Bagisto

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 772 words

Bagisto is the right choice for exactly one kind of store: the one a Laravel developer is going to customise. If nobody on the team writes PHP, close this tab and pick WooCommerce, which has 10 times the extension catalogue and a plugin for every payment processor on earth. If you have a Laravel developer, Bagisto gives them a modern, well-structured codebase to bend, and that is worth more than any number of off-the-shelf plugins.

What the framework framing means in practice

Everything ships as Laravel packages: catalogue, cart, checkout, customer accounts, promotions, and the Vue-based admin. Adding a product attribute, a shipping rule, or a custom checkout step is a matter of writing a package the way you would for any Laravel app, with migrations, service providers, and Blade or Vue views. That is the value and the cost in one sentence. A WooCommerce store owner installs a plugin; a Bagisto store owner writes one, or pays Webkul, the company behind the project, for one from their marketplace.

The built-in feature set is broader than the framing suggests. Multi-currency and multi-locale are core rather than add-ons, multiple sales channels can share one catalogue with separate storefronts, and inventory sources let you track stock across several warehouses. Those three alone are paid or bolted-on in most of the e-commerce category.

The stack: PHP 8, MySQL, and an optional Elasticsearch

The catalogue's 1 GB RAM figure is for the application alone. Realistically you are running PHP-FPM, a web server, MySQL, and probably Redis for sessions and cache, so 2 GB is a more honest starting point for a small production store. Elasticsearch is optional and worth skipping until the catalogue passes a few thousand SKUs; the default database search is fine below that.

The source install is the one I trust, because it is what the documentation is written against:

composer create-project bagisto/bagisto
cd bagisto
php artisan bagisto:install

The installer walks through database credentials, default locale, currency, and the admin account. The admin panel lives at /admin. The project's Docker images exist and work for evaluation, but for production I still deploy it like any Laravel app: a Git checkout, composer install --no-dev, a queue worker for emails, and a cron entry for php artisan schedule:run. Put Caddy in front for TLS.

Headless is real, but it is a second product

The GraphQL API is a separate package that turns Bagisto into a headless back end for a Next.js or Nuxt storefront. It is complete enough to build a real store on, and this is where Bagisto competes with Medusa and Saleor rather than with WooCommerce. My honest read: if you are starting a headless project from zero and have no attachment to PHP, Medusa's Node ecosystem is more natural for a JavaScript front end team. Bagisto headless wins when the back office team already lives in Laravel.

The ecosystem is small and partly paid

The catalogue is right to flag the smaller extension ecosystem and patchy documentation. Webkul's marketplace has a few hundred extensions and the useful ones, such as marketplace multi-vendor mode or specific regional payment gateways, cost money, typically in the low hundreds of dollars each at last check. Community forum answers are thinner than for WooCommerce or Magento. When something breaks at 2 a.m., the fix is reading the source, which is clean Laravel and is a real consolation, rather than searching for someone else's identical problem.

Payments and the compliance you inherit

Bagisto ships with PayPal and a handful of gateways, and Stripe is available as an extension. Whichever you use, keep card entry on the processor's hosted fields or redirect flow so that no card number ever touches your server. Self-hosting a store puts you in scope for PCI questionnaires that a hosted platform absorbs on your behalf, and Shopify's monthly fee is partly buying that absorption. Factor that time in before comparing prices.

What I'd do

For a store run by a team with a Laravel developer: Bagisto on a 2 vCPU, 4 GB VPS, MySQL and Redis alongside, deployed from Git with the same pipeline as your other Laravel apps, Stripe via hosted checkout. For a store run by anyone else: WooCommerce, and revisit Bagisto if the plugin stack ever becomes the bottleneck. It is an MIT-licensed, actively developed, 28,000-star framework, and it rewards developers precisely in proportion to how much it frustrates non-developers.