Solidus vs Spree - which should be used?

Question

I'm about to upgrade my small online shop based on old Spree version. I was planning to use newest branch 3.X, but after project being drop by SpreeCommerce company I was thinking to switch to Solidus (they seems to pay more focus more stability and reliability). But last month new core team took the project in their hands.

Are there any Solidus or Spree developers who could tell what would be better. Stick to Spree or move on to Solidus? Or maybe use different e-commerce RoR app like Shoppe or ror_ecommerce. I'm happy to see what are your thoughts?

Some articles

2016/01 Spree new Core Team https://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-roadmap-announcement

2015/10 Spree dropped support [officially] https://spreecommerce.com/blog/future-of-spree-oss

2015/09 Solidus - new Spree fork http://resolve.digital/blog/posts/spree-commerce-acquired-is-it-time-to-move-your-spree-store-to-solidus

Github activity

Update

Spark Solutions made interesting starter kit including Spree and React. https://github.com/spark-solutions/spark-starter-kit.

Forcemeat

Our team had to decide between two projects as well, and we decided to go with solidus. As of now the solidus project seems to be more stable. It may change in the future as spree project has found new leadership. – Pentheus

Answer 1

The Blue Stout folk wrote a pretty comprehensive blog post a couple of weeks ago about this same conversation. The pros and cons could have been listed so that they were a little bit more parallel, but I think it's still helpful as they mention some things that aren't in the articles above.

http://bluestout.com/blog/spree-vs-solidus-ecommerce-platforms/

Gilles

Great article Amanda! I'm looking community and trying both solutions side by side to compare but... still haven't made up my mind. If I can ask you - what personally would you like to pick for small ecommerce app/ – Forcemeat

Answer 2

I interviewed core team members of both Spree Commerce and Solidus and have written up a comprehensive blog post about Spree vs Solidus. It covers the history of the projects and how we've ultimately ended up with Spree and Solidus.

Here's what I concluded:

Our customers who are on Spree will likely stay on Spree, but new stores we build will be on Solidus. This is because behind all the noise, we think Solidus is the future.

When it comes down to it, here’s what we recommend as of today:

• New Stores: Use Solidus
• Existing Spree 3.x Stores: Stay on Spree
• Existing Spree 2.x Stores: Make a case by case decision about if you want to move to Solidus on stay on Spree.
• Existing Spree 1.x Stores: Upgrade to Spree 2.4

Misfeasance

Answer 3

If I was building a small ecommerce app I'd be looking at Shopify first. Only if I couldn't customize a store to my needs would I look at something as big as Spree or Solidus. The financial and time cost of a dev team to put either together and then maintain it over the life is a lot more than you might expect and not really worth it unless you have no alternative.

That being said, if I had to choose between Spree and Solidus personally myself, I would choose Solidus. The caveat on that is that I work as a designer for Stembolt (one of the companies that forked it from Spree) and I've probably got the most intimate understanding of where we're going to take our admin interface in the near future. We have dedicated devs on the project that are quickly and continuously improving security, efficiency and general user experience and I'm genuinely excited about where we're going.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Solidus isn't a brand new project, it's been around as long as Spree because it's built from Spree. Also lot of the Spree extensions can be used with Solidus with minimal or no debugging.

My best advice to you would be to make a list of what you're looking for first, and then you'll be better able to decide what will meet your needs.

Helaina

Answer 4

We have been developing for a while with Spree and also we have a store that uses it. Spree has help us on many projects. We develop on European projects and we know about the features needed in this part of the world. About Spree or Solidus, it's not an easy question and we should wait how both communities advance. But I think that there are some initial points of views that could help to decide at this moment. Solidus is supported by two important retail companies and as far as I know they are looking for easy migration between versions and stability. From my point of view they are working on adding features that are business related needs. As examples they have been working on improving VAT system on Solidus that could help on European projects and propose other features as adding in the future solidus_multi_domain to the core . About Spree new core team we must let them work and they look also promising, their roadmap looks interesting and they will support rails 5, add store credits to the core, performance improvements and many other things.

Answering the initial question, I think that Solidus its a good option to use and we don't have to forget that they started their project before Spree Commerce had to finish supporting Spree. I like the stability, easy migration path, and new features that they are working on, I find them at this moment more interesting and deeper. We need more features and improve business related needs if we want to compete with other platforms also as every thing evolves the migration path must be as easily as possible. But as I said at the beginning we have been using spree and also their roadmap is interesting, we will keep using it or evolving actual projects without much worries.
I think that the key question is... Can Spree and Solidus join their efforts somehow and work together?

Hope my thoughts help

Dimple

Answer 5

Spree is a good technology that we can build shopping cart like applications. But right now they officially down the support. Solidus is working on a fork copy of spree. Solidus is a good choice for upgradation

Aught

I already know @Anoob, but what about the new core team and a brand of Spree? It has very huge community and Solidus is just starting to grow. What about extensions. There are plenty for Spree comparing to Solidus. – Forcemeat

Answer 6

Solidus working well with good support now. You can refer that.

Ryurik