Welcome to the comparison of three unique eCommerce platforms – Magento, Shopware, and Sylius.
Let’s start with the question: Why did we choose these three? We work with these platforms frequently, as do many of our customers. In 2024, these three are among the top choices for PHP in the SMB and Enterprise segments, especially if we are looking to build something custom. Each platform brings its unique strengths to the table, making it suitable for different business scenarios and development requirements.
In this comparison, we will go beyond marketing promises and look at real-world metrics and practical experience. We’ll examine the architecture, performance benchmarks, and many other key metrics associated with these platforms. Whether you’re planning to start a new eCommerce project or migrate an existing one, this will help you make a decision based on facts and updated data.
Let’s start by answering the crucial question of why the eCommerce market has become so diverse over the years.
Quick Jump
- Why is the eCommerce market so diverse?
- Recent platform updates and changes
- What are the key differences between these platforms?
- Architecture comparison
- Sylius, Shopware & Magento static analysis with PHPMetrics
- What does this mean in practice?
- Top countries and number of implementations
- Which platform is right for you?
Why is the eCommerce market so diverse?
The eCommerce industry has evolved dramatically, particularly in the post-pandemic era. Today, it extends far beyond basic online stores with shopping carts and product pages. We’re seeing innovative business models emerge that put technology at their core, from sophisticated marketplaces to subscription-based platforms and complex B2B eCommerce solutions.
Each modern eCommerce platform excels in different scenarios, with varying strengths and optimal use cases. However, this diversity presents a significant challenge: decision-makers often underestimate the importance of platform selection despite its long-term technological implications. Without extensive experience in the field, choosing the right solution from the many available options can be overwhelming. As a result, many rely on platform representatives’ advice, which may not always align with real-world performance and capabilities.
Given these challenges, today’s article take an objective look at three major eCommerce platforms – Sylius, Shopware, and Magento. Instead of relying on marketing promises or biased opinions, we’ll focus on metrics and numbers to provide a clear, factual comparison that can help inform your platform selection process.
Recent platform updates and changes
The past few years have significantly changed all three platforms, reshaping their positions in the eCommerce industry. Let’s make a quick summary.
Magento‘s story took an interesting turn when Adobe acquired the platform. While this acquisition promised new integration possibilities between the two ecosystems, it also created some uncertainty in the market. Shopware has strategically capitalized on this situation with an impressive €100 million in funding from PayPal, specifically aimed at acquiring customers from the Magento ecosystem. However, Shopware’s journey hasn’t been without its challenges. As financial pressures mounted, investors began questioning the platform’s monetization strategy. This led to a significant increase in licensing fees – a decision that created a notable divide within the Shopware community and sparked some backlash among its users.
Sylius has also experienced its share of transformative changes. The platform underwent substantial turnover within its Core Team, eventually leading to the company being put up for sale.
These developments over the past three years have fundamentally changed the situation of these eCommerce platforms. Each change has played a crucial role in determining these platforms’ current market positions.
What are the key differences between these platforms?
Magento made its mark in eCommerce history as a true giant, controlling approximately 11% of the global eCommerce platform market at its peak. This impressive position wasn’t accidental – Magento offered a comprehensive “all-in-one solution” that included all the key tools necessary for running a successful online business. From advanced CRM systems to mailing tools and sophisticated customer segmentation capabilities – everything was available within a single platform.
However, the eCommerce market began to evolve in an unexpected direction. The emergence of specialized SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions changed the rules of the game. While Magento performed well across all areas, it couldn’t compete with tools that specialized in specific functionalities. This situation exposed the platform’s main weakness – in trying to be an expert at everything, it achieved mastery in none.
An additional challenge stemmed from the platform’s excessive complexity. Businesses looking to create a customized Magento store found themselves wrestling with an entire ecosystem of unused features that cluttered their workflow instead of streamlining it.
Moving on to Shopware, the year 2019 brought a significant change to the eCommerce platform market with the launch of Shopware 6. This new version was designed to balance functionality and flexibility. While it offers fewer (but still great) built-in features than its competitor, it provides more flexibility and room for customization.
Rather than trying to compete in every possible area, they chose to focus on integrating traditional eCommerce functionality with tools for creating and managing digital customer experiences. This functionality, known as the Digital Experience Platform (DXP), enables coherent management of all customer touchpoints, making Shopware a particularly attractive choice for B2C stores.
However, it’s worth noting that Shopware remains a relatively monolithic platform, which can have implications for performance and scalability – aspects that will be more clearly visible in our later comparative metrics.
Sylius stands out with its unique approach to functionality. Unlike Magento or Shopware, this platform emphasizes simplicity and minimalism – but don’t mistake this for limitations. Sylius follows the 80/20 rule, offering 80% of the most commonly used eCommerce features while leaving room to customize the remaining 20% according to specific business needs.
This philosophy makes Sylius particularly effective for emerging business models. Marketplaces, B2B platforms, and innovative B2C projects that are setting new market trends make Sylius an ideal technological partner.
However, if you’re planning to launch a standard online store, Sylius might not be the best fit. In such cases, simpler platforms might better suit basic eCommerce needs. Sylius excels in scenarios where standard solutions fall short, and businesses require deep personalization and flexibility.
Architecture comparison
Each leading eCommerce platform takes a different approach to system architecture. While powerful in its capabilities, Magento relies on its own complex Magento framework. This factor requires developers to make significant time investments – often several months – just to learn the framework before starting actual project work.

