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.

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/

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

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.