Magento vs Sylius: An Ongoing Debate

It may be rather challenging to pick the right framework for your project given its specific pros and cons. To help you make the right decision, we prepared a quick comparison between Magento and Sylius. We do hope that this article will help you understand the specificities of both frameworks without any doubt which of these will work for you.

Pros and Cons of Magento

Being an open-source platform, Magento allows you to modify the source code in line with your needs and requirements of a project, customize templates and ultimately, deliver desired functionality. In addition, Magento is flexible in terms of allowing third-party integration – importing products, to name one. It is one of its key pros because it simplifies looking and analyzing website performance and allows you to collect real-time information.

Community

As one of the most used e-commerce platforms in the world, Magento has an impressive community of users. This has resulted in the development of a variety of extensions and plugins. Quick support ensures that once you encounter a problem, you are provided with numerous resources to solve it.

Bundle of Features

Compared to Shopify, Volusion, or WooCommerce, Magento has been widely used for a variety of features allowing you to manage multiple stores and supporting multiple languages, locations, pricing, and currencies. Using Magento, you can offer a different price for your staff or VIPs.

Magento community version provides the benefit of enjoying a number of features that can’t be found on other platforms.

Scalability

Each time someone starts a small business, it is with the idea of expanding in the future. Along with the expansion, your e-commerce platform needs to be able to handle the constantly increasing amount of products and sales. Unlike some e-commerce platforms, Magento can deal with the growth and handle thousands of products.

Namely, Magento is able to handle up to five hundred thousand products and thousands of transactions in an hour. This is important because Magento can be customized without any constraints.

Customization

Magneto is all about customization, including the look of your site or the way you configure your product features and categories. Nevertheless, this means that practically everything needs to be coded from scratch. Magento’s site offers a small number of design themes, but most business owners who use the CMS prefer a unique and customized site and therefore hire a Magento developer.

SEO-friendly

Magento’s Enterprise Edition was tailored to align with the growing importance of SEO, thereby making optimization of product pages and descriptions significantly simpler. It generates SEO-friendly URLs and meta descriptions, which saves you time as you won’t need to create them yourself.

Furthermore, Magento-based sites are mobile responsive and thus compatible with all browsers and screen sizes. This allows your customers to shop from anywhere in the world, using any device. It’s also Google-friendly as it helps your rankings in the results of searches.

Editing Made Easy

Creating a Magento site may be a hell of a work, but once you have everything coded and running, adding and editing new products is rather smooth. Its straightforward content
management interface allows you to easily monitor and edit pages. If manual site management is too time-consuming for you, thanks to Magento CMS you can find skilled developers and SEOs to help you manage your content.

Made for Sales

E-commerce as an add-on can be found in a number of other CMS but Magneto is specific because it was built to be sales-centered. Accordingly, it is considered one of the best picks in the context of driving conversions.

Magento’s segmentation option allows you to target customers on the basis of their cart and buying history and also provide relevant content along the way. Moreover, you can tailor onsite promotions and send custom coupons, thereby allowing your customers to see only ad content relating to products they’ve clicked, purchased, or added to their cart.

Other features, like product recommendations and upsells on product and checkout pages, facilitate customer journey through your website and enhance their purchasing experience.

Ultimately, there’s a one-page checkout so customers will be more likely to stay on your site (and continue purchasing).

Mobile Friendly

To succeed in e-commerce, a mobile-friendly configuration is simply something you cannot go without. Mobile sales are expected to increase by 22.3 % to $3.56 trillion in 2021.*

Considering the growing number of mobile users (currently at 5.1 billion), mobile commerce is not expected to stop growing anytime soon.

Given the trend, online retailers must build their strategy on the fact cannot that internet browsing has moved to mobile devices. Magento is mobile-friendly as it allows easy and
streamlined creation of a mobile site without and provides high-quality mobile viewing experience which is one of the necessary prerequisites for growing sales and lower bounce rate.

On the other Hand…

No matter how powerful Magento is considered in terms of accommodating your needs and managing hundreds of thousands of individual products, it comes with a set of disadvantages you need to take into account before picking the right platform.

Too pricey

Magento comes in in many versions, with only the community available for free. The enterprise version will cost you at least fifteen thousand dollars, whereas the Premium Enterprise version of Magento, targeted for large businesses is available at a cost of at least fifty thousand dollars for a year.

There is also a third-party fee, in case you can’t install the extension yourself. This would be considered a too extravagant adventure by most retailers. Therefore, the cost is certainly one of the key drawbacks of Magento, otherwise seen as one of the top e-commerce platforms.

Lack of Developers

Due to a large community of users and developers, one of the key disadvantages of using Magento is the fact that you are rather unlikely to find authentic Magento developers. This is because being an authentic Magento developer requires an in-depth understanding of object-oriented development and extensive knowledge of core software.

In addition, thousands of files and hundreds of database tables make Magento quite a challenge to master. Even if you’re lucky enough to find an authentic developer, his/her prices are going to give you a headache.

Time-consuming

On the account of slow loading time, customization may be difficult to make. It is going to take you even more time to switch from other e-commerce platforms to Magento and import the data.

Slow loading is caused by Magento’s flexible architecture, which makes the set-up process quite complex and time-consuming. This drawback is considered highly debatable as slow loading time is specific only to the community versions, whereas the enterprise and premium enterprise versions are rather fast.

