Open-source alternatives to Shopify

The most expensive mistake when leaving Shopify is not picking the wrong platform — it is not realising that three of the four projects below ship no storefront at all. Shopify is end-to-end: theme, checkout, payments, inventory, fulfillment, the whole thing, out of the box. Medusa, Saleor, and Vendure are headless commerce frameworks — they give you a commerce API and expect you to build the storefront yourself. That is enormous flexibility and an enormous amount of frontend engineering. WooCommerce is the only entry here that gives you a working store without a frontend team. Decide whether you have that team before you read any further.

If you have engineers and want control → Medusa

Medusa (33.8k stars, TypeScript, MIT) is the strongest headless pick for a JavaScript/TypeScript shop. MIT licensed — the cleanest terms in this group, genuinely no strings — and the most flexible architecture: you model the commerce backend, then build a Next.js (or any) storefront against it. This is the right call when your differentiator is the customer experience and a Shopify theme felt like a straitjacket. The cost is honest and large: every piece of UI Shopify gave you for free — cart, checkout, account pages, order history — you now build and maintain. Budget a frontend team, not a weekend.

If you want GraphQL-first and multi-warehouse → Saleor

Saleor (22.9k stars, Python, BSD-3-Clause) is the other serious headless option, GraphQL-first, with notably strong multi-currency and multi-warehouse support baked in. BSD-3-Clause is permissive and embedding-friendly. Choose Saleor over Medusa when your team is more comfortable in Python than TypeScript, or when complex inventory across warehouses and currencies is a first-order requirement rather than an edge case. Same caveat applies: you are building the storefront.

Vendure — the same headless bet, smaller community

Vendure (8.1k stars, TypeScript, NOASSERTION) is a well-regarded TypeScript/ NestJS/GraphQL headless framework in the same family as Medusa. The honest differentiator is community size: at 8k stars it has a smaller ecosystem and plugin pool than Medusa’s 34k, which matters for finding answers and pre-built integrations. Its card license reads NOASSERTION (GPL-family terms in the repo — check before commercial work). A reasonable pick if its architecture fits your team, but Medusa is the lower-risk default in the same niche.

If you do NOT have a frontend team → WooCommerce

WooCommerce (10.3k stars, PHP) is the genuinely different option and, for many small merchants, the right one. It runs on WordPress, which means you get a working storefront, themes, and the largest extension ecosystem of any project here — payment gateways, shipping calculators, everything — without building a frontend from scratch. The trade is the WordPress operational surface: hosting, plugin updates, the security hygiene that a public WordPress site demands. If you were a small Shopify merchant who wants out of the monthly fee and transaction cuts but does not have engineers, WooCommerce is the realistic landing spot, not the headless trio.

The thing you are really giving up

Shopify’s hosted checkout — PCI-handled, fraud-screened, conversion-optimised, maintained by someone else — is the single hardest thing to replace. With any of these you take on payment integration and the compliance surface around it. That is the real reason Shopify can charge what it charges, and it is the line item that most often sends merchants back.