E-Commerce

Open source e-commerce in this category means headless commerce: the product catalog, cart, checkout, and order management run as a backend or API, while the storefront customers browse is built separately as its own frontend application. Medusa, Saleor, and Vendure all follow this model, in contrast to a platform like WooCommerce or Shopify's hosted storefronts, where the frontend and backend are bundled together.

Medusa is a Node.js and TypeScript commerce engine with a modular architecture: core commerce logic (carts, orders, pricing, regions) ships as installable modules, and a plugin system covers payments (Stripe, PayPal), shipping providers, and search. It includes a Next.js starter storefront, so teams can launch with a working frontend and customize it rather than building one from zero. Saleor is GraphQL-first, exposing the entire catalog, cart, and checkout as a GraphQL API, which suits teams already standardized on GraphQL across their stack or building multiple frontends, such as web and mobile, against one commerce backend. Vendure is also TypeScript and Node.js based, with a plugin architecture similar to Medusa's, and leans toward B2B and multi-vendor marketplace use cases with built-in support for multiple sellers and sales channels.

What to look for: the API style (a REST and GraphQL hybrid for Medusa, GraphQL-only for Saleor and Vendure) matters for how the frontend team will integrate. Multi-currency and multi-region support is built into all three but with different configuration models, worth checking against specific business requirements before committing. Payment and shipping provider coverage varies, so checking the plugin or integration list against the payment processors and carriers a business actually uses is a concrete first step, rather than assuming universal support.

Because these are headless, none of the three ships a finished storefront a non-technical team can deploy without a developer; a frontend build, or at minimum adapting a starter template, is required regardless of which backend is chosen. Self-hosting the commerce backend keeps order and customer data under the merchant's own infrastructure and avoids per-transaction platform fees that hosted commerce platforms typically charge on top of payment processor fees.