, which always seem to have struggled getting merged into the core in a timely manner, but that doesn't mean support has stopped happening behind Adobe's closed doors. Magento 2.4.6 was actually the first version of Magento that allowed the community to vote on issues to be made. While things have definitely been corporatized with Adobe's takeover, there's recently been a strong initiative from Adobe, perhaps spurred by the Mageos initiative, to increase transparency and development of Magento open source. When you have a community as involved as this one, something just doesn't die. It would take significant effort to try to make Magento die, and even if this iteration of Magento did die, or another one would most likely step up to fill its empty boots, the Magento community has remained so strong even through numerous acquisitions, code updates and failed plans and initiatives. You just can't take Magento out of us open source e commerce devs. This leads us right into the next reason why Magento is not dead, and that's the fact that it is open source. The open source nature of Magento's platform means that businesses are not locked into any particular vendor or service provider. I'm not sure if some of the other offerings can say that. Since Magento is open source. That means businesses can work with any solutions provider that they choose, whether it be a group of independent contractors or an agency. They can host their site anywhere they want and scale up to a catered hosting solution that is specific to their business's needs. Being open source also means that you have complete control over the software since the code is completely open source and also available on GitHub. This means that developers have complete control to customize and extend the platform to their specific desires, including the checkout area. Because of this, projects such as Hoover have spanned out of nowhere, ripping out the entire workings of the JavaScript and front end aspects of Magento to replace them completely with a custom solution. Hoover uses Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS along with a custom library called Magewire based on Livewire, which completely revolutionizes the innovation and development happening in the Magento front end. There's nothing that prevented anyone from creating a project like this due to the nature of open source systems, that's the type of innovation that would be hard pressed to spawn out of other SaaS based offerings. If you like having the ability to override and modify any aspect of your storefront, you may also like this video from time to time. There's definitely been a love hate relationship going on with Magento and Adobe. Let's face it, there are good reasons for Magento developers to be upset. Perhaps it's Adobe saying that Magento is now Adobe Commerce. Maybe it's the fact that my favorite conference of all time, Magento Imagine, was replaced with a corporatized Adobe Summit. Or maybe it's the fact that they haven't upheld their promise of Magento certifications never expiring. Well, they recently made cert updates free, but that still doesn't apply to lower tier Pro certs, which means that I need to pay to renew my certs this summer. You can tell that even I'm a little mad about some of these changes. Things do change and we may need to learn to live with some of these changes and make the best of them. But these changes don't mean that Adobe doesn't also come with a ton of other benefits. For one, Magento now belonging to Adobe means that merchants and devs now have access to additional support and resources that they wouldn't otherwise have had. Adobe is definitely a leader in the market and knows what it takes to support a platform at scale. This also means that Magento now has access to additional Adobe related products and services such as Adobe Sensei. Sensei is a powerful AI and machine learning tech that is used across various Adobe products to enhance the functionality and experience of these products and and it can also be used in Magento to power product recommendations among other things. It can also be used for content creation and optimization and to analyze customer data and identify trends and patterns, enabling merchants to make data driven decisions. Magento's integrations with the Adobe ecosystem can also lead to some really interesting e commerce architecture initiatives in the future such as App Builder, which may be able to let you build and deploy custom e commerce builds and apps using Adobe's infrastructure. Adobe's backing has brought added credibility to the Magento ecosystem along with some powerful additions and initiatives that can help the path of Magento into the future. Even though Adobe Commerce is an enterprise level offering of Magento, that doesn't mean that Magento Open Source can't fulfill your enterprise project needs. There are so many enterprise level features baked right into the core of Magento that we take for granted that other E Commerce platforms just can't do or failed to properly implement features such as multisite management tools which allow you to manage multiple stores from a single dashboard, and functionality that creates the ability to easily translate your entire store into multiple languages and locales. Adobe Commerce also has tons of performance updates in the recent version, such as the ability to handle 1,000 orders a minute. And while not all of these performance updates are made available to Magento open source, many of them trickle down to it because Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce share the exact same core code base and database structure. That means that Open source picks up many of the enterprise level features of Commerce just by being a part of the same ecosystem. For businesses that require additional support, they can fairly easily upgrade from open source to Commerce again because they share the same code base and then inherit all of the features and functionality that is offered in Adobe Commerce. This includes features that are unheard of in open source systems such as msi, which is an advanced inventory management extension that allows inventory to be tracked from multiple sources, as well as the B2B extension which is designed to meet the needs of merchants whose customers are primarily other businesses, which allows for complex organizational structures and multi user access and permissions. And there's one more big reason why Magento is not dead. It's because a new version just recently got released. If you want to know everything that's new in Magento, check out this video next which covers all of the new features and functionality of the latest and greatest version of Magento 2. And as always, keep coding.