Magento 2 was named the best eCommerce platform 2021 according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and that’s why.

Yegor Shytikov
8 min readSep 10, 2021

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As the pandemic permanently alters the landscape for eCommerce, it’s more important than ever to provide an exceptional buying experience for customers. With stores turning into “pick, pack, and ship” locations and needing to support fast delivery and website performance, a retailer’s digital commerce platform must be able to support these and other fundamental changes.

Magento Open Source, managed by Adobe, has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a Leader in the 2021 “Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce” research report. This is the fifth year in a row Magento Open Source has been named a Leader among the 17 participating vendors that were evaluated on their ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Gartner defines a digital commerce platform as “the core technology enabling customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service experience.” It also notes that a digital commerce platform must “provide necessary information for customers to make their buy decisions, and use rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment.”

When Adobe bought Magento, it had too many issues. More than 6000 bugs, and it is was really slow. Salesperson regularly confuses Varnish/Fastly static HTML page performance with a platform speed. Most of the Magento 2 Open Source issues were resolved by Magento Comunity Contributors. Adobe Commerce (Enterprise) has closed code where contributed can’t commit. That's why the enterprise version is so buggy and slow.

When Magento Community decided to fork the Magento into a separate project, it is one of the best platforms to build!

https://www.mage-os.community/blog/the-future-of-magento

But, based on its ability to deliver an optimal solution for digital commerce, Adobe’s Magento platform has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report 2021 on this category. And that's why.

Magento Comunity quickly understands that Adobe doesn't want to improve Magento. They just added some redundant and ugly parts to the core like Adobe Stock integration, AEM integration, Youtpo, MSI, Sensei, and many other redundant 3-d party and 1-s party modules with any valuable improvements.

So, Magento Comunity started to build custom solutions around Magento instead of reusing Magento's core “Best Practices”.

Such Magento 2 Open Source initiatives are:

Vue Storefront, as an open-source PWA frontend, designed with the Magento headless approach, is the easiest way to make your Magento-based Commerce meet modern standards without reusing outdated Front and based on XML, KnockoutJS, PHP, and jQuery.

Vue Storefront received 8.8K of Stars on Github!

Hyva quickly becomes a Magento 2 killer.

Launched 🚀 February 12th, 2021, Hyvä products are built with the purpose of lowering dependencies to 3rd party libraries, trying to keep the technology stack limited to as few as possible.

Core Principles that make it better than legacy Adobe Magento 2:

  • reduced complexity
  • improved performance
  • improved developer experience
  • improved development velocity
  • reduced dependencies
  • reduced learning curve

Hyva got the best performance, best dev experience, and shortest time to market for Magento. Hyva has Magento 1, like the best practices and development experience. No more Magento 2 bad practices.

The creators of Hyvä got rid of all Magento default layout.xml and all .js .css .phtml files were removed. No more legacy Magento UI JavaScript Components based on RequireJS, KnockoutJS, jQuery. Hyvä eliminates the use of Magento 2 core as much as possible.

It is rEvolution in the Magento development.

However, Headless and Hyva are not enough alone! Magento 2 Framework is still the bottleneck, and the Magento community resolved this issue by releasing Magento 2 Microservices Frameworks using modern PHP\Laravel and NodeJS. In addition, python-based Magento API is also in development.

Update: PyGento Magento 2 Open Source microservices and ORM are ready and released:

If you want to use Magento exclusively as a backend(admin) system without reusing slow, outdated, Zend Framework 1 based M2 core and exploit modern ORMs to get data to use the next Open Source projects:

Laragento Laravel Magento Microservices

Magento 2 has legacy code based on abandoned Zend Framework 1 with really ugly ORM on top of outdated Zend_DB. Laragentois a collection of Model classes that allows you to get data directly from a Magento 2 database using modern ORM built on top of Eloquent ORM (from Laravel framework), that provides a fluent interface to connect and get data directly from a Magento database avoiding Magento core bottlenecks.

Nodejento (formerly known as NodeGento)

NodeJS implementation of the Magento 2 ORM without using legacy PHP

This repo uses Sequelize to directly connect to the Magento 2 database without invoking the broken MAgento 2 PHP framework, so we won’t have to write any MYSQL queries.

