TYPO3 CMS versus TYPO3 Neos

Question

If you have to choose between TYPO3 CMS and TYPO3 Neos, which criteria are relevant to decide?

What are the main differences between those two variants (features, editing, performance, hosting, etc.)?

How different is the developing in terms of learning curve, complexity, programming speed?

Answer 1

(disclaimer): I am part of the Neos team - so I cannot compare the differences clearly as I have not been working productively with TYPO3 CMS.

Still, I'd like to give some general remarks as well on the above points:

Learning Curve: I think Neos more consistent concept-wise than TYPO3 CMS -- because we were able to learn from the pros and cons of TYPO3 (as quite some of us have been TYPO3 CMS core devs in the past). On the other hand, while we try to have as much documentation as possible, we know that documentation is still a weak point of Neos. There definitely exists a lot more documentation for TYPO3 than for Neos, and the community is bigger.

Complexity: Hard to compare. I think both systems are complex in certain areas, easier in others.

Speed: If you download Neos, it is by default running in Development Context, which makes it slower, but nicer to work with during development. Many caches are automatically cleared then. However, make sure to enable the Production context when working with Flow/Neos applications. You can do that by adding an environment variable FLOW_CONTEXT=Production to your apache/php/nginx configuration. I've seen quite some productive instances running (slowly) in development context.

Features: I think that one is honestly hard to compare. As an example, TYPO3 CMS has a big "News" extension (actually, several of them); which might get you started easily on the one side, but on the other side adjusting it to very specific output can be more complex. In Neos, it is very easy to create your own node types and build them in a way that they do exactly what you want them to do. So for now, you will create a "News" node type which works the way you like. I think in the longer run, more best practices will emerge, leading to "de-facto" standard packages for solving e.g. News. As an example, there is the https://github.com/Flow-Community/Community.News package maintained by Neos community members.

Important: Neos 2.0 is currently in beta phase, containing e.g. more advanced access controls along with lots of other smaller and bigger features, as well as lots of bugfixes. If you can, I'd suggest you use this one.

Verdict: I know many of the TYPO3 CMS devs and they are also doing truly great things :-) So I won't give a recommendation for the one or the other.

Greets, Sebastian

Answer 2

I wonder that the criteria of future development is not mentioned here. For me it's one of the most important, especially after splitting Neos and TYPO3 CMS just some month ago. TYPO3 CMS is well established over years. Neos is much younger, which brings perhaps advantages in some technical parts. Some people fear the separation and hope that Neos can build a community and not ends as a death-system.

If you want to discover how it feels like for editors in backends the demo sites of Neos and TYPO3 CMS can give you an idea.