Your vision should shape your software. Not the other way around.
A distinctive brand needs more than a familiar checkout. It needs room to tell its story, express its personality, and turn a good idea into an experience customers remember.
Shopware gives you a complete commerce foundation and the source code to make it your own. Start with a working storefront, catalog, cart, checkout, and administration. Then build the product advisor, configurator, integration, or buying journey your business calls for.
| Why Shopware | What that means for your project |
|---|
| Make the experience unmistakably yours | Combine Shopping Experiences, custom themes, or an API-driven frontend. |
| Build on a complete foundation | Focus on what makes your business different rather than rebuilding commerce basics. |
| Keep control of your next move | Extend the MIT-licensed core, choose compatible hosting, and decide how external services use your data. |
| Build with your preferred coding agent | Let agents inspect code and propose changes while you review, test, and deploy them. |
See what makes Shopware different
These conceptual illustrations show possibilities, not recordings of the administration or promises of one-click features.
A brand people remember
Bring product discovery and your brand's story together with Shopping Experiences, themes, and custom frontends.
Static view · Explore Shopping Experiences
Commerce that works the way you do
Connect events, rules, and actions to automate repetitive workflows and make more time for customers and new ideas.
Static view · Explore Flow Builder
Open code. Your ideas. Your choice of agent.
Use your preferred coding agent to explore the implementation, develop extensions, and run tests. You remain in control of code review and deployment.
Static view · Agent instructions
Choose your starting point
Different projects need different first steps. Pick the path that fits what you want to do.
| I want to… | Start here | What to expect |
|---|
| Explore Shopware | Create a demo store | Try a hosted shop without local installation. The demo has limitations. |
| Build my own shop | Run Shopware locally | Create a development project with the Shopware CLI and Docker. |
| Build an extension or theme | Explore extension guides | Choose between apps, plugins, themes, and API-based frontends. Scaffold a plugin or theme with shopware-cli extension create, then add example features with shopware-cli extension add. |
| Contribute to Shopware core | Read the contribution guide | Follow the upstream contribution workflow, which differs from a merchant project. |
Curious about an experimental alternative? A community browser playground runs a Shopware demonstration using WebAssembly. It is a separate experiment, not the official hosted demo or production hosting. Optional agent features may require your own API key and provider charges.
Why developers choose Shopware
Own your stack. No vendor lock-in. The MIT-licensed core runs wherever you choose to host it, and your code, data, and extensions stay yours. Development happens in the open on GitHub, so you can follow every change, see where the platform is heading, and contribute your own solutions back.
Under the hood, Shopware is a Symfony application with a Vue.js administration, a Twig storefront, and APIs and extension points throughout the platform.
| Part | Technology |
|---|
| Backend | PHP, Symfony, Doctrine DBAL |
| Storefront | Twig, Bootstrap |
| Administration | Vue, TypeScript |
| Data | MySQL or MariaDB; Shopware Data Abstraction Layer |
| Integrations | Store API and Admin API |
Exact supported versions depend on the Shopware release. See the installation requirements.
Shopware supports different extension models:
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
