Laravel Best E-commerce Shop Packages: Comparison Review

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.

Aimeos

Bagisto

LunarPHP

Vanilo

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This review was done in July 2023, which means that the information about some of the systems may be outdated, so please check the latest information on the official websites.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...