PWA Studio is growing, and month by month, new features are being added. PWA and headless are hot topics right now, but the current Magento monolithic frontend based on the Magento Luma theme is still the first choice for merchants. There are a few reasons for this:
- The current frontend is stable, while the headless frontend is in the development phase.
- There are many developers experienced in Magento theming.
- Merchants can find a lot of third-party extensions for the current Magento frontend.
- And much, much more.
The crucial fact here is that the current Magento frontend has many more out-of-the-box features compared to PWA Studio.
In this article, I want to show you the differences and the current State of PWA Studio and its plans for the future. We will focus on out-of-the-box features. If you want to read about the differences on the tech side, take a look at one of my recent articles:
CMS content and Page builder
Page builder lets you create CMS Content with an easy drag & drop visual editor. PB is part of Magento Enterprise Edition, and it’s supported by PWA Studio as well. Take a look at the latest Venia demo homepage, which is built using Page Builder.
I have noticed some limitations and things that haven’t been done yet. For example, when you add the Products list widget to your CMS Page/block, the content of this widget will be displayed in a PWA Studio instance without styles.
Category & search results page
The primary functionality here is displaying products. Using the current Magento Luma frontend you can see products in list or grid mode, sort, and filter them. You can also use pagination if there are many products.
In addition, the customer is able to select product options (in this case color and size), and add the product to cart, wishlist, and to compare.
In PWA Studio, a customer can see products only in grid mode, but it is possible to sort and filter products.
Please note that in PWA Studio, a customer is not able to add a product to the cart directly from the category page. In this case, a customer needs to go to the product page and then add the product to the cart. In some cases that’s OK, because Merchants want the customer to buy through the product page where there are more product information and related products.
The last thing I want to discuss in connection with the category page is the functionality commonly known as the “Category landing page”. In the administration panel, you can set the display mode to “Static block only” for the selected category and select the CMS block to be displayed. Unfortunately, this does not work with PWA Studio, where only products are always displayed.
Don’t be so sad…
In the next tutorial, I want to show you what the category Landing Page in PWA Studio shows.. 🙂
Product page
The product page looks great and works superbly in PWA Studio, but there are some limitations compared to Magento Luma:
- Video in the gallery does not work in PWA Studio.
- Customizable options are not visible, and adding a product with customization options set in the backend is not possible.
- No option to add the product to the wishlist.
- No option to add the product to compare.
- A short description is not visible (but you can use this tutorial to add them to the product page).
- Product reviews are not visible, and there is no option to add new reviews.
- Related and up-sell products are not visible
Product types
Magento gives merchants the ability to add a few types of products:
- simple product
- grouped product
- configurable product
- bundle product
- virtual product
PWA Studio currently supports only simple and configurable products.
Checkout process
Minicart
Minicart is available in both Luma & PWA Studio storefronts, but in PWA Studio there is no possibility to change product quantity directly from the mini cart.
Cart & checkout page
We know exactly what Magento Luma Checkout looks like, and what a difficult part of Magento it is. I hope that the PWA Studio checkout implementation will be easier to customize. The PWA Studio core team is currently working on the checkout process – it’s not finished yet but the progress is good, and the whole process looks pretty interesting.
My account pages
My Account pages are currently under development in PWA Studio. For now, customers can log in/log out, and only the password reminder functionality works. Magento Luma has a big advantage here over PWA Studio.
Other missing features
Take a look at the list below, where other missing PWA Studio features have been listed:
- Internationalization/translation support – under development in PWA Studio
- Multistore support
- Advanced pricing (special prices, cart rules, catalog rules)
- Most of the Magento Enterprise and B2B features
Take a look at the official roadmap if you are interested to see when some of them will be finished.
Conclusion
PWA Studio is growing quickly and it is definitely the future of the Magento frontend. The main problem here is that the current Magento monolithic frontend has many more out-of-the-box features and thousands of third-party modules and themes. The next issue is performance, and lack of support for server-side rendering which is important for many merchants. What’s more, I think that the lack of full support for Progressive Web App technology on the iPhone (Safari) effectively prevents the development of all PWA applications (not only PWA Studio).
It’s difficult to say exactly when the PWA will replace the current M2 frontend, but it will definitely happen!
WRITTEN BY
Marcin Kwiatkowski
Certified Magento Full Stack Developer who is passionate about Magento. He has 7 years of professional Software engineering experience. Privately, husband, father, and DIY enthusiast.
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