3 things decide whether a Magento PIM build lands on schedule.
1. The connector ships in 3 lines with different floors. The compatibility table in the README of the Akeneo Connector for Adobe Commerce/Magento pairs 103.x with Magento 2.3.7 up to but not including 2.4.4 on PHP 7.4 and above and marks it end of life; 104.x with 2.4.4 up to but not including 2.4.7 on PHP 8.0 and above, marked bug fixes only; and 105.x with 2.4.7 and above on PHP 8.2 and above, marked current. The repository at github.com/akeneo/magento2-connector-community carries branches for all 3 lines, and its most recent tag, checked on 24 August 2026, is v105.1.2. Adobe's release lifecycle page puts 2.4.4 and 2.4.5 out of support entirely, and puts 2.4.6 in extended support until 31 August 2027 after it left regular support on 11 August 2026. A merchant on 2.4.6 is therefore on the bug-fixes-only connector line, and the platform upgrade that restores regular support is also a connector line change. That makes the line choice a week 1 decision rather than a composer constraint.
2. The sync is one-way. The README describes the connector as exporting catalog data and structure from Akeneo PIM into Adobe Commerce through API calls, and lists categories, families, attributes, options, product models, family variants and products as what it imports. Nothing travels back to Akeneo. The ownership boundary that holds up in production: Akeneo owns the product model, attributes, media assets and channel rules. Adobe Commerce reads channel-scoped products through the connector. Price and stock stay with the ERP and reach Magento by a separate path.
3. Attribute volume is a database decision before it is a modelling decision. The connector builds temporary tables during import and exposes a Storage Engine setting at akeneo_connector/akeneo_api/storage_engine. Its own admin comment states that MyISAM allows high scalability with an important number of attributes, and that InnoDB is recommended but may cause errors during import for a large catalog. A second field, Disable InnoDB Strict Mode, exists for catalogs with many attributes where MyISAM is not available. A catalog with 40 attributes across 6 locales and 3 channels reaches that territory faster than it looks on a whiteboard, and the symptom is a failed import with a database error underneath it.
When an import goes wrong, the first table to open is akeneo_connector_entities. Its definition in etc/db_schema.xml stores an import type, an Akeneo code and an Adobe Commerce entity ID, under a unique constraint across all 3 columns. Duplicate products after a re-run usually trace to rows there. The module also writes akeneo_connector_import_log. Any agency quoting this work should be able to describe both tables and its rollback procedure without looking them up.
2 published numbers are worth carrying into a scoping call, and they disagree. MGT-Commerce publishes 4 to 8 weeks for a standard Magento PIM integration and 3 to 9 months for a complex one, service costs of $5,000 to $30,000, and 8GB of server RAM above 5,000 SKUs. Bemeir sets the PIM adoption threshold at 5,000 SKUs. MGT-Commerce sets its adoption trigger far lower, at 500. The two published thresholds are ten times apart, so neither is a reliable trigger on its own, and attribute and locale count are the better sizing inputs.