How Sylius revolutionized
e-commerce for over 10,000 brands globally

The challenge

In 2011, Paweł needed an online shop for his mother and aunt's small business. Every e-commerce platform on the market at the time was the same story: monolithic, untested, painful to extend. Building on top of them meant inheriting someone else's technical debt on day one. There was no framework that let a developer write clean, object-oriented, fully tested e-commerce code. So he built one.

The solution

Sylius started as a side project on top of Symfony — MIT-licensed, open source, test-driven from the first commit. No enterprise sales team, no funding round. Just a framework good enough that other developers started using it, then paying for more of it.

Over the next decade, that single decision compounded into a full Commercial Open Source Software model:

• Free core, paid depth — Sylius Standard stayed free and open source. Sylius Plus, the enterprise layer, became the revenue engine.
• A partner network instead of a sales org — instead of hiring an army of account executives, Sylius built a Business Partner Network: agencies certified and incentivized to implement, extend, and refer. Today that's 74 partners worldwide.
• An ecosystem, not a product — a plugin marketplace, strategic integrations with PayPal, Adyen, Mollie, and Stripe, and a community of 700+ contributors who treat the codebase as their own, because in a real sense, it is.

The results

Fifteen years after that first commit for a family business:

• 10,000+ online stores run on Sylius, from mid-market retailers to marquee enterprise brands including Mytheresa, Dr. Oetker, Forbes, Carrefour, and Intersport, plus multiple European football clubs and airports.
• €2B+ processed annually through the platform.
• 7,400+ developers in the Sylius Slack community, 700+ code contributors, zero venture funding required to get there.
• December 2025: Sylius, together with BitBag, joined the cyber_Folks group in acquiring PrestaShop — one of the largest consolidations in European open-source e-commerce, and the culmination of a strategy built on giving software away and monetizing everything around it.