Magento vs Sylius: A Modern Comparison (2025 Update)

Choosing the right eCommerce platform can make or break a project. Today, we’re comparing Magento and Sylius, two heavyweights, across key factors: performance, flexibility, development costs, time to market, developer experience, SEO, and out-of-the-box features for marketers.

With the recent evolution of DegDitor — a powerful CMS plugin — Sylius has significantly reduced the gap on content management, making the comparison even more interesting.

Magento:
Magento 2 offers good performance at scale but requires heavy server resources, aggressive caching, and regular performance tuning (Varnish, Redis, CDN, etc.). Without careful optimization, it can feel heavy, especially for mid-sized businesses.

Sylius:
Built on Symfony, Sylius is lightweight, modern, and extremely efficient. Native Symfony best practices ensure out-of-the-box fast response times, and less server load compared to Magento. Performance optimization feels more "natural" and predictable.

🏆 Winner: Sylius, especially for projects valuing lean, scalable architectures.

Magento:
Magento is very customizable but also very opinionated. Customizations can become complex due to the heavy reliance on XML configurations and legacy patterns. Over-customizing Magento often leads to technical debt.

Sylius:
Sylius is an API-first, headless-ready platform built for customization. It provides a robust core but expects you to tailor it to your needs, with a modular, service-oriented architecture that's Symfony-native.

🏆 Winner: Sylius, offering true flexibility with modern development standards.

Magento:
Development costs are typically higher, mainly due to the steep learning curve, complexity of the platform, and the need for specialized Magento developers (who are usually expensive).

Sylius:
Sylius projects often have lower initial development costs, especially when leveraging the Symfony ecosystem. Plus, hiring Symfony developers is easier and often more affordable than Magento specialists.

🏆 Winner: Sylius, for both budget-friendly startups and scalable enterprises.

Magento:
Magento’s ecosystem offers tons of pre-built extensions, but integrating them properly and customizing the store still takes considerable time.

Sylius:
Sylius projects can reach market faster with a focused development team, especially now that DegDitor fills the CMS/content gap. Instead of building a full CMS or hacking it together, teams can use DegDitor and focus purely on business features.

🏆 Winner: Sylius, with a faster and cleaner launch pipeline in 2025.

Magento:
Magento development can be frustrating. The architecture, heavy use of XML configurations, and upgrade complexity require deep expertise. Debugging and customizing can become time-consuming.

Sylius:
Sylius developers enjoy working with a clean, modern codebase, a familiar Symfony stack, powerful testing capabilities, and true extensibility. DegDitor further improves this experience by solving CMS pain points without introducing bloat.

🏆 Winner: Sylius, hands down.

Magento:
Strong SEO capabilities out of the box: meta titles, descriptions, friendly URLs, canonical tags, etc. Plus, plenty of plugins to extend SEO features.

Sylius:
Out of the box, SEO in Sylius is basic. However, with community plugins and the flexibility of Symfony, you can easily implement robust SEO strategies. Thanks to DegDitor’s structured content capabilities, Sylius can now compete even in content-driven SEO strategies.

🏆 Draw — Magento is stronger OOTB, but Sylius now has an edge for custom SEO strategies thanks to DegDitor.

Magento:
Magento provides robust marketing tools by default: promotions, customer segmentation, abandoned cart emails, upsell and cross-sell features. Ideal for marketing-heavy operations from day one.

Sylius:
Sylius was historically more developer-focused. However, with DegDitor and third-party modules, marketers now have access to page-building tools, content marketing features, landing page creation, and rich media integration — all integrated natively into the admin.

🏆 Slight edge to Magento for pre-built features, but Sylius has dramatically closed the gap for businesses willing to build their unique marketing stack.

Thanks to its Symfony DNA and the evolution of plugins like DegDitor, Sylius now represents a true alternative to Magento — offering superior flexibility, lower costs, faster time to market, and a more modern developer experience.

If you're starting from scratch, building a modern DTC brand, or scaling an international project with custom needs, Sylius is no longer the "risky choice" — it's the smart choice.