Vendure

Vendure is an open source, headless commerce platform for modeling catalog, orders, pricing, promotions, and customers on a single backend you control at the core. Where a hosted platform like Shopify keeps storefront and business logic inside its own constraints, Vendure exposes everything through an introspectable GraphQL API and lets you extend or override core behavior through plugins rather than forking the codebase. It's a TypeScript stack end to end: Node.js and NestJS on the backend, GraphQL as the API layer, and a React/TanStack admin dashboard. Vendure is used in production by enterprise teams at high transaction volume, and its stable plugin contracts are designed to give safe extension points without forking the core. Patch releases ship regularly, and release notes are published on GitHub so teams can track what changed before upgrading a production deployment.

Key features

• Plugin-first extensibility: Add custom entities, pricing logic, and workflows through stable plugin contracts and service overrides, without patching core code.
• One backend, every channel: A single extensible core serves D2C, B2B, marketplace, and omnichannel storefronts through the same GraphQL API.
• Full TypeScript stack: Strong types across the backend (Node.js, NestJS) and GraphQL schema, with no proprietary query language to learn.
• Built-in commerce primitives: Catalog, orders, customers, promotions, channels, tax, shipping, payments, and stock are included from day one.
• React/TanStack admin dashboard: A modern admin UI ships alongside the core, rather than requiring a separately built back office.
• Agent and MCP-ready API: The introspectable GraphQL schema is designed to make it straightforward to wire up LLM tool-calling, MCP servers, and agent frameworks against the commerce backend.

Getting started

A new project scaffolds with the server, admin dashboard, and GraphQL API already wired up:

npx @vendure/create my-shop

This requires Node.js 20.19+ (or 22.12+) and a SQL database: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, or SQLite are all supported. This repository is the Vendure source monorepo itself (the core framework, admin dashboard, CLI, official plugins, and e2e test harness); it should only be cloned directly by people contributing to Vendure, not by people building a store.

Self-hosting and deployment

Because Vendure runs anywhere Node.js runs, it can be self-hosted on your own servers, in Docker, on Kubernetes, or on any cloud provider, with you owning the deployment, the data, and the stack end to end. For teams that want git-push deploys without managing that infrastructure themselves, Vendure Cloud is a managed PaaS option, and Vendure Platform adds an optional enterprise layer (SSO, approval workflows, B2B pricing) on top of the same open source core. Vendure also offers professional services directly from the team that builds it, covering architecture review, implementation support, and launch readiness for teams taking a build to production.