When should I start using Magento 2?

Finally it’s time for a new blog post as the last one about the interesting ShopTechBlog episode is dated a while back.

Today I want to raise some pro and contra arguments for upgrading to Magento 2 or starting a new project with the new release of Magento E-Commerce. This is by no means a complete list but just some of my thoughts on this topic.

First of all we have 2 scenarios to look at:

Scenario No. 1: Upgrading an existing Magento 1 store to Magento 2

In my daily business I have lots of request for migrating a Magento 1 store to Magento 2. At the moment in most of these cases I do not recommend upgrading now if the store is not a really, really simple one or the merchant is willing to be as flexible as possible with features.

Magento 1 is a proven platform since 2008 (yeah I am really working long with it now..) and it is working stable and predictable in most cases.

Despite that Magento 2 is fresh out-of-the-box and as seen in the latest security updates there still may be severe bugs. So I expect it to be more stable and the availability of migration paths at the end of this year. Also to note that at the moment there are no remarkable new features for merchants in the current 2.0.3 release in comparison to Magento 1.

So instead of upgrading to Magento 2 I would instead recommend to stay prepared for upgrading at the end of the year and therewith now upgrading to the latest Magento 1.X edition, keep your codebase clean, remove unused modules, etc..

Scenario No. 2: Starting a fresh project with Magento 2

When looking at starting a new project with Magento 2 the world looks a bit different. If you do not have a very limited time line I would definitely recommend using Magento 2 as this is announced as the platform for the future. Magento will stop supporting Magento 1 at the end of 2018 which means that – if there is no direction change in between – you have to be switched to Magento 2 at this point otherwise there will be no security updates, etc.

The biggest hurdle for Magento 2 are missing extensions. Magento extension developers are migrating to Magento 2 – as me – and the number of extensions for Magento 2 is growing every day.

The biggest pain point here are payment extensions as these are not easy to implement yourself (and I would never recommend that).

The company integer_net has also written a recommendable post about this topic which you can find here: The Right Moment for Magento 2

Of course also one of my older blog posts about why you should do a Magento upgrade in general applies.