Best Open Source E-Commerce Platforms in 2026

TL;DR

Shopify charges $39–399/month plus 2.9% per transaction — at $50K/month revenue, you're paying $1,740/month to Shopify before a single line of custom code. Medusa is the best headless e-commerce engine for modern React storefronts. WooCommerce wins on ecosystem breadth. Saleor is the right choice if your team is GraphQL-native. All three eliminate transaction fees entirely.

Key Takeaways

• Medusa (MIT, 26K+ stars) is the most developer-friendly headless commerce engine with a Node.js API and React starter storefront
• Saleor (BSD-3, 21K+ stars) offers a GraphQL-first API with the strongest B2B and multi-channel selling features
• WooCommerce (GPL-3.0, 9K+ stars) remains the most widely deployed e-commerce platform with 1,000+ extensions
• Bagisto (MIT, 14K+ stars) is the best Laravel-based option with built-in multi-currency and marketplace support
• Zero platform transaction fees on all four — you pay only Stripe/PayPal's standard rates (2.9% + $0.30)
• Headless platforms (Medusa, Saleor) require more developer effort but offer unlimited frontend flexibility

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Why Shopify's Cost Model Breaks at Scale

Shopify's pricing looks reasonable at launch — $39/month for a new store is affordable. The cost structure becomes punishing as revenue grows. The Basic plan at $39/month charges 2% on every transaction using non-Shopify payments. At $10,000/month revenue, that's $200/month in transaction fees on top of the subscription.

Move up to Shopify Plus ($2,300/month) to eliminate some fees, and you've locked yourself into a $27,600/year contract with limited customization options and Shopify's infrastructure constraints.

Beyond cost, the customization ceiling is the bigger problem. Shopify's Liquid templating language, checkout restrictions, and app sandbox limit what you can build. Teams that need custom checkout experiences, complex fulfillment logic, or integration with enterprise ERP systems run into walls that require expensive workarounds.

Open source headless commerce separates the data/business logic layer from the frontend, giving your engineering team full control of both.

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Medusa — Best for Developer Teams

Medusa is built for engineering teams that want to own their commerce infrastructure. The architecture is explicitly modular: the core provides product management, orders, customers, and payments as API primitives. Your team builds the storefront, the checkout experience, and the business logic on top.

The Next.js starter storefront is production-ready and demonstrates Medusa's capabilities, but it's a starting point — not a constraint. Teams have shipped Medusa storefronts on Remix, Nuxt, Gatsby, and even mobile apps consuming the same REST API.

Medusa's modular plugin system is particularly strong for payment integrations. Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Adyen, and 20+ other payment processors are available as official plugins. Each follows the same interface, so swapping payment providers requires a config change, not a rewrite.

# Create a new Medusa project
npx create-medusa-app@latest my-store
cd my-store

# Start backend + storefront
npx medusa develop

The development experience is notably good. medusa develop starts the admin dashboard, the API server, and connects to the PostgreSQL database with hot reload. Changes to custom plugins or business logic reflect immediately.

Medusa admin dashboard covers all the operations you'd expect: product management, inventory tracking across multiple warehouses, order management, customer profiles, discount rules, and fulfillment workflows. The UI is React-based and open source (not a separate paid tier).

Key features:

• Modular Node.js API (REST)
• Next.js starter storefront
• Multi-warehouse inventory management
• Subscription and recurring payments (plugin)
• Multi-currency and multi-region pricing
• B2B customer groups and price lists
• Fulfillment provider integrations (ShipBob, ShipStation, etc.)
• 20+ payment gateway plugins
• Webhook-based event system

Self-hosting requirements: PostgreSQL database, Redis for queues, minimum 1 GB RAM for the API server. Docker Compose setup available in the official docs.

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Saleor — Best GraphQL Commerce Platform

Saleor's GraphQL-first API is its defining characteristic. Every operation in the platform — product queries, cart mutations, order creation — happens through a typed GraphQL schema. For frontend teams that are already GraphQL-native (Next.js App Router with Apollo or urql), this is a significant developer experience win.

