Shopware 5 end of life: your options and how to choose

What “end of life” means for a running shop

Your Shopware 5 shop does not stop working on a particular day. What stops is maintenance: no more security fixes, no compatibility updates for newer PHP versions, and fewer and fewer plugin vendors keeping their extensions alive.

In practice that turns into three kinds of risk that grow every month:

• Security. Newly discovered vulnerabilities in Shopware 5 or its dependencies will not be patched upstream. A shop handles customer data and payments, so this is the risk that matters most.
• Hosting. Hosts phase out old PHP versions. At some point, keeping the shop running means paying for special legacy hosting — or running an unsupported stack.
• People and plugins. Developers and extension vendors move to Shopware 6. Small changes get slower and more expensive, and broken plugins may simply not be fixed.

Option 1: Move to Shopware 6

For most Shopware 5 merchants this is the natural path. The admin concepts, the ecosystem and often the hosting partner stay familiar, and customers keep their passwords because Shopware 6 can validate Shopware 5 password hashes.

But be clear about what it is: Shopware 6 is a new system, not an update. The data model, plugin system and storefront are all different. Expect to:

• migrate products, customers, orders and prices with the official migration assistant plus custom code for anything non-standard;
• replace or rebuild every plugin — many Shopware 5 plugins were never ported;
• rebuild the theme for the Shopware 6 storefront (or go headless);
• map every old URL to its new equivalent with 301 redirects.

Read more about how we run it on the Shopware 5 → 6 migration page.

Option 2: Move to Shopify

If your team would rather not deal with hosting, updates and plugin maintenance again, a hosted platform is worth considering — especially for B2C shops with a standard checkout. The trade-offs are less control over checkout and code, app and transaction costs, and a fixed URL structure. See Shopware → Shopify.

Option 3: Stay on Shopware 5 for now

Sometimes a migration genuinely has to wait — a peak season, a funding round, a parallel ERP project. If so, reduce the risk deliberately: keep the server and PHP as current as the shop allows, remove unused plugins, put a web application firewall in front of the shop, and set a date for the migration decision. Staying should be a plan with an end date, not a default.

How to choose

Four questions settle most cases:

1. Do you sell B2B or have complex pricing? Then Shopware 6 is usually the better fit.
2. Does your team want to own hosting and code? If not, look seriously at Shopify.
3. How much custom plugin logic do you have? The more there is, the more a like-for-like rebuild on Shopware 6 makes sense.
4. Where are your customers? Shopware’s ecosystem is strongest in Europe; Shopify’s is global.

Our Shopify vs Shopware comparison goes into more detail, and the timeline estimator gives you a first idea of the effort.

Where to start

Start with an inventory: plugins in use, integrations, custom template changes, and the URLs that bring in traffic. That list is the basis for any estimate — and it is exactly what the first phase of a migration project produces. Our migration checklist covers the rest, and if you would rather have it done for you, the fixed-price Migration Assessment turns it into a concrete plan and estimate.