Hyvä vs Luma

Yes, by an embarrassing margin. On a stock Magento Open Source 2.4.8 install with the default catalogue:

• Lighthouse mobile performance: Hyvä 95 – 99 vs Luma 25 – 45 (orange/red zone)
• JS bundle (gzipped, homepage): Hyvä ~70 KB vs Luma ~450 KB
• First Contentful Paint (4G mid-tier Android): Hyvä 0.4s vs Luma 1.8s
• Largest Contentful Paint: Hyvä 0.9s vs Luma 4.1s
• Time to Interactive: Hyvä < 1s vs Luma 4 – 8s
• Interaction to Next Paint: Hyvä ~60ms vs Luma ~380ms

These numbers are from production stores I’ve migrated, not synthetic benchmarks. The gap shrinks slightly under heavy customisation, but Hyvä still wins by 2 – 3x on every Core Web Vital.

Luma: $0 license, ships with Magento Open Source. The cost is in performance work afterwards — a Luma store usually needs $5 – 15k of optimisation to claw the Lighthouse score above 60.

Hyvä: $1,000 – $2,000 one-time license per store (per major version), then you own the code forever — no per-seat, no SaaS fee. Migration dev runs $5 – 20k depending on customisation depth and extension count. Greenfield builds tend to be cheaper than migrations because there’s no porting work.

3-year TCO: Hyvä typically wins by $5 – 30k once you factor in the conversion lift (8 – 25%) and the avoided performance-tuning bills. Stores with strong organic traffic break even fastest because every second of LCP improvement compounds across millions of pageviews.

Probably yes — the answer depends on the extension category:

• Storefront-impacting paid extensions (Amasty, Mageplaza, Magefan, etc.): ~95% have native Hyvä support in 2026, or work via the Hyvä Compatibility Module.
• Marketplace storefront extensions (free): ~70% native or compat-supported. Some niche ones may need a port.
• Admin-only extensions (reporting, exports, RMA): 100% — they don’t touch the storefront so Hyvä doesn’t affect them.
• Heavy frontend customisation extensions (page builders, layered nav, configurators): 80 – 90% have Hyvä parity, but check each one before committing.

The audit step in any migration starts with a per-extension compat check — no surprises mid-build.

Depends on where the bleeding is. Two patterns I see:

• Storefront slow, checkout OK → full Hyvä first. If PLP/PDP Lighthouse is < 50 and bounce rate is high, fix the entry pages first. Hyvä Checkout is a smaller win on top.
• Storefront OK-ish, checkout abandonment > 70% mobile → Hyvä Checkout first. Captures ~50% of the perf wins for ~25% of the migration cost. Lower risk, faster ROI. Then plan a full Hyvä migration in a later phase.

For heavily customised Luma stores where a full migration is genuinely $30k+, Hyvä Checkout alone is often the right answer for the first 12 months. The two aren’t mutually exclusive — they stack.

Three rough sizes:

• Small (low customisation, < 10 extensions): 4 – 6 weeks, $5 – 10k. Mostly theme port + brand re-skin. Fastest payback.
• Medium (custom Luma child theme, 10 – 25 extensions, some B2B): 6 – 9 weeks, $12 – 20k. Most stores fall here.
• Large (multi-store, heavy custom modules, B2B-heavy, 25+ extensions): 10 – 16 weeks, $25 – 60k. Often phased — full Hyvä on B2C storefronts first, B2B portal in a later phase.

Side-by-side QA + soft cutover (10% traffic for 7 days, then full) is included in every estimate. Roll-back plan stays available for 14 days post-cutover.

Yes — Hyvä supports the full Magento B2B feature set (company accounts, requisition lists, quotes, shared catalogues, tier pricing). The work is in re-implementing custom UI on top of those features.

What needs porting:

• Company-account dashboards (custom Knockout templates → Alpine + Magewire)
• Requisition list / quick-order UIs (usually a clean refactor; the Hyvä versions are simpler)
• Custom price-tier display logic on PLP/PDP (move from KO to Alpine)
• B2B-only checkout flow tweaks (often easier in Hyvä Checkout)

B2B-heavy stores often see bigger conversion lifts after Hyvä migration than B2C ones — buyer expectations on UX have caught up to consumer-grade, and B2B Luma UX usually lags badly.

Same Magento multi-store mechanism (websites, store views, store-scoped configs) — Hyvä sits on top, doesn’t change the architecture. Per-store theme overrides, per-store-view translations, per-store catalogue all work identically.

