Adobe announces the End of Life for Business Catalyst

Report · Mar 25, 2018

Adobe is committed to delivering exceptional software and services to our customers. It’s in our nature to innovate and try new things, and it was in this spirit that we acquired Business Catalyst in 2009. As we re-focus on products that broadly provide our customers with the most value, Adobe is announcing the end of development for Business Catalyst as of March 26th, 2018. New sites will no longer be available for purchase starting with June 18th, 2018.

Adobe will stop hosting existing sites on Business Catalyst on March 26th 2020. Adobe encourages customers to download their data and migrate to other systems well before March 26th 2020. Detailed how-to information and assistance is available. Customers' data will be retained by Adobe until March 26th 2020, after which date the data will be deleted. Data retention is for the sole purpose of allowing customers to export their data and transfer to another platform.

We thank our Business Catalyst users and want to help them make a smooth transition to a third-party service. Please see the following for more information on transitioning: https://secure.worldsecuresystems.com/product-announcement

Please see below a detailed FAQ.

Why is Adobe discontinuing Business Catalyst?

Adobe is committed to delivering exceptional software and services to our customers. It’s in our nature to innovate and try new things, and it was in this spirit that we acquired Business Catalyst in 2009. As we re-focus on products that broadly provide our customers with the most value, we are now announcing the end of life for Business Catalyst. We thank our Business Catalyst users and want to help them make a smooth transition to a third party service.

When will the End of Life take effect?

On March 26th, 2020.

Will this end-of-service affect paid sites as well?

Yes, all sites, including trial and paid sites, partner sites, etc. will be affected by the end of life.

Will data be available for download beyond the service end date?

No. Data will be deleted. We encourage users to download their data before the service end date.

I need help downloading my data. Whom can I contact for help?

BC users may find export instructions in the Business Catalyst Help and Support pages. If you still have questions, please contact our Customer Support team.

How long do I have to export my data?

All Business Catalyst servers will be taken down on March 26th, 2020, after which all customer data will be deleted. Please export your data before March 26th, 2020.

How long will you keep my data? What will you do with it?

We will retain your data until March 26th, 2020 or until you delete your site, whichever is sooner, so that you can transition to another product.

Do you recommend another product for me to use?

While there are other hosting solutions available in the market, Adobe does not recommend a specific product. For basic websites and Creative Cloud users, we provide documentation to help with transition to GoDaddy, should the customer choose this replacement. Moreover, since we’ve seen the emergence of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) website creators that leverage customizable templates to quickly create responsive websites, Adobe is making our own investment in the DIY space and welcomes all interested customers to join our upcoming pre-release program for a new format that will be introduced later this year as part of Adobe Spark.

Will new features be developed?

No, new features will no longer be developed on Business Catalyst. We are maintaining a small team to correct critical issues, but no new work is being done. The Business Catalyst team will maintain the PCI and GDPR compliance throughout the lifetime of the product and develop any new features needed in this respect.

Will Adobe still fix the bugs in Business Catalyst?

We will continue to repair critical issues (related to security, payments or customer data for example) when they appear, however, the work will be limited to bugs that have a high security or high stability risk. We will not be fixing minor items with small impact or that have a workaround which can be used.

Will my site be closed down?

At this time, all sites will continue to be live and the public will see no difference in your site. However, starting with March 26th, 2020 all sites will no longer be live and they will not be accessible either to the general public, or to the site administrators. Please find an alternative platform for your site and data before this date.

Can I continue creating trial sites?

You can continue creating trial sites until June 18^th, 2018. They need to be upgraded to a paid plan before June 18^th, 2018. The data from these sites, as well as from any other site in your portfolio, needs to be removed from the platform before March 26th, 2020.

Can I upgrade my trial site to paid?

You can continue upgrading trial sites to paid until June 18^th, 2018, but the data from these sites, as well as from any other site in your portfolio needs to be removed from the platform before March 26th, 2020.

Can I downgrade my site or make any other plan changes?

