2025 in Review: The State of Magento, and What It Means for 2026

2025 was a year of two directions pulling at once: Adobe steering toward SaaS, and the community doubling down on open source. Here is the whole year in one place, with links to the detail, and what it sets up for 2026.

The releases: 2.4.8 and PHP 8.4

April brought Magento 2.4.8, with PHP 8.4 support, 497 fixes and the removal of PHP 8.1. It reset the baseline for what a current, supported store looks like. The details, and the upgrade path, are in our 2.4.8 and PHP 8.4 guide.

Adobe went SaaS

At Summit in March and then at general availability in June, Adobe made its direction clear with Commerce as a Cloud Service and Commerce Optimizer, and confirmed there is no Magento 3. We covered what Summit actually meant and what the SaaS pivot means if you own your store.

The community held the open-source line

The counterweight to Adobe going SaaS was a strong open-source year. Mage-OS grew up with new releases and governance, and Hyva went fully open source. Together they are the reason merchants who value ownership had a good year, not an anxious one.

AI arrived at the storefront

2025 was also the year AI started buying. Agentic commerce moved from concept to live checkout inside AI assistants, and the referral traffic numbers made it impossible to ignore. The merchant view is in our agentic commerce guide.

Security was the story nobody wanted

It was a brutal year for store security: continued CosmicSting fallout, the critical SessionReaper flaw, a backdoor epidemic, and PHP 8.1 reaching end of life. The full account, and the checklist, is in our 2025 security year in review.

What it means for 2026

The theme running through all of it is ownership. The stores that had the calmest 2025 were the ones that controlled their stack, patched fast and treated maintenance as an operating cost. That advantage compounds. If you want to head into 2026 with a clear plan for your store, book a free strategy call with LIQUIDLAB.