Magento Version Comparison Guide | Latest Magento Version
Magento remains one of the leading ecommerce platforms in the world. In fact, it’s ranked among the top 10 content management systems powering all existing online stores.
First released over a decade ago, the platform has undergone drastic changes over the years.
In this article, we’ll break down each Magento version. We’ll also provide a Magento versions comparison so you can see how it’s evolved — all the way up to the latest Magento version. Keep reading to learn how you can take advantage of new features to power your ecommerce business in 2022.
What is the Latest Magento Version?
2.4.3 is the latest Magento version. It was released on August 10, 2021. The 2.4.3-p1 security release was introduced to the public later last year on October 12, 2021. It provided several security fixes for the vulnerabilities found, which enhanced the version and made it more stable.
What’s New in the Latest Magento Version?
The latest Magento version 2.4.3 provided performance improvements, platform enhancements, and stronger security measures to keep your store secure from various attacks.
Latest Magento Version 2.4.3: Key Updates
- Substantial security improvements — This version added more than 30 security enhancements, including the new Composer Plugin to reduce security vulnerabilities, and reCAPTCHA expansion.
- Infrastructure improvements — Version 2.4.3 includes enhanced functional areas like catalog, cart and checkout, and customer account.
- Platform enhancements — The latest Magento version includes compatibility with PHP 8.0 and Redis 6.0.12, among many others.
- Performance improvements — Magento version 2.4.3 added various performance enhancements, including decreased indexation time for product price and catalog rules indexers.
Why You Want to Use the Latest Magento Version
Modern content management systems have become so popular that they are used by the vast majority of websites in the world wide web. The increasing popularity of these brought the attention of the community, which, unfortunately, can have both positive and negative consequences. Hackers and cyber security experts are constantly working on identifying vulnerabilities in all kinds of systems, including popular website platforms like Magento.
Running an outdated Magento version, or software of any kind, can put you at risk. It can make your website an easy target for hackers, who are using the most powerful approach to break into a system — automation. Pre-made programs executed by computers can easily perform network attacks, and all it takes is knowing what vulnerabilities a certain system has. That is why using the latest version of Magento is so important.
The 2.4.3 Magento version has been released with over thirty security enhancements, and two hundred functional fixes, which makes it the best version to use right now. We strongly recommend performing updates regularly to ensure you leverage the performance, and platform improvements, and keep your store secure and available for your customers at all times.
How to Check Your Magento Version
You can check the Magento version used by your store by using a few different methods, which we’ll walk through below.
Method 1: Sending an HTTPS GET Request
You can see what Magento version you are currently using by sending the following request to your web browser:
https://<your-magento-store>/magento_version
Your web server will return a page showing the current Magento version used by your store. The response will be similar to the one below.
Magento/2.3 (Community)
Method 2: Using the Command Line Interface
You can also check your current Magento version in use from the command line using Magento commands. Let’s see how we can do it.
Step 1: Log into the server via SSH and navigate to your Magento store installation directory. Log into the server hosting your Magento store and navigate to your Magento base directory as shown in the screenshot below.
The user we are logged in as
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ whoami
magentotest
Our current working directory
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ pwd
/home2/magentotest/public_html
Step 2: Check your Magento version by running the magento –version command. You will see the Magento version you are using appear in your terminal. You can see that our Magento store is on the 2.3.7 version, which is not the latest one released.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ magento –version
Magento CLI 2.3.7-p2
Method 3: Using Your Magento Admin Panel
You can see the Magento version installed from your online store Magento admin interface. Log into Magento as an admin user and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. The version will be shown on the right side of the footer.
How to Do a Magento Version Upgrade
Having checked the Magento version used by your online store, you may notice that you are not taking advantage of the newest features released, and your store may be susceptible to known vulnerabilities. To address that, we need to perform a Magento version upgrade. Let’s see how we can do that from the command line interface.
1. Log Into the Server via SSH and Navigate to Your Magento Base Directory
The first step would be to log into the server as the user that owns the installation files and navigate to our Magento base directory. Please see how we did that when we were checking our Magento version in the previous section of this article.
