medusa

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.