Yes, you can continue making any changes to your site plan and extras until March 26th, 2020.

Can I still purchase extras?

You can continue purchasing extras until March 26th, 2020. Please note that all extras expire on March 26th, 2020 and can no longer be used after that date.

Can I continue sending newsletters?

The e-mail marketing features will continue to work for the duration of your site. You can continue sending emails until March 26th, 2020 at which point all newsletter credits remaining in your account will expire.

Can I still redeem my commissions?

You can continue to redeem the commissions available in your account until March 26^th 2020. Following this date this feature will not be available anymore.

What happens to the commissions below $500?

At this time, we are researching technical options to allow redemption of lower commissions. Please stay tuned for further announcements from the Business Catalyst team.

Can I extend the validity of my extras beyond March 26th, 2020?

No, the validity date for your extras can no longer be extended. All extras not used until March 26^th 2020 will be forfeited.

Will I be able to use Adobe Muse or Dreamweaver to update my site?

Yes, until March 26th, 2020, if your desktop app still functions properly.

Will I still have technical support for Adobe Business Catalyst?

Yes, until March 26th, 2020. However, after June 18^th, 2018, our support team will give a higher priority to cases about the off the platform migration questions, in addition to critical security, compliance, and availability issues.

Report · Mar 27, 2018

Hi Alexander,

Apologies if I have been unclear. Having it all in one place will definitely make it easier but compared to 10 years ago, today you can link different services easier through various platforms making it an approachable solution.

Cristinel

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Magda,

The official response to Wayne's points regarding going open-source or selling the product suggest the only interest being protected by opting to ignore either of these options is Adobe's. Adobe would be creating competition for it's own brand should another company buy BC and better operate it for it's users. Leaving users without an option is better for the company than to give users a viable option outside of Adobe.

Joe

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Hi all, we are going to be greatly affected by this also. But I wanted to give a possible avenue that could help with migrations for some of you. Look into wp engine for hosting(very secure and great support, automatic backups etc.), wordpress for websites. In addition to that, which will will make your sites faster to build, is to use beaver builder. it is hands down the best drag and drop builder out there, it uses the 12 column grid system and is simply amazing. I have been using it for over a year now. You will also need beaver themer(to build custom headers and footers). Also, as an option, ultimate addons for beaver builder. It provides even greater functionality. I began migration from BC about a year ago, because I was tired of the limitations of bc. Now for ecommerce, you will use woocommerce which is free, unless you choose to use addons which could cost additional money. For forms, we use gravity forms. They are by far the best form plugin for wordpress as well. Using all of the tools mentioned here, I am able to create sites much faster than ever that I could with BC. I do not have an answer yet to sites that use webapps(similar to a database) to power there sites. I too, am facing this issue to come up with a solution. I could build it using ruby or python or what have you, but then that limits the customer from being able to easlily make changes. I will actively be searching for a wordpress solution, so If I find one, I will post again. Hopefully this helps everyone. We have over 60 sites to migrate over, and if you do the math, that means we have about a week and a half for each site, before all data is gone. Obviously, adobe didn't do the math and come to the conclusion that 2 years is not nearly enough time to migrate over, it should be more like 5 years, because I know some of you have hundreds of sites. I will never use another adobe product for as long as I live. there are better alternatives.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

What Adobe should do as one minor update to Muse and Adobe XD is allow users to be able to copy/paste content from one application to the other to help with the transition of software. Just trying to hold off the town mob of torches and pitchforks.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Hi Samuel,

XD is indeed a great tool when it comes to designing workflows, but again, it cannot be recommended as a full replacement for either Muse or BC since it does not actually generate the code for the site.

Report · Mar 27, 2018

I understand that, but to speed up the process in converting the visuals for a site to be handled further by a developer, it would make sense to add functionality to have the ability to copy/paste items from Adobe Muse to Adobe XD.