2. Backup Your Magento Store
Before performing your Magento version upgrade or making any other major changes to your website, we strongly recommend getting your Magento store backed up. This is a very important step that can not be skipped regardless of what method you are using.
3. Enable Maintenance Mode
To avoid any issues while the upgrade process is running, we need to put our store into maintenance mode. The front page of your website will display a message letting your visitors know the store is currently unavailable.
[magentotest@newvps ~]$ magento maintenance:enable
Enabled maintenance mode
4. Pull the New Version Files and Update the Dependencies
In this case, we are upgrading to the latest version 2.4.3-p1 of the Magento community edition.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ composer require
magento/product-community-edition 2.4.3-p1 –no-update
Updating composer.json for Magento Open Source 2.4.3-p1 …
./composer.json has been updated
Once we have pulled the version files, we can update the dependencies using the composer update command. The command can take up to a few minutes to complete and will produce a long output.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ composer update
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
…
5. Flush Cache
We can run the following commands to flush cache as shown below. Please note that If you have another cache storage in use such as Memcahced or Redis cache, you will also need to manually clear the cache there.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ rm -rf var/cache/*[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ rm -rf var/page_cache/*[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ rm -rf var/generation/*
Or use a Magento command:
magento cache:flush
6. Update the Database Schema and its Data
The final step would be getting our database data and its schema updated. We can do it using the command below.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ magento setup:upgrade
Cache types config flushed successfully
Cache cleared successfully
File system cleanup:
…
Media files stored outside of ‘Media Gallery Allowed’ folders will not be available to the media gallery.
Please refer to Developer Guide for more details.
7. Check the New Magento Version Installed
Now that the upgrade completed successfully, we can verify our website is now using a new Magento version. You can see that now we are running the latest Magento version.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ magento –version
Magento CLI 2.4.3-p1
8. Disable Maintenance Mode and Check the Store for Any Issues
After the upgrade has been completed successfully, we can disable maintenance mode, so our store is available to visitors again, and we can check if the upgrade caused any issues to it. If you notice any issues with your website after the upgrade has been performed, you can try to troubleshoot them or use the backup we created before the upgrade to restore the website.
[magentotest@newvps public_html]$ magento maintenance:disable
Disabled maintenance mode
Magento Versions Comparison
Over the course of the Magento platform existence, the world has seen two major releases: Magento 1 and Magento 2. Despite the fact that Magento 1 reached its end of life back in 2020, a large number of ecommerce websites are still powered by it.
Magento 2 became a successor to Magento 1, transforming the platform entirely. In 2018, Magento was acquired by Adobe, starting a whole new era, including the debut of Magento Commerce Cloud.
Numerous new Magento versions have been released since then, adding new amazing features to make it the ecommerce platform of choice. Let’s take a look at the major Magento versions list below along with what was improved and changed every step of the way.
| Magento Version Release | Release Dates | Key Features Added | End of Support |
| Magento 1.0-1.9x | August 31, 2007 – 2015 | The first Magento versions released. Basic ecommerce functionality added. | June 30, 2020 |
| Magento 2.0 | November 18, 2015 – February 27, 2018 | The total transformation of the Magento platform. Significantly faster, more secure, and user-friendly. | March 31, 2018 |
| Magento 2.1 | June 23, 2016 – June 25, 2019 | Content staging and preview, Solr replaced with Elasticsearch for commerce versions, PayPal payment methods, improved admin interface | June 30, 2019 |
| Magento 2.2 | September 26, 2017 – January 28, 2020 | Advanced reporting functionality, instant purchase checkout, Magento shipping, new B2B features | December 1, 2019 |
| Magento 2.3 | November 28, 2018 – October 12, 2021 | Progressive web apps, multi-source inventory, Elasticsearch introduced for community versions, improved page builder | September 8, 2022 |
| Magento 2.4.0-2.4.3 | July 28, 2020 – October 12, 2021 | 2FA for the admin panel, enhanced media gallery, MySQL search engine fully replaced by Elasticsearch, seller-assisted shopping, improved progressive web apps | November, 2022 |
| Magento 2.4.4-2.4.6 (latest Magento version) | April 12, 2022 | Support for OpenSearch, vendor bundled extensions removed, improved page builder, cart and checkout updates, new payment methods | November, 2024 |
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