Is there a future for Akeneo Community Edition in 2026?
Akeneo Community Edition (CE), once a vibrant open-source solution for product information management (PIM), Akeneo Community Edition has transitioned from a well-maintained, regularly updated open-source product to a stable but now mostly static codebase supported by the community and third parties rather than Akeneo’s core development team. Its role has shifted towards being a legacy open-source foundation as the company focuses on SaaS offerings with richer features and professional support. As of the end of 2025, the question many developers, integrators, and businesses are asking is: Is Akeneo CE dead? Short answer: Not quite yet, but Akeneo Community Edition’s development has slowed significantly, and its future beyond 2026 is uncertain.
Here is why:
Development ended, maintenance continues
Akeneo ended active development and feature releases for the Community Edition in 2023. The final major release, Akeneo PIM v7.0 (Sahara Hare), was issued in March 2023 and will continue to receive security patches and critical bug fixes until September 30, 2026. No functional enhancements or roadmap-driven improvements are planned.
Akeneo’s product strategy is now fully centered on its SaaS-based Serenity and Growth Editions, leaving the Community Edition in a maintenance-only state with no ongoing innovation, a shift that has also been acknowledged by ecosystem partners such as Webkul.
Community-led activity without stewardship
Although Akeneo no longer actively stewards the Community Edition, its public GitHub repositories—pim-community-dev and pim-community-standard—continue to show community-led engagement through late 2025.
Recent commits, issues, and pull requests visible on GitHub mainly come from third-party contributors and system integrators. Most discussions focus on practical issues such as PHP compatibility, asset management, and cloud storage integrations. However, official involvement from Akeneo is quite limited, and few pull requests are merged, a situation also reflected in observations shared by ecosystem partners like Webkul.
Support shifts to third parties
To meet ongoing customer demand and generate services revenue, companies like Webkul offer formal long-term support (LTS) for Akeneo Community Edition. These services typically include security patches, compatibility updates (such as PHP upgrades), bug fixes, performance improvements, and custom development and integration work to keep CE secure and functional even after official support has ended.
Relying on third-party support for Akeneo Community Edition keeps it secure and functional, but comes with potential downsides: no official backing, variable quality, limited access to proprietary features, reliance on the third-party provider for updates, and possible complexity for future upgrades.
Practical Trade-offs of Using Akeneo CE
Despite its reduced official support, some organizations still deliberately choose Akeneo Community Edition in 2025-2026 for cost, control, or architectural reasons. However, these benefits come with concrete operational and technical risks that must be clearly understood.
Key Downsides to Consider:
No official updates or new features
Community Edition no longer receives updates that keep it aligned with the latest Growth and Enterprise editions. This undoubtedly leads to gaps in functionality, such as missing new product attribute types, advanced workflow options, or integration features like automated marketplace exports and cloud storage connectors.
Compatibility issues with newer PHP versions
As PHP and related libraries are updated, Community Edition users often encounter upgrade challenges. Common problems reported on GitHub include broken image uploads, errors with S3 cloud storage, and failures in running certain import/export scripts. These issues usually need to be fixed manually or with help from third-party support providers.
Removal of Marketplace bundles for CE
Akeneo no longer provides official marketplace bundles for Community Edition. As a result, users have less access to ready-made extensions, such as connectors for Shopify, Magento, or cloud storage integrations, and must rely more on custom development or third-party modules to add these features.
No SLA-backed support from Akeneo
Akeneo no longer provides contractual support, response guarantees, or security SLAs for CE. Production incidents are entirely the responsibility of the operating organization or its external partners.
Security risks without proactive maintenance
Like any unmaintained platform, Akeneo CE accumulates vulnerabilities over time. In practice, this can lead to remote code execution via file uploads, exploitable API endpoints, authentication or authorization flaws, and exposure from running on outdated PHP versions. Because there is no vendor-backed security monitoring or guaranteed patching, vulnerabilities may remain exploitable for long periods, making Akeneo CE a higher-risk component unless actively maintained by experienced teams or external partners.
CE vs Serenity: A New Era
Akeneo’s Serenity Edition is now the company’s primary focus. Akeneo Serenity is a fully managed SaaS platform and the focus of Akeneo’s ongoing development. It promises to remove much of the operational burden from customers through its AI-assisted enrichment, cloud-native architecture, advanced workflows, built-in analytics, and automatic updates. akeneo.com
Despite this, many organizations do not migrate from Community Edition because:
-
Organizations are concerned that Serenity’s subscription pricing exceeds the long-term cost of running an existing CE installation.
