"Sylius or Shopify Plus" is one of the most frequent questions we hear from mid-market stores. And it is almost always framed wrongly. These are not competitors fighting for the same title — they are two platforms designed for two different sales models. Choosing between them is not about which one is "better", but which one fits the way you really set prices and serve customers.
The short version for the busy: if you run B2B with individual price lists and trade credit, Sylius wins. If you are building a D2C brand with a plan to expand into EU markets, Shopify Plus wins. Below we break this down into specific axes and numbers, so that you can defend the decision in front of your board rather than merely feel it.
This is not a ranking — it is a fit with your model
We run both platforms in production and both do what they promise. Sylius is open source on Symfony (PHP) with full control over the code, built for catalogues of 10k–100k SKUs and complex business logic. Shopify Plus is SaaS, that is a hosted service in which the vendor takes on infrastructure, security and scaling — the fastest route to a production-ready D2C store.
The difference comes down to one question. Is your price individual — negotiated per customer, dependent on a credit limit, a framework discount, volume — or is it a catalogue price, the same for every visitor? That question settles most such decisions before we even get to costs. If you want to see how we structure comparisons like this for different store profiles, we have collected them in our platform rankings.
The cost model: what you really pay over three years
The biggest misunderstanding concerns cost. "Shopify is expensive because of the licence" and "Sylius is free because it is open source" — both statements are misleading. The real cost only becomes visible when you spread it over three years.
Sylius: cost up front, then hosting and a team
Sylius has no licence fees, but that does not mean it is cheap at the start. In our projects implementation starts from PLN 150,000 fixed price for a standard B2C store with up to 10k SKUs. A typical mid-market B2B implementation is PLN 200,000–300,000, and an enterprise one with multi-store, headless and marketplace — PLN 300,000–450,000. Migrating from PrestaShop or Magento is usually 30–50% more expensive than greenfield, because data and URL mapping are added.
On top of that comes the maintenance you do not see in a price list: hosting (typically a dedicated server or Kubernetes), Redis, Elasticsearch and a CDN, plus a development team or a retainer. You carry that cost — but in exchange you pay no commission on every złoty of turnover.
Shopify Plus: a lower entry threshold, a cost that grows with turnover
Shopify Plus works the other way round. Implementation is faster and cheaper to enter, but you pay a fixed rent. The licence is USD 2,200/month (around PLN 9,000) plus 0.15% of transaction turnover (with an upper cap). Add apps from the App Store — for a mid-market store with 5–10 apps that is usually USD 200–800/month — and Shopify Payments processing fees of 1.4–2.4% per transaction. In practice the real running cost of a store doing PLN 20 million in turnover is typically PLN 15,000–25,000/month all in.
The mechanism is simple: Sylius is a cost closer to an investment (capex) which, once implemented, stops growing along with sales. Shopify Plus is an operating cost (opex) that scales together with turnover. At low turnover Shopify's lower entry threshold wins; at high turnover the percentage fees start to hurt and the fixed cost of Sylius looks increasingly sensible.
An example: a store doing PLN 20 million in turnover
Let us work through a simplified example (illustrative figures from our projects). A D2C store with PLN 20 million in annual turnover on Shopify Plus typically generates PLN 15,000–25,000/month in running costs all in — that is around PLN 180,000–300,000 a year, and that amount grows together with turnover, because part of it is percentage fees. Over three years that is usually PLN 0.5–0.9 million in running costs alone, on top of which comes a cheaper and faster implementation.
The same store on Sylius means a higher entry cost (a B2B implementation of the order of PLN 200,000–300,000 as a one-off), but the running costs — hosting plus a retainer — are not tied to turnover and depend only on the scope of care. The bigger the sales, the more strongly that difference works in favour of Sylius. The conclusion is not "Sylius is cheaper" or "Shopify is cheaper" — it is: work out where your crossover point lies. For a store doing PLN 3–5 million today but expected to grow, that point can fall in the middle of the investment horizon.