Everyone should have seen this coming once Adobe released a new visual design tool. Something had to go and this isn't the first time ever that Adobe dropped a major software application to go against competition. Does anyone remember Pagemaker moving into InDesign to compete against QuarkXPress? Now, it's Muse moving to XD to compete against Sketch.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Hi all

We also have several websites running in BC for our customers. We do not know what to do next and what alternative cms / crm systems to migrate to. All our business is based around the BC platform and this will hit us hard. We have just started developing complex websites for customers that utilize much of the functionality in BC an now we have to look for alternative systems. We also have more offers out that we can`t not stand for as they are based on the functionality in BC.

Does anyone know about other good (all-in-one) cms / crm platforms? Which CMS systems do you consider moving to? All tips on good systems are received with great thanks 🙂

Report · Mar 26, 2018

To those of you looking for a CMS replacement, I started looking for just that not long ago when I read posts that hinted at such a possibility. Obviously the decision two years ago to stop offering the lifetime partnership was probably the biggest red flag of them all.

I found MODX (modx.com) and thought it's probably the closest replacement to BC that I could find, although I haven't had a chance to switch yet and give it a good test run. As for webapps, it does appear to allow you to easily build data-driven web pages, according to this forum posting, Can Revo do forms and data driven pages? | MODX Community Forums).

This truly is a disaster for many partners who counted on the reliability and sustainability of an apparently stable and trustworthy company. I feel that this has been handled in the worst way for the partners' sake, in that Adobe has maximized their ability to continue to make money off BC, all the while denying the possibility and stealthily creeping toward a complete shutdown of operations, instead of being more upfront with everyone that this was an impending likelihood and brainstorming with their "partners" for alternative solutions.

I will definitely not be purchasing another Adobe product or service and encouraging others to do the same.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

I actually started with ModX long before i heard of BC, back in 2006 when it was just in Beta.

Just like back then and now - E-Commerce works horribly bad and is very difficult to get right.

ModX is great for very custom solutions, but not for quickly fleshing out or moving sites.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Hi all,

It's been a crazy day and not what I expected for this Monday. I received an email from Adam Cook's distro list earlier today mentioning that he was looking at Platform OS. However, I have not been able to find anything on the web for this CMS. Does anyone know anything about this CMS? Do you know the URL to the home page?

Thanks.

-Scott

Report · Mar 26, 2018

BC Sandpile announced special guests including Ex original partner of BC Adam Broadway (now NearMe platform).

Interesting this is happening, A wise man once said "be very careful of people who market mouse traps and cheese when a plague of mice suddenly appear around your home"

Report · Mar 26, 2018

What a day... I did a pile of research today looking for alternatives to Adobe. I am so entrenched (like all of you) in BC and, in my case also Adobe Muse that I was trying to figure out what's next now that Adobe has basically said fu.... Like Google, Apple, and others Adobe has gone the way of the corporate bully, "If we can't beat the competition with our products then let's just buy them and put them out of business. To hell with our customers".

I have also been a subscriber to a few support groups like BC Gurus and MuseGrid. The latter, MuseGrid, somehow picked up on this event a week ago and have come up with a decent alternative: webflow.com. At the moment it is missing eCommerce natively but is planning to add it soon. It also has several integrations for ecommerce. It looks like it might be a worthy alternative to BC (and Muse). Check it out.

In other news:

1) cancelled my Adobe Creative Cloud accounts

2) Chose Affinity Photo over Photoshop

3) Affinity Designer over InDesign:

4) DaVinci Resolve (free version, full featured) over Premiere Pro

5) Nitro Pro over Acrobat DC

6) TBD: between DxO Pro or Phase One to replace Lightroom. Leaning towards DxO because they now own and have integrated NIK.

Done with Adobe.

Let me know when the Class Action Suits start so I can join up.

Special thanks to Magda for taking it on the chin all day and bravely defending her chicken shit higher ups. I hope they reward her well, She deserves it.

Good luck everyone.

Marshall

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Great plan, but be careful, because next step Adobe will buy Afinity and discontinue like BC.