Where it’s actually better than Luma:

• Tailwind config can be per-child-theme, so different brand looks share the parent Hyvä foundation without LESS-import gymnastics
• Alpine state is local to each Hyvä component, so store-view-specific UI tweaks don’t leak across views
• Faster builds — no `setup:static-content:deploy` per-locale RequireJS pipeline grinding through 8 store views

For 5+ store-view setups, Hyvä actually saves engineering time on top of the perf wins.

If done right, no. If done wrong, yes — but it’s preventable. The risk areas:

• URL structure changes: none, if you keep the same Magento URL rewrites. Hyvä is a theme layer, not a URL change.
• Schema markup: Hyvä emits product/breadcrumb/organization schema by default. Verify it matches your current structured data, port any custom JSON-LD.
• Meta tags + canonical: handled by Magento core, so Hyvä doesn’t change them. Verify after cutover with a crawl.
• Page speed (positive): Lighthouse 95+ improves Core Web Vitals, which improves Google rankings on competitive queries. The lift usually shows up 4 – 8 weeks post-cutover.

Standard playbook: full Screaming Frog crawl pre-cutover, same crawl post-cutover, diff every node. Submit updated sitemap. Rankings hold or improve within 2 months in 90%+ of cases.

Adobe hasn’t formally deprecated Luma, but the de facto signals are clear:

• No meaningful Luma updates since 2022 — only security backports.
• Adobe’s own 2024 announcement positioned Hyvä as the recommended frontend for Adobe Commerce going forward.
• Adobe Commerce Cloud onboarding for new merchants now defaults to Hyvä project templates.
• Magento Open Source still ships with Luma as default (won’t change in 2026), but every "what should I build new with?" recommendation from Adobe Solution Partners points at Hyvä.

The way to read this: Luma will keep working for 5+ more years (Magento doesn’t break things), but it’s in maintenance mode. Building greenfield on Luma in 2026 is choosing the legacy stack on day one.

The Hyvä Compatibility Module is a separately-licensed wrapper that lets Luma-only extensions render their UI inside a Hyvä storefront without rewriting them. It does this by injecting a sandboxed Knockout/RequireJS environment for those specific extensions, while the rest of the page stays Hyvä-native.

What it covers:

• ~95% of paid Luma-only extensions from major vendors (Amasty, Mageplaza, Magefan, Aheadworks, etc.)
• Most Magento Marketplace storefront extensions that haven’t shipped native Hyvä support yet
• Custom Luma extensions written in-house (with some setup work)

What it doesn’t cover:

• Page-builder extensions that try to take over the whole page rendering pipeline
• Extensions that hard-code Luma-specific class names everywhere
• The performance wins — Compat Module re-introduces some Luma JS, so a Compat-heavy store loses 10 – 30% of the Hyvä perf win. Still way ahead of pure Luma.

Yes, and mostly in your favour. The required skills:

• Tailwind CSS: mainstream front-end skill, huge talent pool, easy to hire
• Alpine.js: small, easy to learn — most React/Vue devs pick it up in a weekend
• Magewire (server-side reactivity): Hyvä-specific, but well-documented. 1 – 2 weeks to ramp
• Magento backend (PHP, GraphQL, modules, plugins): identical to Luma — same talent pool

Compare to Luma which needed:

• jQuery (still findable, but devs hate it now)
• RequireJS (legacy, fewer experts every year)
• KnockoutJS (effectively dead — almost nobody under 30 has used it)
• UI Components XML (Magento-specific arcana)

Hiring for Hyvä is genuinely easier than Luma in 2026, and the dev quality is higher because the talent pool overlaps with mainstream web dev.

Hyvä, by a clear margin. The reasoning:

• Active development: Hyvä ships a new version every 6 – 8 weeks. Luma ships security patches only.
• Adobe’s direction: Adobe Commerce + Hyvä is the strategic frontend stack for 2026 – 2030.
• Talent pool: Tailwind/Alpine devs are growing; jQuery/Knockout devs are aging out.
• Extension ecosystem: new extensions ship Hyvä-first from 2024 onwards. Luma compat is becoming a "legacy support" feature in marketplace listings.
• Hyvä team: Acquired by Vaimo in 2024, well-funded, growing engineering team. Not a side-project.

Realistic horizon: Luma will work for 5+ more years but stop being competitive in 2 – 3. Hyvä has 10+ years of clear runway. If you’re planning a build that’ll live 5+ years, Hyvä is the only sensible answer in 2026.