Frontend options for Sulu: from CMS to live storefront

Sulu is a Symfony-based CMS you can run headless: it delivers content through the SuluHeadlessBundle API, but it does not ship a finished, production-ready frontend. Building that frontend is a separate decision, and a visual page builder is one of the routes for Sulu.

What Sulu gives you

Sulu manages your content, editorial workflow and localization, and exposes it through the SuluHeadlessBundle API. Sulu is deliberately not a WYSIWYG tool: it favours structured content over visual composition, so a visual frontend layer is exactly what it leaves open. What it does not give you is a ready storefront: layout, components and page logic are yours to build.

The frontend question

Every Sulu project faces the same choice. Four options are established:

• Official starter or template: great to learn, you keep building the production frontend
• Community framework: active, but no official product and no enterprise support net
• Custom build (Next.js or Nuxt): full control, six to twelve months plus maintenance
• Visual page builder: components, hosting and a visual editor in the platform, live in weeks

Laioutr as the frontend layer for Sulu

Laioutr reads your Sulu content through the SuluHeadlessBundle API and renders it as a fast frontend, with 70+ components, EU hosting and Core Web Vitals by default. Sulu stays your content backend; Laioutr delivers the frontend. See, for example, the Page Builder for TYPO3.

FAQ

Does Laioutr replace Sulu? No. Sulu stays the content backend; Laioutr is the frontend layer on top.

How does Laioutr connect to Sulu? Through the SuluHeadlessBundle API, plus project-specific queries for custom logic.

More on the category: what a Frontend Management Platform is, or the Laioutr home page.