Aimeos vs. Bagisto : Comparing differences
Tags: aimeos, bagisto, laravel, ecommerce
Published: 2020-09-30 08:58:12

![Aimeos vs. Bagisto](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/qfg1opxpcoynevdhqg7w.jpg)

Aimeos and Bagisto are the most popular **Laravel ecommerce** packages. There have been a lot of noise around ecommerce for Laravel lately and this article tries to shed some light into the discussion.

# Aimeos

**Aimeos** strongly focuses on performance and scalability so it's suitable for small shops to setups bigger than Amazon with 1+ billion items. The flexibility and extensibility of Aimeos makes it particularly suitable for highly customized online shops, complex B2B applications and custom marketplaces.

Link: https://aimeos.org/

# Bagisto

**Bagisto** is suitable for small to medium sized stores. It offers the most important shop features and focuses on simplicity for users so more complex requirements are not its domain. Bagisto uses Vue.js, even in the front-end, and you need to know the tool chain well if you want to customize it.

Link: https://bagisto.com/

# Comparison

Both are Open Source and share some features which I have left out in this comparison to focus only on the **differences**. The supported features have been retrieved from their official web sites and other official sources:

| | Aimeos | Bagisto |
| ----------------- |----------------- | ---------------- |
| **Rating** | [4.8/5 (18 reviews)](https://www.capterra.com/p/181685/Aimeos/) | [4.3/5 (6 reviews)](https://www.capterra.com/p/197572/Bagisto/) |
| **Github Stars** | [17,100+](https://github.com/aimeos) | [5000+](https://github.com/bagisto/bagisto) |
| **Scalability** | very high | medium |
| **Extensibility** | very high | medium |
| **Configurability** | 2500+ options | a few |
| **Modularity** | completely modular | modular approach |
| **Databases** | MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server | MySQL |
| **Translations** | 30+ | 11 |
| **Payment gateways** | 100+ | PayPal, 10 (paid) |
| **Multiple currencies** | yes | partially |
| **Block/tier pricing** | yes | no |
| **Customer/group prices** | extension (paid) | yes |
| **Multiple tax per price** | yes | no |
| **Basket rule system** | yes | no |
| **One-page checkout** | yes | no (?) |
| **Time based data** | yes | no |
| **Products bought together** | yes | no |
| **Promoted products/category** | yes | no |
| **Last seen products** | yes | no |
| **Watched products** | yes | no |
| **Configurable data sets** | yes | no |
| **XML import/export** | yes | no |
| **SQL injection protection** | yes | no |
| **Content Security Policy** | yes | no |
| **Elasticsearch** | extension (paid) | cache only |
| **Multi-tentant SaaS**  | yes | extension (paid) |
| **AI-based text generation** | yes | no |
| **AI-based text translation** | yes | no |
| **AI-based image search** | no | yes |
| **SEO** | fully optimized | no schema.org |
| **CMS** | full-featured | minimal |
| **POS** | no | extension (paid) |
| **Code quality** | 9/10 | ? |
| **Unit tests** | 6000+ | a few |
| **Update customized shops** | easy | hard |

Bagisto offers more (paid) extensions than Aimeos but that's due to the fact that Bagisto base system hasn't many features included while in Aimeos all major features are part of the Aimeos core and thus available for free.
Nevertheless, Bagisto offers some special extensions like an NTF marketplace builder for $10,000 that are not available for Aimeos.

The ratings of Aimeos and Bagisto are taken from Capterra, a platform for product ratings where verified users can write detailed high quality reviews for products. Bagisto makes a lot of noise around their Trustpilot rating which is much better than their Capterra rating. But in Trustpilot, users only rate the customer service, not the product itself so the Trustpilot rating is equal to the service sub-category rating in Capterra only.

# Backend

The administration back-ends of Aimeos and Bagisto differ in layout and handling while the navigation is more or less similar.

## Aimeos

The admin back-end of Aimeos has a card based layout with a light and dark theme. Major attributes are:

* Fully mobile optimized
* Supports right-to-left (RTL) languages like arabic
* Available in several languages

![Aimeos back-end](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4ntiaq0m9tmai3smibnt.png)

## Bagisto

The back-end of Bagisto tries to resemble the Magento back-end in some way but is very light in terms of colors (only white and grey). Major attributes are:

* Not mobile optimized
* Doesn't support RTL languages
* Only available in English

![Bagisto back-end](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qfnbngg0hdy1nh8ay4bk.png)

# Performance

Aimeos and Bagisto published some performance data but they are not directly comparable. Nevertheless, here are the raw numbers for the product category pages:

| | Aimeos | Bagisto |
| ----------------- |----------------- | ---------------- |
| **App server** | Apache: 8 core / 16 GB RAM | Apache: 2 core / 4 GB RAM |
| **Data server** | Elasticsearch: 8 core / 32 GB RAM | MySQL: 1 core / 2 GB RAM |
| **SKUs** | 1.010 billion (1,010,000,000) | 1.3 million (1,300,000) |
| **Categories** | 1111 | 7 |
| **Request/sec** | ~600 | ~100 |
| **Response time** | 110 - 160 ms | 14,000 - 22,000 ms |
| **Hosting** | [Profihost](https://www.profihost.com/) | [AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/) |

## Notes

- The Aimeos test system has almost 1000x more products and 150x more categories than the Bagisto test system
- The Aimeos app server (they are handling the web requests) is 4x as powerful as the Bagisto one
- The Aimeos app server can handle 6x the requests of the Bagisto one
- The response time for a complete page load of the Aimeos setup is 125x better than the Bagisto one

What you can see is that the Bagisto test system has been sized way to small for the load because the response time for a complete page load is at least 14sec and up to 22sec. Such response times render every eCommerce site unusable and the Bagisto setup seems to be only good for ~10 concurrent users.

## Sources
- Aimeos: [#gigacommerce – Aimeos shop performance with 1 billion items](https://aimeos.org/tips/gigacommerce-aimeos-shop-performance-with-1-billion-items/)
- Bagisto: [Bagisto eCommerce Benchmarking Report](https://bagisto.com/en/ecommerce-benchmarking-report/)

# Conclusion

Which one is suited better for your needs depends on your requirements. If you need a scalable system that can be highly customized, you should have a deeper look at **[Aimeos](https://aimeos.org/Laravel)**. Bagisto is the right choice if you need one of their special extensions. For simple shop requirements, both will do their job and it depends on personal preferences, e.g. which admin back-end you prefer.

Demo installations:
Aimeos: https://demo.aimeos.org/
Bagisto: https://demo.bagisto.com/