Which Laravel e-commerce CMS/package is the best? It's a common question on forums. We tested out FOUR popular Laravel packages for e-shops - Aimeos, Bagisto, Lunar, and Vanilo. In this tutorial, you will see who are the "winners".
When talking about e-commerce in general, the most popular choices are non-Laravel: systems like Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, or you can just register at Shopify. But in Laravel, there are also quite a few alternatives you could use.
Each has its strengths and issues. We will compare the shops, based on these criteria:
- Installation process, its complexity and issues
- "Ease of use" Experience as a user and as an owner
- Development experience: extending, custom functions and official packages
- Reliability and issues/bugs
- Ecosystem and community size, including questions on forums
- Overall thoughts on the system
Let's get started!
Before looking at a review, we should say this:
This review was done in July 2023, which means that the information about some of the systems may be outdated, so please check the latest information on the official websites.
With that out of the way, here's the overview of each system:
Platform 1 - Bagisto
It's a whole Laravel application you can install, immediately giving you access to everything. It's also quite feature rich and has quite a few extensions available.
Installation Process and its Complexity
When looking at installation, you can instantly see two options - Composer installation with Laravel setup and GUI setup. We've tried the composer installation, and it worked without any issues. Once that is done, we get an entire store up and running:
Experience Using the System
Overall, the experience of using this system has been great. It has a lot of features, and it's easy to use. Even product creation is quite simple as it's a wizard form:
As for the user side - there are a lot of...
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Comments & Discussion
Thanks so much for this comparison which helps me a lot as we've just been given a contract to develop a store for 6 branches.
I like Bagisto but there are small things that bother me:
- They ask you on their home page to star their repo. When you click that link, instead they want to do Github integration and do the starring for you. Creepy.
- They have too much marketing on their website.
- Some basic plugins are quite expensive.
Overall it's does look feature rich and the PWA is a big plus. I couldn't see if the PWA costs money though.
For now we've decided to go the Lunar route.
The Lunar documentation seems fairly sane even though some of their design decisions seems more complicated than usual.
The reason why we've decided on them is because:
- Livewire starter kit. I have no doubt when troubleshooting ecommerce front-ends I don't want to troubleshoot Javascript or anything else. Livewire is it.
- Filament Backoffice. They've changed their strategy from building their own back office to rather using Filament for the back office. This is a huge plus and aligns with another of our future strageies.
Watch this space! In six months I'll report back how it went :-)
It's been six months. We now only have one "beta" site using Filament. Beta being it's not production. In my opinion the software is rock solid. The community on Discord is incredibly responsive. The lead developers are really pro-active and given great updates. Their idea to have it production is on track. They have set timelines and they are keeping to it.
In my opinion it doesn't matter that Lunar is now only Beta. I am inspired every day that I can use the Filament back office. It's by far the most advanced Filament back office I have encountered so I'm learning a lot there.
I'm still not crazy about the attribute structure. The way pricing and language is abstracted is quite complicated for me as a mid-level developer. But I still love the software. We're building a parallel back office using their Filament core so we are ending us with just the customization I need.
Thanks! It was very interesting. It would be interesting to see a speed comparison as well with 10t items eg. And comparing to Woocommerce and others too.
Woocommerce and others are not really designed around Laravel, so we have skipped that for this reason.
As for comparison with more items - it takes a long time to properly setup the benchmark and they are usually not that indicating. Setups are different, data flows differ, so in some cases optimization can be done and slower system might push forward. That was exactly the case with Bagisto for example. You can go inside their code and optimize it, introduce caching if needed. Giving you infinite posibility to scale the application.