E-commerce
3 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
 medusa The world's most flexible commerce platform. | 35.8k | +170/wk | 88 |
 saleor Saleor Core: the high performance, composable, headless commerce API. | 23.2k | +37/wk | 88 |
 Vendure The commerce platform with customization in its DNA. | 8.3k | +24/wk | 73 |
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Our Analysis
Medusa is a headless commerce engine built in TypeScript. You get the full back end: products, orders, carts, payments, fulfillment, as modular building blocks you wire into any front end. It is not a Shopify theme. It is the plumbing underneath, designed for teams that need custom checkout flows, multi-region selling, or marketplace logic that hosted platforms cannot bend far enough to support. The architecture is modular. Swap payment providers, add custom fulfillment logic, extend the data model, all without forking. B2B, DTC, subscriptions, point-of-sale: the primitives are there. The community is large and the plugin ecosystem is growing fast. Alternatives like Saleor and Vendure play in the same space but Medusa has the strongest developer experience and the most momentum right now. The catch: headless commerce means you build your own storefront. No drag-and-drop. You need real front-end engineering, and self-hosting means you own uptime, scaling, and database ops unless you pay for Medusa Cloud.
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.
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.