Report · Mar 27, 2018

Nice that you are taking action!!

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Hi everyone,

We were as shocked as anyone today to hear this news. However, not long after Adobe took over, we noticed a lot of time was being spent on the backend and not adding new features or bringing the various components of the system up to date for end users. About two years ago we started migrating our 59 BC customers to Wordpress. To this end, we’d like to offer some advice that may help ease the transition for some of you. Since we started migrating to WP two years ago, we’ve painfully whittled our BC sites down to just 11. Take this with a grain of salt and use it as you may — but this is what’s worked best for us:

CMS: Wordpress and Wordpress Multisite

Hosting: Managed Cloud Hosting Platform - Cloudways (full disclosure - this is an affiliate link!)

We love its featureset and ease of creating new applications for many different clients. It’s allowed us to meet the needs of clients who had very simple BC sites up to the most complex, including SSL needs and fluid hosting - RAM, HD space, etc - you can adjust all of these on the fly or let the system adjust them for you in real time based on traffic spikes - very handy.)

Plugins we couldn’t live without (if there’s interest, we can provide more that we have ended up relying upon to provide an experience as good as and often much better than Business Catalyst):

For our clients with an e-commerce site, we’ve used Shopify and WooCommerce.
WPMUDEV (Helps you manage many aspects of your sites) WPMU DEV - Your WordPress Toolkit
Advanced Custom Fields Pro (this will give you all the features of WebApps and in a MUCH better interface than BC ever had) ACF | Advanced Custom Fields Plugin for WordPress
Contact Form 7 (a lot of people love one called Gravity Forms too!)
Contact Form DB (this will save all your contact form enquiries to an on-site database)
Domain Mapping Plugin (for managing multiple clients)
Google Analytics (set one up for each client as you add them)
Post Thumbnail Editor (very handy)
Enable Media Replace (very handy to replace an instance of an image on the site)

Again, this is a short list, but hopefully this will help at least one of you in making the transition to a better system and will give you a jumping off point to begin rebuilding a business after this unfortunate and untimely announcement.

Take care and best of luck to us all.

Brandon

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Thank You! Yea, php here i come

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Yea, what about secure zones?

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Great Article.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

I'm assuming this is a move by Adobe due to what? Not profitable? In my opinion, this is a very bad move for Adobe. There are other vector programs such as corel draw, other image editing programs like live picture. When will you be announcing that Illustrator and Photoshop are at end of life? Time to look into other programs folks. Thanks for the two year heads up.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

One final (ironic) slap in the face.

I cancelled my Adobe CC account and will be charged "50% of the remaining yearly subscription".

When I inquired earlier today about getting a refund for my Lifetime Business Catalyst Account I was told that Adobe would not honour that contract with me and provide a refund.

Nice.

MCC

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Does anyone have a record or copy of the actual partner agreements? I can't find anything online anymore, and the only email I have from them when I purchased is my receipt!

Report · Mar 26, 2018

I might have some screen shots that would stand in court. Have to look on an old laptop

Report · Mar 26, 2018

I have one from 2006 signed with business catalyst prior to its purchase by Adobe if that helps?

Report · Mar 26, 2018

And that's after Adobe just announced it's record breaking financial year. Massive revenue and profits. I have no issues with being profitable, I have an issue when it comes at the cost of stepping on the less fortunate, hard working individuals.

And yes. There are alternatives to almost anything in life.

Report · Mar 26, 2018

Why the shock? Sorry everyone - but why?

Adobe has treated this platform with disdain since it bought it. They have failed to invest and watched other platforms grow while this went backwards. It's been a dud platform for years now.

We've built over 250 sites on this platform but saw this coming ages ago and stopped building on, and recommending BC 2 years ago.

Nevertheless Adobe - this is a staggeringly poor way to handle it.

"Adobe is making our own investment in the DIY space and welcomes all interested customers to join our upcoming pre-release program for a new format"

Seriously? Why would anyone trust you after so many years of neglect?