B2B logic: the axis that usually settles it
Here it stops being about taste and starts being about things a platform either has or does not. For mid-market B2B the critical ones tend to be:
individual price lists per customer and per trade group,
trade credit, limits and deferred payments (net terms),
the quote-to-order path: request for quotation → quotation → order,
multi-level order approval (approval workflows) on the buyer's side,
separate catalogues and assortments assigned to a specific company,
integration with the ERP as the source of truth about price and stock.
Sylius has this natively. Individual price lists, trade credit, marketplace sync and ERP integrations are part of the model, and dual-channel B2B+B2C works on a single database. That is why KMK Klinkier — a migration from PrestaShop to Sylius with a B2B product configurator — is our flagship project, maintained on a retainer for 3+ years.
Shopify Plus also has B2B — customer price lists, credit — but it requires additional apps and custom configuration. It works best in a hybrid model: a mainly B2C business plus a small B2B segment. For pure mid-market B2B, Sylius is simply less of an uphill struggle.
You are not choosing the "better" platform — you are choosing the one that fits your sales model. In practice one question settles it: is your price individual or catalogue?
A separate case is punchout — integration with a corporate customer's procurement systems (OCI/cXML catalogues), where the order "returns" to the buyer's procurement. Neither platform offers this as a ready-made button; it is always development work. Sylius's open code makes it more predictable, because you are not fighting the limitations of a SaaS.
Time to market and the team that will maintain the store
If time matters, the difference is clear. We close a typical Shopify Plus implementation in 8–14 weeks, a Sylius one in 16–22 weeks. The reason is no secret: Shopify gives you ready-made building blocks, Sylius you customise — and customisation costs time. For simple logic (fashion, beauty, lifestyle, food) Shopify can be as much as ~3x faster to launch.
The second dimension is the team. Shopify Admin is designed for marketers, not developers — the store can be run day to day by a marketing-focused team supported by a partner. Sylius requires Symfony/PHP skills, and those developers are in short supply in Poland. That is a real operational risk which has to be addressed consciously: either you build the capability in-house, or you work on a retainer. It is worth calculating this before the store implementation rather than after it.
Ownership and lock-in: what remains when you change agency
Sylius you own outright. You have the code, you can host it anywhere, develop it with any vendor and migrate without asking permission — there is no vendor lock-in at platform level. The price of that freedom: ownership also means maintenance is your problem. Paradoxically another kind of attachment appears here — to the team. Sylius clients stay on a retainer partly because moving to an agency without genuine Sylius skills is risky (the average length of our retainer relationships is ~3.4 years).
Shopify Plus takes infrastructure, security and scaling off your hands — that is enormous operational value. In exchange you are inside an ecosystem: you pay a percentage of turnover for as long as you sell, you operate within the limits of a SaaS, and leaving is harder. It is an honest trade-off: operational simplicity versus full ownership.
EU expansion, integrations and performance
If the plan involves entering further markets, Shopify Plus has a natural advantage here. Multi-currency and multi-language are native, checkout localisation and region-specific payment methods are added (BLIK in Poland, Klarna in DACH), and integrations with EU marketplaces are ready to go. That is exactly the Topeshop path — a migration from PrestaShop to Shopify Plus, 12k SKUs, a UX redesign and +58% conversion.
It is worth remembering that choosing a platform almost always means a migration — and that is a separate risk, independent of which side you pick. A bad migration can wipe out SEO rankings built over years: the industry benchmark is a 15–30% drop in organic traffic right after the move. In our migrations — both to Sylius and to Shopify Plus — we usually keep that drop below 3%, thanks to one-to-one URL mapping and 301 redirects for the entire old addressing (in the Bogart Meble migration that meant thousands of URLs). Which means the cost of "switching" is counted not only in the implementation budget, but also in lost traffic — and that is why the decision about the platform and about the migration method is taken together, not separately.
Sylius also scales to many markets, but with a different model: multi-store, that is one database and many front ends for different brands or geographies, with local price lists and local payment integrations. That is a powerful tool for brand groups — at the cost of more implementation work. To simplify: Shopify is fast, standardised expansion; Sylius is a tailored multi-brand/multi-geo architecture.
