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Information technology has had a profound impact on modern business. People are now getting used to a new way of running a business: e-commerce. This new form of commerce has gained popularity in recent years thanks to its many advantages over brick-and-mortar stores. For this reason, many companies have decided to open their virtual stores. However, before creating a sales website, online merchants need to choose a suitable platform, which requires a lot of scrutiny.

We have already seen some useful comparisons between some platforms, but today we want to tell you about Sylius and Magento.

Sylius vs Magento: an overview

The first step before making further comparisons is to gain a thorough understanding of each platform. Therefore, here is some general information you need to know about Sylius vs Magento.

Sylius

Sylius is an Open Source E-Commerce platform based on Symfony, one of the best PHP frameworks. It is also powered by BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) via Behat, another PHP framework. Compared to other platforms, Sylius doesn’t have many merchants, only 2500+, but it was downloaded over 50k times in one month. Furthermore, many brands successfully manage their web shops with the help of Sylius.

Sylius 1.0 – the first version of this platform – was released on September 13, 2017. Sylius also released its latest version – Sylius 1.9 – on September 14, 2020. Also, besides the free version called Standard, Sylius only has the Plus one. And of course, you get what you pay for.

Magento

Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform written in PHP and built on the Zend Framework. It was first released on March 31, 2008, by Varien Inc. and then acquired by Adobe in May 2018. Many large companies around the world have chosen this popular platform, namely Nestlé, Nike, ASUS, Ford, Helly Hansen, HP and so on. So far, the number of Magento online stores around the world is around 750,000 and it will undoubtedly increase steadily.

Magento offers two different editions:

Magento Open Source (also called Magento Community Edition):
Magento Open Source provides essential functionality to power a simple website. Users don’t have to pay anything to download.

Magento Commerce (also called Magento Enterprise Edition):
Magento Commerce comes with advanced features, tools and architecture. Additionally, this release offers two different plans with two pricing options: on-premise and cloud.

Sylius vs Magento: the comparison

Having grasped several points on the two platforms, it’s time to make detailed comparisons between Sylius and Magento. They both have several similarities and differences.

1. Main features and functionality

The first thing when comparing Sylius vs Magento is the critical features and functionalities.

Sylius is a potential e-commerce solution offering open-source and global support, customer service, quick product search, market flexibility, etc. In addition, the REST API allows you to connect with third-party services (CRM, ERP, PIM, Mailing) and develop Web Progress apps. The paid version of Sylius (Sylius Plus ) offers users extra ready-to-use features for larger companies. A sum of money is worth several features such as Advanced Multi-Store Management, Loyalty System, Returns Management or Admins by Channel, Advanced User Permissions, etc.

Magento offers a variety of solid built-in features that are all helping to build an excellent e-commerce store. Inventory management, automated destination rules, flexible pricing tools, and so on are useful tools that make a difference. What’s more, the remarkable thing about this platform is that it also supports B2B features. As a result, B2B customers can experience great additional features, including but not limited to business accounts, quotes, shared catalogues, quick order and pay on account, quick restocking, etc.

2. SEO

SEO and marketing are two fundamental tools for the success of e-commerce. Therefore, it becomes fundamental, to make a comparative analysis also in this sense, between Magento and Sylius. It is clear that while Magento has all the SEO management features, Sylius does not. This therefore leads us to say that from this point of view, Magento has more potential.

Although Sylius Plus comes with some marketing features, such as email marketing, content management, review management, and CRM, it does not have SEO management. This is a considerable weakness. Therefore, you need to install additional extensions to optimize SEO on your site.

As a leading e-commerce solution, there is no doubt that Magento does a great job of offering countless ready-to-use SEO and marketing features that help its customers’ websites be more visible on Google and other search engines. Some ultra-modern SEO features are sitemap, search terms and synonyms, Google Tools 301 addresses, custom URLs, etc. As for marketing, there are several built-in features provided by Magento Commerce, including:

  • Promotion: gift card accounts, related product rules, etc.
  • Private sales: invitations and events
  • Communications: Email reminders, email and newsletter templates, etc.
  • User Content: Customer Reviews
  • Customer Engagement: dotdigital Chat, dotdigital Engagement Cloud, etc.

3. Prices

The Sylius Standard version does not require a subscription. However, a free edition is only aimed at a simple website with standard features and basic functions. You can consider purchasing Sylius Plus to own more facilities and optimize your store. Pricing is based on the gross volume model of the commodity. You need to contact them and ask for a quote to get an accurate price.