Shopware presents a more modern approach, primarily based on the Symfony framework. The platform’s architecture was designed to allow developers to implement best-of-breed solutions and modify them. This deliberate design choice reflects an understanding that modern eCommerce projects often require customization and integration with external systems.

Meanwhile, Sylius distinguishes itself with the elegant simplicity of its layered architecture, implementing the concept of a modular monolith. The system is built from independent components and bundles (which are essentially components adapted to the Symfony environment), along with a core containing key functionalities such as tax handling, categories, and promotions. Most importantly, Sylius fully leverages the capabilities of the Symfony framework, allowing developers familiar with Symfony to begin effective work on the platform after just a few days of reviewing the documentation.

Sylius, Shopware & Magento static analysis with PHPMetrics
Static analysis is a method for investigating top-level metrics of code, such as its volume, potential errors, code construction, etc. Simply speaking, it helps gauge the complexity of a solution before deciding to use it. Here, we looked at the open-source versions of all three platforms.
Lines of code (LOC)
Let’s begin our detailed comparison by looking at the sheer volume of code in each platform. The numbers tell an interesting story: Sylius emerges as significantly lighter, with approximately 6-7 times less code than Magento. Shopware, in turn, positions itself in the middle ground between these two platforms.

The volume of code directly impacts developers’ ability to navigate and understand a platform. When you’re dealing with nearly a million lines of code in Magento, locating specific functionality becomes a significant challenge. In contrast, with around 100,000 lines in Sylius, developers can more easily familiarize themselves with the code structure and intuitively locate what they need, even when documentation falls short.
Sylius’s approach of “less is more” offers another major advantage: it provides a solid foundation that any Symfony developer can work with without learning an entirely new framework. This means teams can start being productive much faster, focusing on building custom features rather than spending months learning how the platform works.
Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
Understanding the object-oriented structure of each platform provides crucial information about their maintainability and extensibility. Let’s look at some key metrics that reveal the architectural differences between these platforms.

When examining methods, it’s particularly valuable to calculate the methods-per-class ratio, as this gives us a high-level view of the system’s structure. This metric is especially important when considering customization needs. The ability to properly segment and organize code becomes handy when you need to hook into specific functionality or modify certain behaviors within the platform.
Coupling

These measurements reveal how tightly coupled your code is – essentially showing how interconnected different parts of the system are with each other.
Complexity

Bugs
Bugs refer to the predicted number of errors and defects in the code, allowing for an assessment of its quality and stability.

Violations
Violations are coding rules and guidelines breaches, such as errors, warnings, and informational messages that may affect code quality.

While Sylius has fewer lines of code, this reduction doesn’t come at the expense of functionality. Instead, it reflects a commitment to high-quality, efficient code design where each line serves a clear purpose.
Package
Packages are collections of related classes and functions organized logically and structurally to facilitate the management and reuse of code in a project. Metrics measure the structure and organization of code at the package level, including dependencies between packages and their internal structure.