The multi-channel architecture in Saleor is one of the best implementations in any e-commerce platform, open source or paid. A "channel" in Saleor is a separate commerce context with its own currency, pricing, payment methods, and warehouse assignment. You can run a US storefront (USD), a UK storefront (GBP), and a wholesale B2B catalog as separate channels — all managed through one admin dashboard and one API.

# Saleor is Python/Django — Docker Compose:
# docker-compose.yml (simplified)
services:
  api:
    image: ghcr.io/saleor/saleor:latest
    environment:
      - SECRET_KEY=your-secret
      - DATABASE_URL=postgres://saleor:password@db/saleor
      - CELERY_BROKER_URL=redis://redis:6379/0
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
  dashboard:
    image: ghcr.io/saleor/saleor-dashboard:latest
    ports:
      - "9000:80"
  db:
    image: postgres:15
    volumes:
      - saleor_db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
volumes:
  saleor_db:

Saleor's B2B features are stronger than Medusa's out of the box: customer group pricing, order approval workflows, company billing addresses, and bulk order management are all built-in.

Key features:

• GraphQL API (strongly typed schema)
• Multi-channel selling (currency, pricing, warehouse per channel)
• React dashboard
• B2B features (customer groups, bulk orders, approval workflows)
• Multi-warehouse inventory with stock allocation
• Digital products and physical products
• Shipping zones and carrier integrations
• Plugin marketplace

Limitations: Python/Django requires more infrastructure expertise than Medusa's Node.js stack. The self-hosted Docker Compose setup includes 5+ containers and requires more RAM (2+ GB) than Medusa.

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WooCommerce — Largest Ecosystem

WooCommerce is the most widely deployed e-commerce platform in the world — more stores run WooCommerce than any competitor, open source or paid. This installed base has produced an ecosystem of 1,000+ extensions covering every conceivable use case: subscription billing, appointment booking, digital downloads, auctions, and multi-vendor marketplaces.

The WordPress foundation means WooCommerce works on any shared hosting plan. If your team already operates WordPress sites, adding WooCommerce is additive rather than architectural. The content management is first-class — WordPress's block editor plus WooCommerce's product management is a complete publishing + commerce platform.

The extension ecosystem is a double-edged sword. The breadth is unmatched, but quality varies significantly between extensions. Budget $50–200/month for essential premium extensions (subscriptions, product bundles, advanced shipping) before reaching Shopify feature parity on complex stores.

Key features:

• WordPress plugin (deploys anywhere WordPress runs)
• 1,000+ extensions (free and paid)
• Every payment gateway (via extensions)
• Subscriptions (via WooCommerce Subscriptions)
• Bookings, memberships, multi-vendor (via premium extensions)
• Huge community and hiring pool
• REST API

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Bagisto — Best Laravel-Based Commerce

Bagisto is the right choice if your engineering team is PHP/Laravel-native. The codebase is clean modern Laravel — Eloquent ORM, Blade templates, queues via Horizon. Adding Bagisto features follows the same patterns as extending any Laravel application.

The built-in marketplace module is notable: Bagisto includes seller registration, commission management, and product approval workflows out of the box. Building a multi-vendor marketplace on Medusa or WooCommerce requires significant additional work or expensive extensions.

Multi-currency, multi-locale, and theme management are built into the Bagisto core. International stores don't require additional plugins.

