BigCommerce now ships two first-class storefront paths. Stencil is the long-standing hosted theme platform — Handlebars templates, jQuery, Bootstrap, and the BigCommerce Storefront Cart UI all wired together so a competent team can launch a working B2C or B2B site in days. Catalyst is BigCommerce's official Next.js-based headless reference architecture — TypeScript, React Server Components, the BigCommerce GraphQL Storefront API, deployed on Vercel or your edge of choice.
Both are good. Both are wrong for some projects. Picking the wrong one is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make with this platform, because the migration path between them is a rebuild.
What Stencil is actually good at
Stencil's reputation gets unfairly dragged by the fact that it ships with jQuery and Bootstrap. People see "jQuery" and assume "legacy." That's a misread. Stencil ships those because they're the path of least resistance for the dozens of widgets a working storefront needs — and BigCommerce maintains the framework around them. It's not legacy; it's commodity. That's a feature.
Stencil wins when:
- Time to launch matters more than UX uniqueness. A team that knows what they're doing can ship a clean, well-performing Stencil site in 4–8 weeks. Catalyst sites take longer because you're building UI primitives, not assembling them.
- The merchandising team has to live in BigCommerce daily. Stencil sites get the full backend authoring experience: Page Builder, Script Manager, native search merchandising, and the app ecosystem (A/B testing slots in via apps or Script Manager rather than being native). With Catalyst, every one of those needs an explicit decision about where it lives.
- You don't have a frontend platform team. Catalyst is a real Next.js project. Someone has to own the build pipeline, deploy targets, image optimization budget, and dependency upgrades. Stencil is run by BigCommerce.
- The catalog is the primary differentiator. Stencil keeps you focused on products and merchandising. Catalyst keeps you focused on UI and architecture. For a lot of B2B catalogs, the first focus is the right one.
What Catalyst is actually good at
Catalyst exists for the cases where Stencil's assumptions get in the way. The clearest tells:
- You need a brand-led shopping experience that doesn't fit the BigCommerce theme model. Animation, custom navigation patterns, content+commerce hybrid pages, complex configurators — everything is easier when you own the React tree.
- Your storefront is one of several touchpoints sharing a design system. A site, an iOS app, an in-store kiosk, a sales-rep tool — Catalyst gives you a frontend that can pull from the same component library as the rest. Stencil can't do that.
- You have or are building the platform team. Catalyst rewards good frontend engineering practice. It punishes teams that don't have it.
- You're going to hit Stencil's edges anyway. If your design comp already includes things you know require eject-from-Stencil moves, just start in Catalyst.
The B2B Edition wrinkle
BigCommerce B2B Edition (corporate accounts, quoting, price lists, requisition lists, buyer roles) supports both. But the integration story is more mature on Stencil — most of the B2B Edition UI plugs in via stock theme components. On Catalyst, you're wiring up the GraphQL Storefront API endpoints for B2B yourself, and some screens (quote management, masquerading) require more deliberate work. If B2B Edition is core to your launch and your team is small, that's a Stencil tilt.
The "headless is always better" reflex
You will hear, often from people who haven't shipped either, that headless is the modern way and hosted themes are legacy. This is a category error. Headless is an architecture; modernity is an outcome. A poorly-staffed Catalyst project that ships in 9 months is less modern than a well-run Stencil site that shipped in 8 weeks and has been iterating since.
The honest reasons to choose Catalyst are: you need rendering control Stencil can't give you, or you need to share a frontend codebase with other surfaces, or you have a team that will genuinely benefit from owning the stack. The honest reasons to choose Stencil are: speed, vendor-managed defaults, and a merchandising experience that comes for free. Either is a fine answer. Just don't pick by reflex.
How we decide on real projects
The first question we ask a prospective BigCommerce client is "do you have, or are you committed to hiring, a frontend platform engineer?" If the honest answer is no, we steer toward Stencil. The second is "are there shopping experiences in the design that you've already seen Stencil sites struggle with?" If yes, that's a Catalyst signal. The third is "B2B Edition: how central is it?" The more central, the bigger the Stencil tilt.
If after that the answer is genuinely "we want both speed and freedom," there's actually a reasonable middle path: ship Stencil first, build the brand and the merchandising muscle there, and migrate to Catalyst when you have a real reason and the team to support it. We've done that twice. Both clients are still on Stencil, by the way — turns out the reason never came.
Trying to make this call on a live project? Tell us what you're staring at and we'll tell you which way the math actually goes — even if the answer is "neither, you should probably stay where you are."