Magento Open Source is free, but Magento Enterprise Edition requires a payment based on the gross sales value of your business. While Magento Commerce’s on-premise plan costs $22,000 per year, you have to pay $40,000 per year for the cloud version. You could be spending a lot of money on Magento, but it’s worth it!

4. Scalability

For medium and large enterprises with large numbers of customers and looking to expand their business, scalability becomes a parameter to watch. So what’s the most reliable platform in this regard: Sylius vs Magento 2?

Scalability is certainly one of Sylius’ strengths. This platform can withstand an increase in productivity of up to 30%.

Compared to Sylius, Magento is far above scalability though. It can cover up to 50,000 visits per hour and, with an exemplary inventory management system, Magento can hold numerous products at the same time. Hence excellent scalability characteristics.

5. Speed ​​and performance

The speed of the websites is a crucial point for an online business to attract customers. Nobody wants to wait too long for a page to load, do they? For more than 3 seconds of delay in website loading time, they lose 40% of visitors. Plus, 70% of online customers never want to return to your page if they have to wait too long for it to load. The loading time of a website has a significant impact on the number of customers and revenue.

A website’s performance is affected by several factors, including image file size, coding applications, plug-ins, or hosting. As for speed, Sylius has more advantages than Magento. Sylius doesn’t require as many complex processes as Magento to set up. As a result, page loading is three times faster than Magento.

Magento always tries to update and customize its platforms with more features and functions, which means that the page takes a little longer to load.

However, some tools allow you to understand if your Magento site is slow or not. For info, the lectern is here.

6. Security

Cyber ​​attacks have grown at an alarming rate and have become a cause for concern for many companies. A group of hackers attacked more than 570 online stores in some 60 countries and leaked stolen information on 184,000 credit cards, earning $7 million. Furthermore, statistics indicate that 60% of online organizations fail after a few months of security attacks. Furthermore, hacking has an extremely negative impact on your trading operations. Consequently, choosing a platform with high security is an effective way to avoid this. Let’s take a look at the security comparisons between Sylius and Magento.

Sylius usually publishes security patches to avoid vulnerabilities. If not, companies can download security extensions.

patch-sicurezza-sylius

As for Magento, while Magento Commerce offers users predefined security features, Magento Open Source requires extensions, which can be downloaded easily. Alternatively, online merchants can wait for Magento security patches which are released frequently to prevent hacking risks.

Remember to always have an updated site and thus, be more secure.

7. Easy to use

Ease of use is another element that can influence your decision. The choice of platform by cyber traders depends on whether it fits their level of technical knowledge. Hence, Sylius vs. Magento 2: which is easier to use?

In these terms, Sylius is the winner, thanks to its coding quality. Even when you are not an experienced programmer, you can still design your website without putting in so much effort. Additionally, this platform helps developers access coding rules and standards. These practices are simple to follow, especially for those who have worked on other platforms previously, making Sylius easier to master.

On the other hand, Magento is a little more difficult for IT newbies to use. Being a more demanding engine, it needs many coding applications to be customized. For this reason, Magento brings excellent results only if the developers already have a rudimentary knowledge of the technology.

8. Support

Online merchants should add support to the list of factors considered. It’s not always easy to design and maintain an online store, so seeking help from people from the same community is very important.

Unlike Magento, Sylius has been relatively new and hasn’t gained a worldwide reputation. Therefore, it is quite difficult to find support from other Sylius users. Fortunately, Sylius provides detailed documents, video instructions, and discussion forums, which are useful for those who are learning to use this platform. We can assume Sylius has potential popularity in the future as its community is getting bigger and bigger. The reason is that Sylius is built on the Symfony framework and the Symfony community supports it extensively.

Magento is almost at the top of the popularity of the e-commerce platform. You are never alone because there are around 300,000 Magento users out there who could help you. You also have the option to discuss any issues you have with experienced developers, regardless of your location. Also, you can access the tutorials via the Magento Help Center or Magento Stack Exchange when using the Magento Open Source edition.

Then in Italy, we find Magentiamo, which since 2014 has been involved in creating guides, updates and training courses, specifically on Magento.

Conclusion

Sylius vs. Magento: who wins the challenge?

Simply put, it’s pretty hard to tell directly which one wins this battle as each has its advantages. But you still have to make a final decision, right? So, before choosing a solution to enhance your e-commerce store, you should carefully evaluate the situation of your business, including the scope of enlargement, financial, purposes, etc.

