Comparison of Storefront and Backend APIs

This document describes differences between Storefront API (REST API) and Backend API.

Spryker provides two main API applications in the same project. Storefront APIs are designed for consumer-facing applications and provide access to Storage and Elasticsearch, making RPC Zed calls using Clients. Backend APIs are designed for administrative and system-to-system communication with direct access to Facades, enabling performant backend operations.

Storefront API uses customer-based authentication, while Backend API uses user-based authentication.

For the module-level implementation differences on the Glue infrastructure, see Backend and Storefront API module differences.