Medium-to-large B2C businesses – especially brand manufacturers or branded retailers – often push Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento Enterprise) to its limits. These companies have complex, content-rich requirements that go beyond out-of-the-box features. In this blog post, we analyze the key challenges such organizations face with Adobe Commerce and why a headless commerce approach often is the more compelling solution. We’ll also show a few examples of merchants migrating away from Magento.
Front-end Flexibility Limitations in Traditional Magento Theming
One of the foremost pain points is the lack of flexibility in Magento’s traditional front-end system. In a conventional Adobe Commerce setup, the front-end is tightly coupled to the backend, built on Magento’s own templating (PHP and Knockout.js). This headful architecture means any significant UI change must work within Magento’s theme framework – an approach that feels rigid and outdated. Magento’s default Luma theme (and even the Blank theme) rely on older technologies (RequireJS, etc.), which do not provide the performance or developer agility of modern JavaScript frameworks.
Magento has been criticized for an underperforming front-end and complexity in implementing improvements to the user experience. Customizing the storefront regularly requires extensive work with XML layout files, less-than-intuitive JavaScript widgets, and CSS pre-processing – all of which slows down development. For a brand-driven business that wants pixel-perfect, innovative web design, these theme constraints are frustrating. Even with Magento’s Page Builder offering some no-code design capability, it remains limited compared to using a state-of-the-art CMS or front-end stack. In short, the monolithic front-end of Magento hampers creative freedom and quick experimentation, prompting many brands to seek more flexible headless front-ends.
Challenges Integrating a Best-of-Breed CMS
Content is king for brand-centric commerce, but integrating a best-of-breed CMS with Magento is non-trivial. Adobe Commerce’s native CMS (pages, blocks, and Page Builder) covers basic needs but lacks the advanced content modeling, workflow, and omni-channel delivery capabilities of dedicated CMS platforms (e.g. Contentful, Storyblok, Optimizely, Adobe Experience Manager, etc). Brands that prioritize rich storytelling, blog content, or complex landing pages often find Magento’s built-in tools too restrictive, with limited customization options and flexibility.
You can certainly pair Magento with a headless CMS, but in a traditional coupled architecture it soon turns cumbersome. Embedding CMS-managed content into Magento templates – or keeping the two data models in sync – usually demands custom code or middleware. Merchants often fall back on inelegant fixes such as iframes, brittle API chains, or overnight sync jobs, all of which add complexity and delay every content update. Instead of polishing the customer experience, teams spend most of their time coaxing two reluctant systems to cooperate.
By contrast, a headless commerce model lets the CMS own the presentation layer (to decide where and what to display), pulling in commerce functions via APIs – a cleaner separation. The bottom line is that merchants wanting a “best of breed” content solution often struggle on Magento’s monolith.
Integration Complexity
Enterprise retailers typically operate a suite of systems – ERP for orders and inventory, PIM for product data, CRM for customer records, etc. Integrating these systems with Magento is a major undertaking, often cited as a pain point for IT teams. Adobe Commerce does provide APIs and some out-of-box connectors, but real-world integration tends to require custom development or third-party middleware. Every additional touchpoint (ERP, CRM, warehouse management, etc.) means new interfaces and data flows that must be built and maintained. In fact, the multitude of integration possibilities can push IT departments to their limits.
For medium-large businesses, it’s common to have multiple ERPs or other backend systems (due to global operations or acquisitions). All of them need to synchronize with the e-commerce platform for consistent product info, pricing, and stock levels. This is precisely what makes Adobe Commerce integration so complex – success depends heavily on the existing IT architecture and often a robust PIM or translation layer. Without a decoupled approach, data integration tasks typically turn into a fragile “spaghetti” of point-to-point connections. Any changes (like replacing a legacy system or adding a new channel) require significant rework on the Magento side. Such rigidity is at odds with the agility that modern digital commerce demands.
Performance and Scalability Issues
Another common struggle is achieving high performance and scalability with Magento, especially for traffic-heavy B2C sites or rapid sales events. Magento’s rich feature set and heavy codebase can make it resource-intensive – if not heavily optimized, pages load slowly and server costs soar. Large catalogs, many extensions, or custom code further tax the system. The platform often struggles with scalability, leading to slow load times or outages during peak traffic. This not only risks lost sales but also erodes customer trust with a poor experience.