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Full Comparison

Feature	Medusa	Saleor	WooCommerce	Bagisto
License	MIT	BSD-3	GPL-3.0	MIT
GitHub Stars	26K+	21K+	9K+	14K+
API Type	REST	GraphQL	REST	REST
Stack	Node.js	Python/Django	PHP/WordPress	PHP/Laravel
Multi-Warehouse	✅	✅	Extension	✅
Multi-Channel	Plugin	✅ Native	❌	✅
B2B Features	Plugin	✅ Native	Extension	✅
Marketplace	❌	❌	Extension	✅ Native
Subscriptions	Plugin	Plugin	Extension ($)	Plugin
Transaction Fees	None	None	None	None
Extension Ecosystem	Growing	Smaller	1,000+	Growing
Hosting Complexity	Medium	High	Low	Medium

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Choosing the Right Platform

Choose Medusa if:

• Your team is JavaScript/Node.js native
• You want the best developer experience for custom storefronts
• You're building headless commerce with a React frontend

Choose Saleor if:

• Your team is Python/GraphQL native
• You're selling across multiple regions with different currencies
• You need strong B2B customer management

Choose WooCommerce if:

• You're running WordPress already
• You need the broadest extension marketplace
• Your team wants the largest hiring pool and community

Choose Bagisto if:

• Your team is PHP/Laravel native
• You're building a multi-vendor marketplace
• You need multi-currency and multi-locale without plugins

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Total Cost Comparison

Revenue	Shopify Basic + fees	Medusa on VPS	Annual Savings
$10K/month	$4,068/year	$144/year	$3,924
$50K/month	$19,188/year	$192/year	$18,996
$200K/month	$74,388/year	$384/year	$74,004

Transaction fee savings alone justify the migration at $50K+/month revenue. The per-server infrastructure cost stays essentially flat as revenue grows.

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Migrating to Headless Commerce: What the Technical Lift Really Looks Like

The financial case for switching from Shopify is clear at $50K+ monthly revenue. The honest accounting of the engineering investment is less often discussed. Most teams underestimate the migration scope, then overrun timelines and budgets — which erases the savings that motivated the move.

The migration has four distinct workstreams, and all four need to be complete before you can cut over traffic:

Storefront rebuild. Headless commerce platforms (Medusa, Saleor) provide the data API; your team builds the storefront. If you're coming from a Shopify Liquid theme, the conversion to React isn't a port — it's a rebuild. Existing theme customizations, custom section logic, and CMS content integrations need to be reimplemented. Budget 6–12 weeks for a React developer who knows Next.js but is new to the commerce layer. Teams that have an existing Next.js codebase can compress this to 3–4 weeks if the design system is already in place.

Data migration. Products, collections, customers, and historical orders need to move. Medusa and Saleor have import tools, but the schema mapping is always imperfect. Shopify's metafield system (for custom product attributes) often maps to multiple fields in destination platforms, requiring transformation scripts. Plan for 2–3 days of data migration work plus a week of QA to verify counts, images, and relationships.

Payment and checkout integration. Shopify Payments migrating to Stripe requires customers to re-enter payment methods — Shopify doesn't export tokenized card data, for obvious security reasons. For subscription businesses, this means a coordination period where recurring customers are migrated to the new billing system at their next renewal. Plan the cutover during a low-volume period.

SEO continuity. Product URLs in Shopify use /products/slug by default. Your new store's URL structure may differ, requiring 301 redirects for every product, collection, and blog URL. Google takes 6–12 weeks to process a large redirect map, during which traffic dips are common. Audit your top-traffic URLs before migration and implement redirects at the reverse proxy level, not in application code.

The total engineering investment for a moderately complex Shopify store is typically 8–16 weeks of developer time. That's the real break-even point to calculate — not just the month when hosting costs drop below Shopify's fees, but the month when cumulative savings offset the migration engineering cost.

For teams evaluating the broader open source infrastructure stack alongside the commerce migration, the best open source developer tools in 2026 covers the supporting infrastructure. Teams migrating from Shopify Payments will want to review the full Stripe billing comparison to decide whether to use Stripe Billing or a dedicated subscription management layer.

Related: Medusa vs Saleor: Headless Commerce Compared · Best Open Source Shopify Alternatives · How to Migrate from Shopify to Medusa

See open source alternatives to Shopify on OSSAlt.