Hosting

To host Magento, you will need a dedicated server. Magento should be configured in a server you or your developer are proficient in, meaning that it can’t be hosted on other normal hosting platforms. This is mainly due to bulkiness. In addition, to handle optimization, you/your developer will need high-level skills and thinking. Otherwise, it may result in the crashing of your websites.

Bad product support

The price of product support for Magento is also one of its key cons, as the cost of developers and consultants for Magento can be quite high. Moreover, Magento forum support is far from what you need or what you’d expect it to provide. AS there is no organized monitoring, official support is overrun with spam. Not being able to find help with any of your problems regarding Magento or falling prey to the scams is one of the drawbacks of the framework.

Sylius – The Growing Potential Behind the Open Source

Sylius allows you to work more efficiently due to its awesome code environment. Furthermore, it is more likely that you’ll find a competent Symfony developer (the framework behind Sylius) who can specialize in Sylius than a great Magento developer. Magento lacks an extended testing environment which reduces the possibility of breaking any mandatory part of the application with a developer’s changes. It doesn’t happen with Sylius.

Finally, compared to Magento, Sylius takes 0,5 seconds for the page load without caching mechanisms in dev mode, unlike Magento’s (up to) the 30s. Needless to say, it does wonders to performance and significantly reduces maintenance costs.

The supreme code quality, robust testing culture, built-in Agile (BDD) workflow, and outstanding flexibility make Sylius the solution of choice for applications based on your business
requirements. Its exceptional REST API is undoubtedly the best solution for integrations, as well as the creation of a unique customer experience across devices.

Growing Community

Sylius is 100% free and open source (MIT license). With a growing number of users on Slack and its Github rating, Sylius makes it the top eCommerce solution (in addition to WooCommerce and Magento). With over 100 extensions made for it and other extensions from the Symfony community (with all Symfony bundles working in Sylius), it is increasingly recognized as a platform of choice for a growing number of users. Especially as many extensions for Magento 1 are not supported by Magento 2 and are unlikely to be upgraded.

Short Time to Market

Compared to Magento, Sylius’ time to market is significantly lower. Due to the quality of Sylius’ environment, it can be extended in a more standardized and organized manner. As a result, a similar B2C system could be done three times faster with Sylius than Magento 2. Sylius is also more developer-friendly in terms of writing a good code, but also easier to extend and maintain, whereas Magento is loaded with antipatterns, which might result in a colossal technical debt if replicated.

Sylius Philosophy

Complex architecture and a multitude of features are certainly the advantages of Magento as an eCommerce platform allowing the creation of complex B2C & B2B systems. If you prioritize extendibility over the number of features, you’ll probably use only 10 – 20% of Magento’s features to integrate with other systems for other functionalities or implement custom logic for it.

Experts argue that Sylius is capable of solving 70 – 80% of typical eCommerce problems in a framework. The rest is what makes the business special. In case native features are not your game, it can be easily extended and. Moreover, these features can be integrated with DAM, CMS, PIM, or Market automation tools using queues (AMQP protocol) or the API (HTTP protocol).

More importantly, Sylius is great for the development of any type of eCommerce – B2C, B2B, and even C2C. Finally, its decoupled architecture (the vendor and consumer operate and manage their resources independently) makes it redundant to use the whole Sylius stack, but only some of its components. This may be a great help if you’re creating a custom eCommerce app, a benefit you can’t find in Magento.

Fewer Concerns About Technical Debt

If you’ve experienced a situation where simple changes get too time-consuming to implement and even break other things, then you know how technical debt might make your life
complicated. This is especially true for those who have worked with Magento. On the other hand, Sylius is committed to being up to date with all security changes, but also news from Symfony & PHP community. Being more stable, secure, and easier to scale makes Sylius the right choice that’ll work for you every time.

Upgrading Process

You’re in for the laborious work of rewriting the whole platform to upgrade from Magento 1 to Magento 2. On the other hand, the Semantic Versioning concept is one of the focal points in Sylius to provide users with adequate upgrade instructions that will streamline the process. The upgrade from Symfony 3 to Symfony 4 and following every Symphony release make Sylius the most modern eCommerce solution around. It takes one week (at most) to upgrade even the most complex projects.

Last, but not least, with Sylius Plus you get all the benefits of Open Source and more. It includes a set of enterprise-grade features, such as:

• Returns Management
• Advanced Multi-store
• Advanced Users Permissions
• Multi-source Inventory
• Partial Order Fulfillment
• Loyalty

Final Word

Sylius is undoubtedly the best e-commerce framework we have had the opportunity to work with. Created for development and maintenance, it allows you to deliver the same functionalities in less time than Magento. It is flexible, free from technological debt, and based on Symfony in which you can easily find skilled and experienced developers.

The truth is that the entry threshold is high, meaning that you need a developer to work, but there’s a huge potential with Sylius as it is expected to replace Magento – at least, in the medium market. For modern growing companies, Sylius is a much more efficient and cheaper solution.

Its development environment and decoupled architecture make it easy to work with, more stable, secure and customizable, and also more scalable than Magento.

To sum up, if you’re looking for a modern, agile, flexible, and customer-centric eCommerce software that can realize the full potential of your idea and align it with the demands of diverse markets, Sylius is the right solution.