Scaling Magento traditionally means scaling the entire application stack (since front and back are one), which is costly and complex. In contrast, a microservices or headless architecture lets you scale specific services (e.g. checkout, product catalog, storytelling pages, search) independently. Many Magento users attempt stopgap measures – full-page caching, CDN, or moving to Adobe’s cloud offering – but those only mitigate symptoms. The core issue remains that the monolithic architecture demands significant tuning and infrastructure to perform at scale, which is a constant headache for growing brands.
Inflexibility of the Monolithic Architecture
Monolithic platforms like Adobe Commerce present inherent flexibility limitations compared to modern composable setups. In Magento’s “all-in-one” design, the front-end, back-end, and database are tightly integrated and deployed as a single unit. This means any change (a new feature, an upgrade, a bug fix) involves redeploying and testing the whole application. It’s difficult to isolate parts of the system for independent updates. For businesses that need to iterate quickly on customer-facing features, this coupling becomes a bottleneck. By contrast, headless composable commerce decouples the presentation layer and breaks back-end commerce functions into services, allowing each to evolve on its own timeline.
In practical terms, Magento’s architecture hinders adopting new front-end technologies or services. For example, implementing a new search engine or personalization tool require deep Magento module integration, whereas in a composable approach you slot in a SaaS API with less friction. Customization in Magento is powerful but comes at the cost of complexity – developers juggle many extensions and extensive custom code to achieve what a tailored microservice does more elegantly.
Developer Experience, Time-to-Market, and Maintenance Overheads
Adobe Commerce gives you “full control”, but earning that control takes time and money. Most mid- to large-sized merchants keep a dedicated Magento team – or pay pricey agencies – to customize and maintain the site. Even a small feature can mean writing a new module, checking it against dozens of existing extensions, and running heavy regression tests, which drags out every release and slows time-to-market.
Upgrades are no easier: each security patch or minor version can turn into a mini-project as you verify that custom code and third-party modules still play nicely together. Over the years, this constant retrofit builds technical debt, making Magento ever more fragile and expensive to run. Teams must either pour resources into Magento specialists or stop evolving the storefront – hardly an agile choice. No wonder many developers see Magento as “heavyweight”: powerful, but clumsy compared with leaner JAMstack or headless frameworks.
Magento as a Heavyweight Platform in an Agile Front-End World
For brand-focused companies that prioritize front-end innovation, Magento simply is too much platform. These businesses commonly realize they are using only a fraction of Magento’s expansive feature set, yet they bear the full weight of its complexity. In essence, Magento’s strength – a wide array of built-in capabilities – becomes a weakness if you need a lean, purpose-specific solution.
The need to deliver new digital experiences quickly (from interactive lookbooks to AR fitting rooms, to progressive web apps) is critical for modern retail brands. A nimble (speed, adaptability, responsiveness) front-end is essential for this kind of innovation. However, Magento’s architecture and reliance on its own theming approach make rapid front-end changes difficult, often requiring back-end adjustments or complex workarounds. The platform’s update cycle has also lagged, leading to the outdated front-end stack and growing technical debt in the default themes. Community initiatives like the Hyvä theme (a lightweight alternative front-end for Magento which we recently talked about) arose to tackle Magento’s performance and complexity issues – essentially stripping out parts of Magento’s front-end to make it more agile (with newer front-end technologies and improved developer experience). This is telling: it shows the lengths developers go to make Magento more front-end-friendly.
The server side is built for stability and changes only now and then, while the customer side must keep up with new devices, fresh designs, and rising user expectations. Because they move on different schedules, they age at different speeds: code that still feels “modern” in the back end can look outdated in the browser after a year or two. In the monolithic setup, sooner or later, the front-end’s need for fast updates crashes into the back-end’s slower pace, and the whole site ends up moving as slowly as its heaviest part.
