Sylius is a young PHP e-commerce framework based on Symfony, whose stable version (1.0.0) was released in September 2017. If this framework is being talked about more and more, it is because it represents a serious competitor to the other traditional e-commerce platforms such as PrestaShop and Magento, which are often considered heavier. Today Sylius is at version 1.5.1 and it is stepping things up by offering a more complete service with an enterprise plan.
This article is aimed primarily at readers who already know the PHP framework Sylius. If you don’t yet have a real grasp of it, we advise you to start by reading our article introducing Sylius.
What does the PHP e-commerce framework’s Sylius Plus enterprise offering have in store for us?
On 30 May 2019, Sylius published an article in which it sets out its new enterprise offering. This new offering is called Sylius Plus and notably provides:
- technical support (although we don’t know whether there is a limit on the number of tickets)
- an advanced multi-store feature
- a returns management feature
- multi-source inventory
- advanced management of user rights and permissions
- as well as improvements to performance and security
This is a fairly complete service that is being offered with this new package, quite close to what Magento and Oro offer in their enterprise versions. To benefit from it, you will have to pay the annual licence fee, namely 4,900 euros. Although this price is attractive, you can’t say it is a low-cost price aimed at driving down market prices. Indeed, unlike Magento, Sylius is aimed at different projects, for which the use of a framework such as Symfony would have been considered in the first place. Let’s remember that Sylius stands out mainly through its scalability and its flexibility. It therefore represents a suitable solution for projects that use only 20% to 30% of Magento’s features. This makes it possible to optimise performance while leaving open the possibility of adding features later, in the form of additional bundles.
To sum up: Sylius Plus is a package of additional features that can be grafted onto an existing Sylius project, and very easily at that. But that’s not all! What makes the strength of the Sylius Plus enterprise offering is its technical support for each project. To that end, Sylius assigns a Customer Service Manager to each project, in order to ensure its follow-up and its development, in collaboration with the agency developing the project. It is therefore bespoke support for strategic projects, allowing genuine involvement of the Sylius teams in client projects.
Sylius Plus, ultimately a sign of good health
When it was released in 2017, Sylius’s main interest was in making itself known! That is why it initially identified itself as a PHP e-commerce framework based on Symfony’s PHP best practices. The challenge was therefore to win the appreciation of developers and agencies! Now that this has been achieved, it is time for the company to appeal directly to online retailers in order to be identified as an alternative solution to traditional e-commerce platforms. The young company comments on this point in its article, saying that it is now seeking to become more commonly known as an e-commerce platform.
A screenshot of the extract from the article in which Sylius positions itself as an e-commerce platform was shown here in the French version and needs to be re-attached.
Why this new label? It is more than worthwhile for Sylius to position itself as an e-commerce platform. Indeed, the challenge is to appeal to project owners looking for a solution to the end of support for Magento 1. Let’s not forget that in June 2020, so in less than a year, many online retailers will find themselves with an obsolete Magento 1 e-commerce site. They will therefore face an ultimatum to settle: should they rebuild their site on Magento 2 or on another e-commerce platform? Offering a commercial plan makes it possible to reassure project owners about the CMS’s long-term future. Even though technically Sylius represents a great alternative to the other platforms, it does not have enough of a track record to carry as much weight in the balance as a Magento or a PrestaShop. Sylius has stated that it remains 100% committed to developing the community version of its framework. The enterprise offering would in reality be nothing more than a way of securing its business model.
Free new features also announced
In its article, Sylius also announces upcoming new features for the community version of the framework, notably including:
- a new guide aimed at supporting a technical team in getting started with Sylius (setting up the production environment, etc.)
- a Bootstrap theme that is “easier to use”. This would use Webpack and Encore.
- as well as another guide for learning how to build a better look and feel for a Sylius shop
A multi-vendor “marketplace” bundle confirmed
We talked about it in our article introducing Sylius: a marketplace bundle is on the horizon! Paweł Jędrzejewski, the founder of Sylius, spoke about this future feature in his newsletter on 13 June 2019. Despite these recent comments, we don’t know much more on that front… apart from the fact that this future Sylius marketplace will also be a paid product! At present, we don’t yet know the price of this future feature; the only thing we can guess is that support will exist for this marketplace extension.
To justify the fact that the feature is paid for, Paweł looked back at the origin of this project in his letter: “Shortly after the release of the stable V1.0.0 version, we were looking for ideas to monetise Sylius in order to grow our business and our community. We were then able to use Sylius to create marketplaces, and after that more and more requests for additional features appeared. That is how the project was born.”