ERP, PIM, marketplace, BaseLinker
Both platforms integrate with what the Polish mid-market needs — the route differs. On Shopify Plus integrations go through apps and APIs: ERP (Comarch, Symfonia), WMS, marketplaces (Allegro, Amazon, eBay), and a hub such as BaseLinker ties it together through connectors. On Sylius you integrate through APIs and your own code, with full control over how data flows. A separate topic is a PIM implementation as the source of truth about the product — with a catalogue of 10k–100k SKUs and rich attributes it usually becomes a condition rather than an add-on, and it falls strongly on the Sylius side, where the product data model is more flexible.
Performance is revenue too
Performance tends to be overlooked in platform comparisons, yet it translates directly into conversion. We can bring both platforms to Core Web Vitals at 90+ — on Sylius usually in a headless architecture with a Next.js front end, on Shopify Plus through a well-optimised custom theme. The direction is the same: a TTFB above 500 ms typically correlates with 5–10% lower conversion, so we aim for a TTFB below 200 ms. The difference is who is responsible for that performance: on Sylius you have full control (and full responsibility) over the stack, on Shopify Plus the vendor holds the infrastructure while you optimise the front end and the app configuration.
A decision table, and when to choose what
Below is a condensed summary of the axes that in practice tip the scales. Treat the figures as typical for our projects, not as a fixed price list.
CriterionSyliusShopify PlusLicence modelOpen source (Symfony), no licence feesSaaS: USD 2,200/month + 0.15% of turnover (capped)Entry cost (implementation)from PLN 150k; B2B PLN 200–300k; enterprise PLN 300–450klower threshold, faster launchRunning costhosting + team/retainer (ops on your side)licence + apps (USD 200–800/month) + fees of 1.4–2.4%B2B logic (individual price lists, credit)native, dual-channel B2B+B2Cpossible via Shopify B2B + apps; best for a hybridTime to market16–22 weeks8–14 weeksEU expansion (multi-currency/language)multi-store, full control, more worknative, ready EU marketplace integrationsLarge catalogue (10k–100k SKU)a strong pointcopes up to ~50k SKU; above that Sylius is betterERP/PIM/marketplace integrationsfull control through APIs and codethrough apps and APIs (Comarch, Symfonia, Allegro…)Team requiredSymfony/PHP developers (in short supply in Poland) or a retainera marketing-focused team + a partnerOwnership / lock-infull ownership of the code, no platform lock-inthe vendor manages the infrastructure; lock-in within the ecosystemBest forB2B mid-market, custom logic, headlessD2C with EU expansion, a fast launch
Choose Sylius when…
you run B2B with individual price lists, trade credit and ERP integration as the source of prices,
you have a catalogue of 10k–100k SKUs with complex logic for attributes, variants and product customisation,
you are planning a headless architecture (your own front end in Next.js/Nuxt) or multi-store for several brands,
you care about full ownership of the code and no commission on turnover — and you have a budget from around PLN 150k plus a team (or a retainer) with Symfony skills.
Choose Shopify Plus when…
you are building a D2C brand with a plan to expand into EU markets and you need multi-currency and ready marketplace integrations,
fast time to market matters (8–14 weeks) and the store logic is relatively simple (fashion, beauty, lifestyle, food),
your team is marketing-focused rather than technical, and you prefer to hand infrastructure to the vendor,
you accept a fixed operating cost and lock-in in exchange for not having your own ops department.
Summary
Sylius and Shopify Plus solve two different problems. Sylius wins where the price is individual, the logic complex and ownership of the code has value — classic mid-market B2B. Shopify Plus wins where pace and standardised D2C expansion matter and you would rather take operations off your plate. If after reading this you are still hesitating between them, that is usually a signal that you have a hybrid model — and then what decides is which side (B2B or D2C) is your main business.
If you want to translate this into a specific scope and budget for your store, start with a conversation about the store implementation — in a 60-minute consultation we will assess the fit of both platforms to your case and give you a recommendation you can defend in front of your board. Write to us via contact; no upsells, with a concrete answer about which platform really fits.