Security Risks and Patch Overhead in Magento
Magento’s size and popularity make it a prime target for attackers, and its security record shows it. Adobe releases multiple critical patches each year, but applying them is rarely a click-and-go affair. As a result, many merchants delay patching – sometimes for months – leaving known vulnerabilities exposed and inviting Magecart-style card-skimming attacks. In mid-2024 a critical XML-external-entity flaw, nicknamed CosmicSting, showed how costly that delay can be. Within days of disclosure, seven different threat groups began using the bug to plant card-skimming malware. Researchers estimate about 5% of all Adobe Commerce and Magento stores – more than 4,000 sites, including brands like Ray-Ban and Whirlpool – were compromised. One week after Adobe shipped the fix, three-quarters of stores were still unpatched.
The hosting model also matters. Self-hosted Magento demands hardened servers, WAF rules, PCI compliance, and round-the-clock monitoring. Adobe Commerce Cloud off-loads some of that burden, yet merchants are still responsible for code-level vulnerabilities and extension hygiene. Compared with SaaS or composable setups, where the commerce core is locked down and front-end services are isolated, Magento’s monolith concentrates risk: once an attacker gets in, everything from product data to payment APIs sits in the same blast radius.
In short, keeping a Magento store secure is a continuous, resource-intensive battle. You either invest heavily in security expertise and rapid patch cycles or accept elevated risk – an uncomfortable trade-off for brands that prize customer trust and regulatory compliance.
Examples of Migrating from Magento to Headless/Composable Commerce
Many organizations in recent years have transitioned away from Magento’s monolith toward a headless or composable model to better meet their needs. Below are a few brief examples that illustrate the motivations and outcomes:
Gymshark
Magento to Headless Shopify
Outages and slow search on Magento pushed Gymshark to a headless stack: Shopify Plus for commerce, Algolia for search, and other best-of-breed services. The new setup coped with 450 k concurrent Black-Friday users and delivered a much faster UX.
LoveCrafts
Composable over Magento 2
Facing Magento 1 end-of-life, LoveCrafts skipped Magento 2 and adopted a composable stack with Commercetools at the core, swapping in separate services for content and search. The API-first model sped up development and opened new sales channels.
Kaporal
Headless Front-End, Magento Back-End
Kaporal kept Magento (upgrading to v2) but replaced the front-end with a React-based headless storefront. Page loads shrank, bounce rates fell 60%, and conversions climbed 15% on desktop and 8% on mobile.
Conclusion
Adobe Commerce (Magento) has long been a powerful all-in-one platform, yet for experience-driven, integration-heavy B2C brands it increasingly shows strain. Rigid theming, labor-intensive integrations, and heavy maintenance can slow innovation and inflate total cost of ownership. Headless / composable commerce addresses these bottlenecks by decoupling the storefront from the core engine and letting teams plug in best-of-breed services for content, search, personalization, and more. The result is faster time-to-market, easier scaling, and freedom to craft unique customer experiences.
Even Adobe now embraces this direction. In early 2024 the company introduced Adobe Commerce Storefront, a SaaS front-end built on Edge Delivery Services. The new offering delivers:
Headless architecture out of the box – the storefront is fully decoupled and communicates with Adobe Commerce via GraphQL and API Mesh,
Pre-built “drop-in” components (PDP, cart, checkout, etc.) that speed up development while still allowing full customization,
Performance-first delivery at the edge, achieving Lighthouse scores in the 90-100 range and reducing the payloads typical of Luma-based sites,
A migration path that Adobe itself describes as “similar to moving to a headless storefront,” reinforcing that API-driven separation is now the recommended model.
Adobe’s developments confirm the broader trend: modern commerce demands a flexible, service-oriented stack. For merchants willing to plan carefully – and often to enlist an experienced integration partner – headless delivers the agility Magento’s monolith struggles to match.
Headless isn’t a silver bullet though. Success still hinges on architecture, governance, and skilled implementation. But with Adobe itself championing a decoupled front-end, the message is clear: future-ready commerce will be headless, modular, and edge-optimized. Merchants that make the shift can evolve with market demands instead of being held back by yesterday’s all-in-one stack.
As Adobe increasingly focuses on large-enterprise merchants, mid-sized brands may want to explore vendors that better support a decoupled commerce stack. Shopify (with ShopifyPlus) and Medusa.js, both designed with headless architectures in mind, are strong options to consider for composable commerce.
