E-commerce

medusa36.5k★

Medusa is a headless commerce engine written in TypeScript. Products, carts, orders, payments, fulfillment, and multi-region selling arrive as modules you wire into your own storefront. It is the plumbing under a custom shop, not a theme you install. The core is MIT with no GMV fee and no order limits, and as of August 2026 that sentence needs an asterisk. On 2026-08-11 the project added an Enterprise Edition license. RBAC (role-based access control) and SSO (single sign-on) now sit in the repository under a proprietary notice: you can read the source, you are not granted the rights, and flipping the feature flag counts as asserting you hold a commercial agreement. Gating auth and permissions is the fair kind of monetization and they have to make money somewhere. But the pitch that every module stays free regardless of plan is dead, and better to learn that now than during a security review. Self-hosting is real work: Postgres, Redis, workers, and uptime are yours. Medusa Cloud runs $29 a month for a development environment, $99 for production with autoscaling and backups, and $299 for background workers, with extra seats at $30. Saleor (saleor/saleor) and Vendure (vendurehq/vendure) are the alternatives worth pricing, and neither has taken a module proprietary. The catch: read the Enterprise Materials path list before you commit. If your roadmap includes staff roles, granular permissions, or company SSO, that is a sales call now, not a config change. Code released under MIT before August 11 keeps its MIT rights, so existing installs are safe, but future versions of those directories are not.

saleor23.4k★

Saleor is a headless e-commerce backend built on Python and Django that speaks exclusively GraphQL. No REST fallback, no monolithic plugin system. Just an API you wire up to whatever frontend you want. It handles multi-currency, multi-warehouse, split payments, and advanced promotions out of the box. The architecture replaces traditional plugins with webhooks and apps that scale independently from the core. Essentially the backend brain for a storefront where you control every pixel. If you are comparing options, Medusa and Vendure cover similar headless territory. Shopify and commercetools are the paid incumbents Saleor wants to replace. The catch: GraphQL-only means your team needs to be comfortable with that paradigm, and self-hosting a production e-commerce backend with payment flows, inventory sync, and uptime requirements is not a weekend project.

Vendure8.5k★

Vendure is a headless commerce framework for teams that want to build their own storefront and don't want to pay Shopify's percentage of every transaction. Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, GraphQL. The architecture is API-first, which means you can wire it to any frontend (Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, mobile apps) and the admin dashboard runs separately on top of the same API. Self-hosting is a Node service, a Postgres or MySQL database, and a storage layer for assets. The plugin system is the killer feature: extending the platform doesn't mean forking it. B2B, marketplace, and direct-to-consumer use cases are all supported, with patches released monthly and minors quarterly. Production deployments at scale exist. Solo and small teams shipping custom storefronts: this gives you the flexibility Shopify can't, and the cost structure is much friendlier at higher volume. Large teams with enterprise needs: Vendure offers an enterprise tier with cloud services, SLA support, and platform extras worth evaluating against Shopify Plus and Commercetools. The catch: it's a framework, not a turnkey store. You're building the frontend, hooking up payment processors yourself, and owning the infrastructure. If you'd rather click-deploy a store and start selling tomorrow, Shopify is still the answer. If you'd rather build commerce that fits your business instead of bending your business to fit Shopify, this is the path.

Virto Commerce1.3k★

Virto Commerce is a .NET ecommerce backend for B2B sellers: catalog, pricing, orders, and an admin UI, all exposed through REST and GraphQL so any storefront can sit on top. The README calls it open source. The license does not agree, and that is the whole story here. The code ships under Virto's own license: OSL 3.0 plus extra terms. Those terms limit use to companies under $1M in annual group revenue and allow non-production use only. Production needs a signed commercial agreement, including work you build for a client. Virto says a Small Business edition of that commercial license is free under the same $1M revenue cap. You must also show a Powered by Virto Commerce logo on every screen. Running it means .NET 10, a SQL database (Postgres, MySQL, or SQL Server), Redis, and Elasticsearch, with modules versioned separately. Paid pricing starts at 0.5% of GMV, or $2 per order, with 10K SKUs. Everything else is a quote. Solo and small shops: medusajs/medusa and saleor/saleor are actually open source. Medium and large B2B sellers: evaluate Virto as the commercial product it is. The catch: you cannot legally run this in production without talking to sales first. And the admin UI is built on AngularJS, whose upstream project is archived.