Sylius vs Magento: What to Choose As Your eCommerce Platform?

According to experts, global eCommerce sales are expected to reach $7.3 trillion by 2025, with the overall online share of retail sales hitting 23.6%.

In the article, we’ll discuss the differences between Sylius and Magento, two of the most popular eCommerce platforms used to create online stores. Before we compare these two platforms, let's clarify some of the terms we will use to describe them.

eCommerce platform types: closed-source vs. open-source

Closed-source software is proprietary, with its code closed to the public. Such solutions are usually software designed for use within a particular organization.

Contrastingly, an open-source product has its source code freely available so that both individual developers and digital professionals can modify, add new features, and improve it. Usually, such products have a community of people who actively participate in upgrading them. For modern startups and emerging companies, open-source solutions are a better choice, since they are usually less expensive and more flexible than closed-source ones.

Modern hosting solutions for eCommerce

Website performance is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a loyal user base and attracting new customers. Therefore, choosing the right hosting provider for an eCommerce platform determines its future growth and scalability.

In the world of web-hosting there are plenty of solutions, from shared and virtual private hosting suitable for small websites to dedicated hosting that comes at a significantly higher price. These days, cloud hosting, which allows your online store to be located on multiple servers linked together, can arguably be named the best choice for an eCommerce platform. Thanks to its stability and flexibility in terms of scale and price, cloud hosting is suitable for online shops with special promotions and discounts, where the number of visitors can increase sharply, and it is important to ensure there is no server overload.

Cloud hosting main advantages:

• Server failure or breakdown doesn’t affect the operation of the website;
• You pay only for the resources you use;
• Additional resources and services can be added to increase the platform’s security and performance;
• You can customize the platform’s configuration according to your business needs;
• Multiple servers ensure stability, distributing server load — each server performs a specific function;
• A cloud service hosting provider maintains the infrastructure, allowing you to focus on what is essential for your business.

Magento: under the hood

Magento or Adobe Commerce is an out-of-the-box eCommerce platform that offers a complete set of ready-made features for launching an online shop. The initial version released in 2007 ran on Zend Framework, which was later substituted by its own PHP implementation to provide robust functionality and reduce the development effort for modules related to business logic.

Magento allows business owners to launch an online store in a short time, using hundreds of ready-made plugins and themes. Many additional modules extend the platform's capabilities even further but require experienced developers on board. Due to the legacy nature of the platform (a mix of Zend and Magento's own frameworks), extending existing features or changing the flow of standard processes can be tricky and time-consuming.

It is important to note that after Adobe acquired Magento and the second version of the platform, Magento 2, was released, the initial Magento 1 was no longer supported. Because of this, the online stores using the first version may face security and technical issues, which they have to solve on their own.

Sylius: a Symfony-based platform

Sylius is an open-source eCommerce platform based on the Symfony framework. The platform provides developers with numerous well-designed components for creating an online shop of any size and profile.

Symfony is a PHP framework for developing web applications. It has extensive functionality, solid architecture, and is supported by a large community of developers. The framework is like a library of ready-made solutions that anyone can re-use in their projects, focusing on custom functionality rather than developing core features such as user authentication and security or handling of HTTP responses and requests. With Symfony, developers can build projects of any kind and complexity, from simple websites to enterprise-level solutions.

Thanks to the solid Symfony basement, Sylius-powered projects can be easily scaled. With a wide variety of Symfony bundles and bundles specifically designed for Sylius, developers can extend or override any of the platform's functions and introduce a custom process flow (for example, checkout) that suits the business requirements. This makes Sylius a perfect choice for projects with custom requirements or those where it is important to adapt the business to changing market trends quickly. Find out more about Sylius in our dedicated article "Sylius eCommerce Platform — why choose it?".

Sylius vs Magento: differences to consider

Cost

Depending on your GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), Magento’s commercial version can cost you in the range between €18,100 and even €155,000 per, with the cloud version costing twice as much.

Meanwhile, Sylius pricing, also based on the GMV, ranges from €14,900 to €72,900. Together with the Sylius Store that has more than 80 plug-ins, most of which are free, the Sylius platform defineky looks more appealing in terms of price.

Performance

Loading speed is a factor that severely affects an online store's popularity. Studies show that loading for more than 6 seconds makes half of the visitors leave the page. That's why it's important to choose a platform that offers high performance out-of-the-box.

Both Magento and Sylius platforms offer high-grade performance. However, in most case scenarios, Sylius shows slightly better performance thanks to its performant PHP Symfony-based framework. All in all, achieving top performance requires some manual optimization of both frameworks by enabling caching, prioritizing asset loading and reducing their weight.

Customization

Because of its monolithic approach, Magento provides limited customization capabilities to implement big-scale modifications. Writing custom solutions within the framework requires specialized knowledge to optimize its performance.

Sylius, which was initially developed as a customizable platform, allows developers to implement even complex architectural changes relatively easily. It also supports quick plugging-in of numerous third-party features.

Scalability

Magento’s legacy monolithic architecture, which is typical for out-of-the-box solutions, comes with a lot of features, which is obviously good. However, these very features can cause slow downs and create a lot of dependencies between various, often distant functionalities. To achieve a high level of scalability with Magento, additional coding might be required, which increases the final price of the development. The Sylius framework, where every feature and element can be modified or even cut out, if necessary, has more scalability potential with less additional coding.

Community

Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms globally and has an appropriately big online community. Its members continually contribute to the framework's functionality by creating new free plugins and extensions. It also means you can expect quick help if you run into trouble when developing a Magento-based project and request help online.

Since Sylius is based on the trendy Symfony PHP framework, it also has an extensive and continuously growing community that constantly creates new extensions and bundles for the framework. All in all, you should have no trouble finding developers to create a project with any of the two technologies.

Hosting

Magento is quite a bulky framework that needs a lot of optimization to run stable and smoothly. In comparison to Magento, Sylius is a much lighter platform, requiring less hosting capacity. This decreases the level of the investments needed to run a Sylius-based marketplace.

Summing things up

We hope that our short guide gave you valuable insights into the differences between Magento and Sylius frameworks. When choosing a platform for your eCommerce business, it is important to consider multiple factors, including the project’s format and scale, required degree of customization, the project budget, and expected business turnover.

With over two decades of custom web development experience and numerous successful projects in various industries under its belt, Vide Infra is always here to help with your eCommerce website development. Contact us and we’ll get back to you shortly to discuss the details.