-
CE allows full access to code and infrastructure, which is limited in a managed SaaS model.
-
Moving to Serenity often requires reworking custom extensions, integrations, and workflows.
-
Some organizations need self-hosting or specific data residency controls.
-
For stable catalogs, CE continues to meet core PIM needs when properly maintained.
There’s no standard published price for Akeneo Serenity, therefore, potential clients must request a quote. However, based on pricing for adjacent SaaS offerings, annual costs for commercial Akeneo PIM SaaS usage commonly begin in the $25,000 – $45,000+ range and increase with scale and additional services.
Next Steps for CE Users
If Akeneo Community Edition no longer fits your needs, you have a few ways to go about it:
Stick with CE + Partner Support
You might continue using Akeneo Community Edition but rely on third-party partners (system integrators or LTS providers) for maintenance, security fixes, and custom development. Organizations choosing to remain on Akeneo Community Edition typically do so for cost and control reasons. CE has no licensing fees and allows full ownership of hosting, data, and the codebase, making it attractive to teams that have already invested heavily in customizations and integrations. This path works best for technically mature organizations with strong in-house engineering capabilities that can maintain and extend the platform.
However, this choice requires careful planning. Teams remain responsible for security patching, PHP and dependency upgrades, and overall platform stability. Support quality depends heavily on external partners, access to new functionality is limited, and there is no official roadmap. Over time, unmanaged upgrades and custom fixes can increase technical debt, making long-term maintenance more complex.
This option best suits cost-sensitive organizations with stable PIM requirements and the internal expertise to manage ongoing maintenance.
Upgrade to Serenity or Growth Edition
Upgrading to Akeneo’s Growth or Serenity Edition means moving from a self-hosted system to a fully managed SaaS platform operated by Akeneo. Infrastructure, updates, scaling, and security are handled by the vendor, reducing operational complexity for internal teams.
Organizations choose this path for vendor-backed SLAs, continuous updates, and access to newer capabilities such as AI-assisted enrichment, advanced workflows, and analytics. It also provides alignment with Akeneo’s long-term product roadmap and removes much of the day-to-day operational burden.
The trade-offs include recurring subscription costs that can exceed the long-term cost of CE, reduced flexibility for deep customizations, and the effort required to migrate existing extensions and integrations. Organizations also become dependent on Akeneo’s SaaS operating model.
This option fits organizations that prioritize scalability, predictable operations, and ongoing innovation over infrastructure control.
Switch to a Composable PIM
If you are thinking about leaving Akeneo CE entirely, AtroPIM and UnoPIM are the two commonly considered open-source alternatives:
AtroPIM
AtroPIM is a good fit for teams that know their product data setup won’t stay static. It works well for organizations with more complex catalogs, multiple channels, or stricter governance requirements, where flexibility is more important than having everything preconfigured out of the box. Its API-first approach, flexible data structures, field-level permissions, and built-in DAM make it suitable for teams that want to adapt the PIM to their processes and grow with it over time.
UnoPIM
UnoPIM, by contrast, is aimed at organizations with simple product data needs that want a quick and easy setup. It’s well-suited for small to mid-sized businesses with straightforward catalogs, limited integrations, and little need for custom development. Its lightweight setup, modern tech stack, and easy-to-use interface make it simple to adopt and maintain, though it’s less suited for complex workflows or large, multi-channel setups.
Key Takeaways
Akeneo Community Edition is not dead by 2026, but it is clearly in a late-maintenance phase with limited prospects. There are three realistic paths forward for CE users:
-
Stay on CE with partner support if you have strong technical capabilities.
-
Upgrade to Serenity or Growth if you want managed operations and ongoing innovation.
-
Switch to a composable PIM if you are modernizing your architecture. The most reasonable open-source alternatives are AtroPIM and UnoPIM:
-
AtroPIM is a good fit for organizations that need a flexible and scalable PIM, with evolving data models, multiple channels, and the ability to adapt workflows as requirements grow.
-
UnoPIM is better suited for simpler use cases, where quick setup, ease of use, and low operational overhead are more important than advanced customization or large-scale complexity.