Magento 1 went end-of-life in June 2020. If you're still running it, every day is borrowed time — no security patches, no PCI compliance, and every extension developer who used to support it has moved on. That part of this decision is easy.
The harder question is what to do about Magento 2, or Adobe Commerce, which is where most of the "should we migrate" conversations we have actually live. Magento 2 isn't dying. It's just gotten expensive and heavy in ways that weren't true in 2018.
The signals we actually look for
Cost creep is the first one, but it's rarely just the license. If you're on Adobe Commerce (the paid tier), you're paying based on revenue tiers that can run six figures a year before you've touched hosting, extensions, or the agency retainer to keep it patched. That's a real number, but it's not disqualifying by itself — plenty of businesses get real value out of Commerce's B2B and multi-source inventory features and the cost is fine.
What actually pushes a client to move is the second signal: every upgrade turns into a project. If your last major version bump took three months because of extension conflicts, custom theme overrides that fought with core templates, or a checkout customization that had to be re-built from scratch, that's not a Magento problem anymore — that's your specific installation telling you the codebase has drifted too far from stock to safely upgrade. We've seen stores stuck two major versions behind for this exact reason, which stacks the security and performance problems on top of the cost problem.
The third signal is checkout performance and mobile conversion. Magento's page weight and time-to-interactive have never been its strong suit, and if your bounce rate on mobile checkout is meaningfully worse than desktop, it's worth an honest look at whether that's a caching/CDN problem you can fix in place, or a platform ceiling you've hit.
What "not yet" looks like
If your catalog is under 50,000 SKUs, your extension list is short and mostly first-party, and your team can still deploy a patch release without a war room, you probably don't need to migrate — you need a code audit and a cleanup sprint. Migrating a healthy Magento 2 store because a sales rep from another platform got in your ear is how agencies make money on projects that shouldn't have happened.
Where people actually land
For DTC catalogs without heavy B2B or wholesale requirements, Shopify Plus is the most common landing spot — faster to launch, less infrastructure to own, and a checkout that converts well out of the box. We wrote about when that trade-off does and doesn't make sense in Is Shopify Plus Right for Your Business?.
For businesses with complex B2B pricing, quote workflows, or deep ERP integration needs — the kind of requirements that push you into expensive Magento B2B extensions anyway — a self-hosted Laravel commerce stack (we use Lunar) is often the better long-term bet. You trade "someone else runs the platform" for full control over the data model and no per-transaction or per-tier platform fees. It's not the right call for everyone, but for the businesses it fits, the economics are dramatically better once you're past the migration cost.
Either way, the migration itself should be scoped around your actual catalog complexity and integration surface, not a template project. Stores with heavily customized checkout flows, multi-warehouse inventory, or B2B pricing tiers take real engineering time to move correctly — budget for that up front rather than discovering it mid-project.