Models are the essence of NodeJento. A model is an abstraction that represents a table in your Magento 2,1 database.

The growth in new direct-to-customer initiatives will continue unabated. And brands are now required to provide much more than just a basic storefront. Customers want an intelligent, personalized experience to facilitate their purchases, and the buying experience has become a key means of competitive differentiation.

You can also build Magento Admin functionality using modern approaches. As an example, ReactJS micro-frontend OpCache GUI Magento 2 extensions:

In addition, Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud (a bundled offering that combines Adobe Experience Manager with Magento) is the worst hosted eCommerce solution for enterprise possible. With the astronomic cost and terrible support and performance, Magento can’t be popular without Community drive Open Source Terraform Infrastructure related with the help of the AWS community Hero Anton Babenko (https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonbabenko).

Now merchants can have a reliable and fast eCommerce cloud in a fraction of a Magento Cloud cost. AWS infrastructure will cost 1200$ per month when Adobe Commerce Cloud 3000$ per month with great performance and support.

The Community is a key reason why the Magento platform is recognized as a Leader by Gartner.

Also, it is good to mention the Magento Open Sorce PWA solution. When Adobe releases PWA Studio, which requires migration and costly implementation. The community released a free solution. It enables PWA features for any existing Magento theme, including Hyva, in 5 minutes without re-platforming:

Progressive web app (PWA), is the latest browser feature that allows anyone to use websites as native mobile or desktop apps. It is not a Magento feature. You don’t need an expensive redesign to use PWA.

PWA is simply a website acting as a mobile app. However, unlike mobile apps, they don’t have to be downloaded from an app store.

With PWAs, users can get app-like experiences they save to their home screens, with lightning speed and mobile-first design without needing actually to build an app for both iOS and Android.

PWAs allow for modern web capabilities, including background sync, offline browsing, barcode scanning, and even push notifications.

Magento (PWA)Progressive Web Applications Are Not a Magento PWA Studio

Adobe’s success with Magento is aided by a large and highly capable ecosystem of the individuals that help large and small brands get the most from Magento implementation. In most cases, were partners and Agencies provide defective implementation using outdated Monolithic eCommerce software development practices. Magento Open source solutions provide a wide range of free services and extensions that help make Magento the preferred eCommerce platform for a wide range of brands. A new Magento open source Micro Service approach is unique. Developers, agencies, and solution integrators empower brands to innovate. The Magento Microservices is also highly flexible. And it’s easy for smaller businesses to start with Magento Open Source and then grow seamlessly into the future without having to change commerce platforms.

Integration with the ReactJS

ReactJS Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce implementation. This Simple module explains how to add and use React Components with Magento 2 and forgot about Knockout/JQuery Magento 2 UI.

Magento 2 Code Generator

Magento 2 requires a lot of boilerplate code for simple features or customizations. All modern frameworks have code generation tools to make developers work easily. But not Magento 2.

However, again, thanks to the free non-paid work of the community, more than 100,000 modules were generated using Mage2Gen.

Mage2Gen is a complex module generator for Magento 2 written on Python 3. The user can generate the base code for a Magento 2 module that works instantly with the extensive interface.

Mage2Gen can generate the following parts:

  • controllers,
  • models,
  • blocks,
  • template files,
  • plugins/interceptors
  • rewrites/preferences
  • observer,
  • console scripts,
  • product attributes.

And more.

First and foremost, Mage2Gen is meant to save time (up to 90%) when creating new modules in order to speed up the number of modules available for Magento 2 and to encourage innovation for newer functionalities, with the ultimate goal to make Magento 2 at least as successful as Magento 1.

The real-time source code reviewer enables you to detect which files and codes are generated for the chosen parts. For example, if you are not quite sure what is required to create system configuration fields, Mage2Gen will show you the minimum required files and parts when generating a system configuration file.

Being named a leader in a Gartner Magic Quadrant 2021 report is an important validation of Adobe’s strategy to improve Magento Open Source instead of the add and upselling more services.

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Yegor Shytikov
Yegor Shytikov

Written by Yegor Shytikov

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