Sylius vs Shopware vs WooCommerce – platforms comparison

Choosing a platform that will meet your requirements is vital for your business. Each of them has its pros and cons, which will further determine your success. Moreover, they differ in terms of architecture and scaling possibilities, making a decision even harder.
But don’t worry – reading this article will shed light on some of the eCommerce platforms in order to help you make the right decision and avoid unpleasant surprises. First of all, take a look at some basic information about these three popular eCommerce platforms.

General information about Sylius, Shopware, and WooCommerce

Sylius

Sylius is an eCommerce platform based on the Symfony framework, available in two versions: Community Edition and Sylius Plus. Both of them give the ability to scale and expand immensely. Sylius is a 100% API-first and Headless platform. Additionally, both editions offer the ability to integrate with external software or eCommerce tools without negatively impacting performance.

Sylius is a platform built by developers for developers. Due to that, it requires programming skills to be able to extend and expand it freely. Unlike Shopware and WooCommerce, the installation of plugins requires programming interference and familiarity with code. This platform is the opposite of the monolithic approach and its high-end performance has attracted many of the largest players in the eCommerce market. Thanks to its unlimited scaling and API-first Sylius approach, it provides a base for building customized eCommerce.

Shopware

Shopware is a more standard solution that has more out-of-the-box functions, such as built-in PageBuilder and marketing automation tools, among others. Shopware, like Sylius, is based on the Symfony framework, but it’s much more friendly to non-technical people due to an easier interface and the ability to automatically install extensions directly from the Shopware store.

Shopware, similarly to Sylius, is able to handle even the most complex and demanding projects. It also has its commercial versions – Rise, Evolve, and Beyond, which are dedicated to more demanding customers. Shopware is a platform based on the API First approach; as opposed to monolithic platforms it relies on the future-oriented Headless approach, the best example of which is the Shopware PWA solution.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin for WordPress website. Its undoubted advantage is low implementation cost to start with. It has a large community, thus, further development is relatively cheap in comparison to other platforms. However, it’s not an OOTB solution – while we can configure a sales platform, there are no ready-made solutions such as payment gateways or shipping solutions.

Headless approach – what is it?

Simply speaking, it is the separation of front-end and back-end layers in an eCommerce platform. Such a solution gives companies the freedom and flexibility to implement their ideas without causing any interference on the website. Below you can see some advantages of the headless approach:

• Easier management
• Less risk of regression
• More stable architecture due to the better testing environment
• Ability to use the best tools available on the market in a specific area („best of breed” approach)
• Integration with legacy and modern software in a headless environment
• Significantly better user experience on mobile, search engine, and other interfaces
• Better performance
• Better debugging

When you should start to think about either solution?

When each of these solutions has no use?

Basic assumptions of each platform

Tech stack and architecture

Sylius

Sylius is built from blocks, where at the very bottom of the architecture exist Components, which are pure PHP libraries, e.g. for a product, for orders, or for payments. These are the kind of libraries that you can adopt to any project in PHP.

A layer above there are Bundles, where all these components are wrapped in Symfony, where you will find all service definitions and Doctrine (a family of PHP libraries ). Such Bundles can be installed to any Symfony project.

Core is the place where a product learns that is has a category, or that it can be purchased during the ordering process, where all Bundles are linked together.

At the very top there are three main segments: Admin Panel, which is connected with User Interface (UI), Shop Panel, and API Panel. Each of these segments can be easily disconnected if you need a headless solution.

Shopware

Shopware is a platform that has the entire eCommerce architecture at the core. This platform offers a headless approach – which means that every third-party process can be connected externally through REST-API. Moreover, it offers low complexity and great maintainability thanks to the technologies like Symfony and Vue.js. 

The Core is the heart of the platform. It contains all workflows and resources essential for eCommerce. Its architecture is modular and the modules are divided into groups and placed in different directories. Shopware is even-driven, which means that actions taken by users are processed by Shopware as events.

