Sylius vs WooCommerce: 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.
| Sylius | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | E-commerce | E-commerce |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| GitHub stars | ~8k | ~9k |
| Tech stack | PHP, Symfony, MySQL | PHP, WordPress, MySQL |
| Replaces | Shopify | Shopify |
WooCommerce has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
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
WooCommerce
Ecommerce on WordPress, a free alternative to Shopify.
Pros
- Ideal if your site already runs on WordPress
Things to consider
- Performance depends heavily on the plugins you install
Key features
Sylius
- Extensible Symfony architecture
- Supports B2B and B2C stores
- Complete REST API
WooCommerce
- Very wide plugin ecosystem
- Works with any WordPress theme
- Thousands of supported payment gateways
Already know which one you prefer?
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