For example, if your business has goals geared to grow faster, with a large inventory, and has a large budget to outsource some coding processes, you should choose Magento. Meanwhile, Sylius will be a better choice if you want to claim that your online store is on a tight budget.

That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.

Reading Time: 3 minutesWe saw in one of our latest articles this new platform that is slowly making its way: Sylius .

Most of the systems available on the market give you access to a huge number of advanced features, but extending them by applying custom solutions is sometimes quite difficult. Sylius, on the other hand, allows you to create flexible solutions. In fact, you can add new features, so that every single part of the code of your application can be adapted to your needs.

Yes, there are some features that aren’t ready for use. However, it is easy to implement them freely. The helpful community has already made many of the plugins. Sylius is based on the Symfony framework, considered by many to be the best PHP framework. It appears in two versions: Sylius (free open-source) and Sylius Plus (the paid one, but it’s worth it).

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some details of the paid version.

There is in fact a free basic version and a somewhat complete paid version. Since we are analyzing the costs, it seems appropriate to put this version under analysis.

sylius-ecommerce

Sylius Plus: prices

The annual license price depends on the value of the transactions that go through the platform (Gross Merchandise Volume). The price of Sylius Plus starts at 14,900 EUR per year. It’s not just a charge for extra add-ons, it includes support from the Sylius technical team and a dedicated Success Manager.

The commercial license retains the ability to modify the solution and adapt it to the real needs of your project (as in an open-source version). After purchase, you will get the source code available as a private repository on GitHub and, like the open source license, can be modified by the developer.

Is it a good solution for your E-Commerce project?

With Sylius Plus, you’ll get features that aren’t ready to use in a free version, available on GitHub, which means faster rollout. However, it’s worth considering if you actually need this solution. You may have tons of features, but do you really need them?

Remember that Sylius still has many basic plugins, which you can add to your application to make it perfect for your needs. Many of these have been developed by the community and many new features are created all the time. With Sylius you can really create your store however you want, as there are many templates that allow for easy integrations and a unique design.

What can it bring to your business?

  • Most popular payment methods
  • Product management
  • Order management and customer service
  • A fast and accurate search for products with ElasticSearch
  • Out-of-the-box omnichannel support in a free and open source version
  • High flexibility: can be used for B2C, B2B, Multivendor-Marketplace or as a headless microservice for VOD, e-learning platforms or SaaS. Sky’s the limit.

sylius-interfaccia

What more does Sylius plus have?

  • Advanced multi-store management
  • Returns management
  • Loyalty system
  • Hierarchical role-based access control management
  • Multi-source inventory management
  • Customer Success Manager, (optional) project success assistance and technical support supported by SLA

As you can see then, Sylius can be a really good answer and a good alternative to the major CMS for E-Commerce. It is a solution that allows many customizations, without necessarily needing too technical skills. With Sylius you can in fact create an online store, with multiple functions and that is perfectly suited to your business.

 

Reading Time: 5 minutesWhen it comes to open source E-Commerce platforms, there are many solutions to choose from and often this choice becomes quite critical.

We have already seen in one of our previous articles, Magento and PrestaShop and what their characteristics are.

But have you ever heard of Sylius instead? If not, in this article you will learn how it works and what features it has. I will also explain how to get started with this tool and the possibilities of extending its functionality.

What does the open source E-Commerce platform mean?

An open source E-Commerce platform is software for running and managing an online business, with direct access to the source code.

Generally these solutions are free, although obviously there are collateral costs. The costs you have to incur relate to hosting, development and personalization. We can say that you decide how much to spend on each process.

Another aspect for which you can choose, according to your needs is the functionality. In fact, being able to access the source code, you can add the features you need or modify the existing ones. This clearly offers great flexibility and scalability. Like other open source platforms, those related to E-Commerce are supported by communities which can certainly be a valid help.

Sylius for e-commerce

Sylius is an open source E-Commerce platform based on the Symfony framework. It is built with decoupled components that can be used independently in any PHP application even if it doesn’t use Symfony. Then you can decide whether to use the complete platform provided by its creators or take advantage of standalone elements to create a custom solution.

sylius-interfaccia

This E-Commerce tool is an API-first solution. This means that Sylius can be used as a backend for implementing JavaScript E-Commerce software such as a PWA or native mobile app. You can create an online store suitable for any size of business – a small, medium or large business.

Is Sylius free?

Sylius is available in two versions:

  • Standard (free) using the open source MIT license
  • Plus (paid) with a commercial license with an annual subscription. Its amount depends on the gross volume of sales you made with this E-Commerce platform.