In addition to REST-API-based core communication, the Administrator Panel is a Single Page Application (SPA), that offers a comprehensive user experience. Although using Vue.js, it is an interaction-oriented system following the example of the Web component patterns.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is not a separate eCommerce platform but a WordPress plugin. After the installation of this plugin, the website is still a blog. To change that into an eCommerce site it is required to install other plugins to extend its functionalities. Nonetheless, it’s rather easy to do that, even for the beginner. WooCommerce uses REST-API and it is possible to use Twig templates by installing the Timber plugin which enables to create of fully-customized WordPress themes faster with more sustainable code.

WordPress is built on an event-driven (hook) engine. Also, WordPress uses native PHP, and responsibility for standardization is spread across the community. Due to that, it is pretty difficult to manage a project on WooCommerce.

Strong aspects of each platform

Weak sides of each platform

Target clients for each platform

What are the implementation risks of each solution?

Licensing model in those three solutions

Sylius offers a free community version, which can be downloaded as an open-source version and, with PHP/Symfony skills, you can set up the store yourself. In addition, Sylius, offers a paid license of Sylius Plus, which you can get from 14,900 Euros as an annual fee, or buy modularly Sylius Plus – the functionality of Sylius Plus that you need most for your eCommerce.

Shopware offers a Community Edition solution, and just like Sylius, you can download it as an open-source version, although it does not require as much programming skills as Sylius itself. Much of the functionality in the best-of-breed approach can be found in Shopware OOTB. In addition, the installation of plugins does not require programming skills. Currently, Shopware has three paid versions: Shopware Rise, starting from €600/month, Shopware Evolve, which is priced by the vendor individually, and Shopware Beyond, which price is also set individually, based on the client’s requirements.

WooCommerce is based on an open-source GPL License, including paid features and plugins.

Vendors behind Sylius, Shopware and WooCommerce

What about Communities?

The Sylius community is still young, but it is rapidly growing. We, as BitBag, are constantly supporting the development of this platform by contributing to the open-sourced free plugins on our GitHub. We have already created more than 35 free plugins and have an open-source department that is constantly working on new extensions.

The Shopware Community is much older than Sylius, due to the fact that the platform itself has been on the market much longer. On the Shopware Community / Shopware 6 channel on Slack, you can find almost six thousand of people who share knowledge and insights about the platform itself. At BitBag, we are working on integrations for Shopware with shipping providers like DHL, DPD, InPost, as well as developing applications for Shopware.

Want to explore the best eCommerce technologies and deep dive into Shopware? Check out our free e-book – A comprehensive guide to choosing the best technologies for eCommerce

WooCommerce has one of the biggest communities among eCommerce platforms with 5 million installations, 17,000 Slack users, 30, 000 questions on Stack Overflow, and 1100 contributors.

So, which platform should you choose?

Sylius is a very powerful tool that will work best for medium and large companies with not non-standard ideas for development, omnichannel, many instances, multi-tenant, etc, and organizations that place a very strong emphasis on performance. Moreover, Sylius is very good for MVM and Enterprise eCommerce websites.

Shopware is ideal for medium-sized companies with a lot of capital that can be invested in expanding their organization. It is an intuitive, very marketing and SEO oriented, with a great UX/UI. Also, programming skills are not required, however, in case of a large development of the platform you will need a team of developers or an external agency that will meet your requirements and do it for you.

WooCommerce offers a huge community, many years on the market, great for new businesses that want to try their hand at the market and has limited budget. Nonetheless, it is a platform with a very large technological debt, which negatively affects the performance and limits your ability to scale your business.

The answer to this question depends on your specific needs and budget. To determine the best platform for you, you should take into account factors such as ease of use, cost, scalability, and support. Additionally, you should assess each platform’s features and compare them to your own requirements. Ultimately, the platform you choose should be the one that best meets your needs and budget. If you are looking for support and guidance in the process of choosing the best platform for your needs, we encourage you to check out our Vision-To-Plan eCommerce workshops or just contact us for more information.