The real cost of staying on Adobe Commerce

Trapped by complexity: 

For many enterprise organisations, ecommerce platform decisions are made with the long term in mind. Flexibility, extensibility and control are often prioritised, and for all the right reasons. Despite all the due diligence, over time, some platforms begin to work against those goals.

For businesses running Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), complexity may have quietly become the dominant force shaping costs, delivery speed, and internal capabilities. What once felt powerful might now feel restrictive. And what was justified as ‘enterprise-grade’ has probably begun to look like a structural drag on progress.

At Candyspace we see it regularly among established brands with mature ecommerce operations, particularly those operating at scale. Rather than enjoying the benefits of an agile, extendable commerce platform that enables the business, many of those who chose Adobe Commerce are coming to us looking for help.

How complexity turns into constraint

Adobe Commerce was designed to be deeply customisable. But that strength is also its greatest source of friction.

As implementations evolve, many teams accumulate:

• Extensive custom codebases
• Heavily modified extensions
• Tight coupling between platform logic and business processes

Each addition makes the system harder to change safely. Routine tasks such as upgrades, patches, or security updates become projects in their own right. Engineering teams spend more time maintaining the platform than improving the customer experience.

Over time, delivery begins to slow, roadmaps are restricted and innovation becomes harder to justify because every change carries operational risk. It’s at this point that complexity has stopped being a feature and started to become a constraint.

The hidden operational cost of Adobe Commerce

For digital and technical leaders assessing the cost of Adobe Commerce, licence fees are only part of the picture.

The real costs show up in:

• Ongoing engineering overheads
• Upgrade and patch burden
• Dependency on specialist Adobe Commerce skills
• Rising agency and support costs
• Reduced speed to market

This inevitably creates a growing gap between total cost of ownership (TCO) and perceived business value.

From the leadership perspective, this is where questions shift from “Can our platform do this?” to “Is this still the right use of our time, talent and budget?”

Specialist dependency and organisational risk

Another common pressure point when running Adobe Commerce is talent: finding it and keeping it.

Adobe Commerce expertise is highly specialised and increasingly scarce. Many organisations find themselves reliant on a small number of individuals or external partners who understand the platform well enough to make meaningful changes.

This dependency introduces systemic risk to the operation, management, and maximisation of the value of the platform, stemming from:

• Knowledge concentration
• Limited flexibility in resourcing
• Increased cost to retain or replace skills
• Slower onboarding for new engineers

Instead of enabling teams, the specialist nature of the platform dictates how teams must be structured, which is rarely sustainable in the long term.

When effort no longer matches outcome

One of the clearest signals that it’s time to reassess whether your Adobe Commerce platform is right for you, is when your teams tell you they are working hard just to stand still.

You may see marketing teams waiting weeks for changes that should take days, product teams compromising on features because implementation cost feels disproportionate, or engineering teams focusing efforts on stability over innovation.

As James Crook, Enterprise and AI Architect here at Candyspace, explains:

“What we see repeatedly is that teams aren’t failing to deliver, they’re being constrained by legacy platforms and dependencies that demand constant attention. Once that complexity is removed, we see that product development velocity is increased and time to market is rapidly accelerated.”

Although staying on Adobe Commerce may feel like the safer option, it’s usually the most expensive one. And in the long term the risk will only build.

There are modern alternatives without the same trade-offs

The ecommerce landscape has changed significantly over the past four years and many of the reasons organisations originally chose Adobe Commerce no longer apply in the same way.

Platforms like commercetools now support enterprise-scale trading, complex catalogues, global operations and deep integration without the same operational overhead. They are composable platforms that allow teams to build highly flexible commerce architectures without the burden of maintaining a monolithic core.

For many organisations, moving away from Adobe Commerce isn’t about sacrificing capability. It’s about resetting the cost and complexity equation. The choice is no longer Adobe Commerce versus another monolith; platforms like commercetools are built with Enterprise in mind.

Although it can feel daunting, the benefits of migration usually include:

• Lower engineering overhead
• Faster release cycles
• Reduced dependency on niche skills
• More predictable operating costs
• Greater focus on customer experience and growth

Building flexibility without platform burden

At Candyspace, we know that migration away from Adobe Commerce is rarely a straight swap. It is, however, an opportunity to rethink how commerce capability is delivered and to escape a platform model that often sits awkwardly between (at least) two better-defined approaches.

There are now credible enterprise commerce models that don’t require organisations to accept platform complexity as the cost of scale.

For many brands moving away from Adobe Commerce, to platforms like commercetools delivers flexibility without reverting to a monolithic platform model, which is where Adobe Commerce so often becomes expensive to run. By decoupling core commerce functions into modular, API-driven services, teams gain freedom to evolve parts of the stack independently, without dragging the whole platform along with them.

What unites these approaches is clarity.

Adobe Commerce frequently struggles here, as it is more operationally demanding than commercetools and less cleanly composable. That’s why teams can feel trapped, because they’re paying the cost of complexity without the freedom it’s meant to unlock.

By contrast, combining modern SaaS platforms with composable architecture principles creates a model where ecommerce technology supports strategy rather than constraining it.

Is your platform still working for you?

Adobe Commerce remains a powerful platform. But this power comes at a cost, and for many organisations, that cost has quietly grown way beyond what the business is getting back.

If your ecommerce platform now demands more effort than it delivers in value, it may be time to explore alternatives. Candyspace helps brands assess, plan and execute migrations away from Adobe Commerce towards modern commerce platforms and composable solutions that enable growth without unnecessary complexity.

If you’re questioning whether staying put is still the right move, we should talk.