M1 to M2 Data Migration Tool or use a service?

Magento 2 Setup
1

I’ve transferred data from an M1 DB to M2 using the M2 db migration tool and it goes fairly smooth, however I was reading about “Migration Ghosts” that popup during upgrades etc… due to the migration. Obviously, this would likely be from DB related issues.

I’m just curious on what the recommendations and experiences are on this.

2

Experiences will be very different for everybody. It normally stems from an anomaly whilst running Magento 1. Something that makes a change or creates an error that you might not notice. But then when you copy those issues over to Magento 2 - Which then become an issue.

Having said that, the issues aren’t always obvious and may only crop up weeks or months after your migration. You just have to be prepared. I had the luxury of a full 2 months of testing at the time, so I was able to be thorough with finding the obvious issues. We seemed to have everything ironed out within 4 months of launch.

I can’t be specific about this, as I mentioned it’s completely different for everyone. In fact, it may only affect a minority of users.

As for the migration itself, I used “UB Data Migration Pro”. At the time, there was only really the Official Tool and this to choose from. I have zero experience with other migration solutions. If I had to migrate another store I’d probably use it again. Albeit, it’s a bit pricey starting at around $399 (at the time of writing this).

3

Thank you very much for the input. I had success using the migration tool that magento provides on two of our local builds and I’m setting things up now to migrate using this tool to a non-local dev site. I’ve seen cart to cart out there as well. I think I may have used cart2cart when we moved from Volusion 10 years ago to M1. It worked great. At the time it was much more cost effective for a data move. I think it estimated around $500-700 to move the data. A bit overkill, but also it would be worth it if it were the best option or you didn’t know how to use the migration tool. I didn’t necessarily see any advantage to using it over the magento tool.