To go Magento 2 or to go with magento 1 ?

[MagentoLyon]

Hi, i'm digital project manager for an online wine merchant.
We plan to start a project on Magento in the next 2 weeks. For sure we will do it using magento.
But we're still trying to know what can be the better choice for us between magento 1.9 and magento 2.0.
We know that Magento 2 standalone is better but that's not the only point.
Can you give us please some contacts with an other merchant who has already a magento 2 platform.
Our decision will depend on those criterias:
- finding a PSP compatible with magento 2(a one which will allow to reduce development to use recurring profile. It's a big part of our business)
- Defining the cost increase to develop (due to knowledge acquisition, and to slowest development speed)
- Dealing with less module in community and less support on the community blogs and forum.

Will you help us to take the right decision ?

[akent99]

Happy to share some personal opinions.

There is no doubt Magento 2 is newer with not as many extensions available. Magento 1.9 is still around, solid, big base of people you can ask for help. However, just be aware if you do a lot of customization, then the effort to move from M1 to M2 later will be a bigger jump, so it will cost more in the future to do an upgrade than starting with M2. All the new features will also be coming out on M2.

Bottom line is I think decision is around extensions - if they are not available for M2 yet and you want to leverage existing extensions in M1, then I would suggest contacting the extension developer to see when they are planning an upgrade to M2. Then you can think through your timelines to see if M2 will line up with your business timelines.

I personally hesitate to recommend new projects start on M1 as there is more to "relearn" later when moving from M1 to M2. But there are definitely more extensions around today for M1 vs M2. 

[typojoe]

We are in the same position.  Personally, I've never used any version of Magento, but we do have some on the team that have used M1 in the past.  Currently, we run most of our sites on Bigcommerce, but we've run into several annoying aspects (php related) and we know that the Magento system would allow us better control of every aspect of our site.

I've been diggin around the web to see the differences between M1 and M2 and they seem very substantial and we have decided to start with M2.  The team members who've used M1 in the past, recalled some of the difficulties with developing on it and it's sluggish speeds, both of which seem to have been addressed in the M2 release.

To avoid the headaches of learning M1 and the switching from M1 to M2 after support ends for M1... starting with M2 seems like the smarter choice.  Although I wouldn't be telling the truth if I didn't say I'm a bit worried about the limited availability of M2 extensions. In our current situation, I don't know what extensions I want or need, so I'll have to cross my fingers that I don't get burned by something before M2 extensions are more wide spread.

A bit of info I read somewhere said that M1 would still be 'supported' until 2018, but it would be highly recommended to switch from M1 to M2 in 2016 but no later than 2017.  They didn't get any more detailed then that, but take from it what you will.

That's my 2 cents. Hope it helps.

[akent99]

Hi @typojoe - I think you understand the situation well.

Regarding the "vagueness" in our recommendations, lets be clear - some of it we don't know either! We don't control the extension market so cannot force them to port. It is simply going to evolve over time. I can say however that Magento is putting all its future efforts behind Magento 2 as our platform to move forward on. All new core product features (like Staging) will be in M2 only. But it is really going to be up to individual projects to decide when to move.

Oh, and the other good news is M2 is moving to a more regular release cadence. No plans for another "mega platform change". Want to move to more of an iterative evolution of the platform.

[akent99 · Accepted solution]

There are over 300 extensions in the marketplace now, with lots more coming. I am going to make this as "accepted" to help me track unanswered questions better.