Shopware vs Sylius: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Shopify. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Shopware | Sylius | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | E-commerce | E-commerce |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| GitHub stars | ~7k | ~8k |
| Tech stack | PHP, Symfony, Vue.js, MySQL | PHP, Symfony, MySQL |
| Replaces | Shopify, Magento | Shopify |
Sylius has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
Shopware
Ecommerce with a visual editor and API-first design, an alternative to Shopify/Magento.
Pros
- Very powerful visual editor for product landing pages
Things to consider
- Some advanced features are Commercial-edition only
Sylius
Symfony ecommerce framework, a flexible alternative to Shopify.
ℹ️ There's no official all-in-one "sylius:latest" image: Sylius is a framework to build your store on top of (like Symfony), and its real artifact is the ghcr.io/sylius/sylius-php base image, which needs your own application code and a web server in front of it. This docker-compose isn't deployable as-is — follow Sylius's official installation guide to generate your own project.
Pros
- Maximum flexibility for complex business logic
Things to consider
- Requires solid Symfony experience to get the most out of it
- No official all-in-one image (see note above) — you need to generate the project following the install guide
Key features
Shopware
- Visual store editor (Shopping Experiences)
- API-first with decoupled admin
- Extension marketplace
Sylius
- Extensible Symfony architecture
- Supports B2B and B2C stores
- Complete REST API
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