What does this mean in practice?
Let’s use the example of the “order” model implementation across each platform. The differences are significant: Magento’s order model, while readable, contains 4,400 lines of code. Shopware offers a more streamlined version with 700 lines, while Sylius keeps it notably concise at just 300 lines.
These numbers aren’t just fancy metrics – they have real implications for development efficiency. The more compact codebase in Sylius makes it significantly easier for developers to navigate and understand the system’s logic. While the exact difference in code volume varies depending on which components you’re comparing, this proportion effectively illustrates the general trend in code complexity across these platforms.
Importantly, a smaller codebase isn’t just about easier navigation. It also reduces the potential for bugs, simplifies the maintenance process, and makes the system more approachable for new developers joining the project. When you’re working with 300 lines of code instead of 4,400, you can more quickly locate, understand, and modify functionality as needed.
Basic out-of-the-box performance
Let’s look at the performance to summarize this part of the comparison. We used the same server environment that best fits the PHP web stack all three run upon and measured some popular eCommerce read/write actions (such as loading the product index/show page, adding 450 products to the cart, processing the checkout, etc.
Overall performance conclusions
- Sylius is 68% faster than Magento
- Sylius is 45% faster than Shopware
- Shopware is 42% faster than Magento
The technologies were tested in the same environment
Server name | OVH SP-32 Server – E3-1270v6 – 32GB (BHS) |
Operating System | Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS 4.4.30-mod-std-ipv6-64 x86_64 |
Processor | Intel Xeon E3-1270 v6 @ 3.80 GHz 1 Processor, 4 Cores, 8 Threads |
We tested these results with multiple concurrent users and observed similar patterns. However, it’s important to note that these benchmarks are based on default installations. Performance metrics will vary as you add custom integrations, increase product counts, and implement additional features. Nevertheless, these numbers provide a baseline starting point for each platform.
Top countries and number of implementations
Now, let’s examine the market presence of these three platforms – a crucial factor when considering the availability of integrations and developers.
Magento leads with nearly 130,000 implementations, with the highest concentrations in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. This widespread adoption reflects its established position in the market.

Shopware follows with over 26,000 implementations. Its presence is particularly strong in Germany, with significantly smaller adoption rates in the United States, Switzerland, and Austria.

Sylius, with almost 10,500 implementations, holds a significant position in France (where Symfony is particularly popular), Spain, and the United States. These numbers reflect Sylius’s position as a more niche solution with a smaller team, although they also suggest growing acceptance in markets that value its technical approach.

Community
As expected, Magento has the largest community among these platforms. It also has the highest number of open issues, which isn’t surprising given its popularity and extensive codebase.
Notably, despite being the newest solution, Sylius has cultivated a highly active community that engages both on Slack and GitHub. This level of engagement demonstrates the platform’s growing momentum in the eCommerce space.
Regarding GitHub stars, it’s worth mentioning that these numbers only reflect Shopware’s latest version – combining all versions would yield different results. Interestingly, these community metrics somewhat parallel the code volume patterns we discussed in our static analysis, suggesting a correlation between codebase size and community scale.
Installations
Looking at installations over time reveals something worth noting. While both Magento and Shopware saw a surge in installations during the pandemic followed by a decline as physical stores reopened, Sylius shows continued growth even after the return to normal business operations. This maintained growth suggests that the adoption of Sylius is driven by more than just pandemic-related digital transformation, indicating a genuine market appreciation for its technical approach.

Number of specialists
While Magento leads in terms of specialized developers due to its market dominance, there’s an important factor when considering developer availability for Shopware and Sylius. Both platforms benefit from the large pool of Symfony developers available in the market. Since these platforms are built on Symfony, many experienced Symfony developers can quickly become proficient with either Shopware or Sylius, even if they haven’t worked with these specific platforms before.
The number of specialists (LinkedIn)
- Magento – 150 000
- Shopware – 8700
- Sylius – 1200
- Symfony – 140 000
Extensions
The availability of ready-to-use extensions also varies across these platforms. Magento leads with over 4,000 extensions, closely followed by Shopware with over 3,000. While Sylius has fewer extensions in comparison, it offers a unique advantage: all of its extensions are available for free in Sylius Store.
Extensions:
- Magento – 4172 (1021 free)
- Shopware – 2991 (471 free)
- Sylius – 469 (all free)
- Symfony bundle – 2600
Furthermore, both Shopware and Sylius benefit from their Symfony foundation. This means developers can leverage the vast ecosystem of Symfony bundles in projects built on either of these platforms, significantly expanding their practical extension options beyond the platform-specific marketplaces.
Which platform is right for you?
The technology you choose for your project depends on what you want to build, what you expect from the technology, and what technical resources you have.
Choose Magento if:
- You have a standard project that needs to be implemented quickly
- You want a popular solution with a large community
- Your team is not yet technologically mature
Choose Shopware if:
- You want to build a standard B2C eCommerce store
- You care about CMS
- Your technical team is more experienced
- You care about a large number of ready-made functionalities
Choose Sylius if:
- You want to build a marketplace or B2B eCommerce platform
- You want to create a custom platform that doesn’t yet exist on the market
- You have a strong, technically proficient team
Are you wondering which solution to choose? We will be happy to help you choose and advise you on the best solution. Take advantage of a free consultation.