In addition to standard Sylius features, the paid version contains enterprise-grade features such as multi-store (allowing you to sell products from multiple business units or legal entities), a loyalty system, and returns management. Let’s now take a look at the functions of a non-paid solution.

Features of the free version

With Sylius Standard, you can create a fully functional online store with many useful features.

  • Order management : each order is linked to the channel (e.g. webstore, mobile application) from which it comes and to the language used by the customer to carry it out.
  • Taxation : You can use the right taxes for different products and billing zones.
  • Payments : Support for many payment service providers.
  • Shipments:  possibility to attach multiple shipments per order.
  • Product Reviews : Thanks to this feature, your customers can leave opinions on the products they have purchased.
  • Product association : you can suggest to customers the complementary items to what they are viewing.
  • Sylius Themes : This is a great option when you have more than one channel for a single instance and you want each channel to look different.

To discover more features and possibilities of this e-commerce solution, access the Sylius documentation .

Who Uses Sylius?

This platform is perfectly suited to the needs of different types of companies: medium and large B2C / B2B companies, but also to startups with high development needs. Its flexibility and adaptability make it a platform that can be adapted to many different realities.

Why use Sylius?

Despite this roundup of features, you may still wonder why you should use Sylius? So here are 6 reasons for you:

  • Scalability . You can deploy Sylius on a single server or in the cloud on a self-scaling multi-server architecture, providing great efficiency for large projects.
  • Flexibility . It is possible to customize every part of this platform, thanks to its modern and well thought out architecture and the use of the Symfony framework. You will thus be able to tailor your E-Commerce to your needs.
  • Ability to apply it on multiple devices . You can easily build native mobile apps for iOS, Android, or a PWA
  • Perfect for developers . This E-Commerce platform guarantees the highest code quality, has a solid test environment and uses business-driven development (BDD). It means the tests are written in a business language which speeds up application testing.
  • Community. There are more than four thousand developers, e-merchants and other specialists working with this tool gathered on the Sylius channel on Slack. You can join them to ask for support or help others solve their problems.
  • Open Source. You can participate in the development of this tool.

Sylius: a headless open source platform

Headless is a word that basically describes the decoupling of the front-end of your E-Commerce from the back-end. Simply put, what sets the headless model apart is the lack of control over how the backend data will be presented to the data to the customer. In the headless approach, the most important is the content that needs to be delivered to the customer, regardless of which platform they want to access and when. To make this possible (also in Sylius), companies use APIs to synchronize data and provide control to IT teams in terms of the technology used to interact with the customer.

Basically, while in traditional ecommerce, all marketing channels, such as blog posts, newsletters, etc., are designed to bring the customer directly to the site, with headless technology, it will no longer be necessary. Purchases will be made directly from the platform through which the promotional message arrives to the customer. Will it be a mobile app, a single page app, or some other system? You don’t know, but the purchase will come by itself and that’s what matters!

Sylius plugin

The organization behind this platform has developed six open source plugins. One of them is the billing plugin which creates an invoice after a customer has created an order. Both the customer and the administrator can download this document.

In the Sylius Store you can find more than 80 different plugins and most of them are free.

  • There is the Elasticsearch plugin which provides the complete search mechanism, separate from the database. It allows you to lighten the store’s resources. In addition, Elasticsearch enables intelligent search and provides product filters. A developer can easily create new ones, as there are helpful guides and guidelines for making them.
  • Another useful extension is the CMS plugin which allows you to add a content management system to your store. Thanks to this, you can create eg. a subpage with the regulations of your online store or a better homepage.
  • With Odiseo’s SyliusReportPlugin , you can add a reporting interface to the platform administration. You can also easily create custom reports. As for statistical data, you can also use the Analytics Plugin which adds Google Analytics tracking to your store, or the Facebook Tracking Plugin which allows you to add Facebook Pixel to track visitors who come to your website from this channel. of social media.

Have we already talked about Sylius plugins and what about integrations with external systems? You can run it via plugin (e.g. the aforementioned Analytics Plugin) or write your own custom integration.

Custom online shop

In this article I have shown you how Sylius is a very flexible system, which allows you to really do everything with your E-Commerce. The customization possibilities of this E-Commerce solution are its biggest advantage. With the help of Sylius experts, you can have an online store entirely tailored to your business needs.

So if you are looking for a useful tool that is easy to configure on both the admin and development side, Sylius may be the one for you.

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