Medusa vs Saleor
Both are alternatives to Shopify. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Saleor vs Medusa — same comparison, one verdict.
Medusa
TOP PICKA headless commerce engine in TypeScript, MIT, no revenue share.
Medusa is a modular commerce backend built in Node and TypeScript: cart, orders, fulfilment, payments and inventory exposed as APIs, with the storefront entirely your own. There is no transaction fee and no seat count — you pay for hosting. MIT, around 35.6k stars and actively developed. It suits teams that already build in JavaScript and want commerce to be a service inside their own application rather than a platform their application lives inside. The cost is real: you are assembling a stack Shopify hands you complete.
Saleor
GraphQL-native commerce built for complex, multi-region catalogues.
Saleor is a mature Python and GraphQL commerce platform aimed at the harder end of the market: multi-channel, multi-warehouse, multi-currency, complex tax and permission models. Where Medusa is the lightweight modular option, Saleor is the one that handles genuine enterprise complexity without an enterprise licence. BSD-3-Clause, around 23k stars. The GraphQL-first API is excellent and it is a real commitment — the whole team ends up working that way.
Side by side
| Medusa | Saleor | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 93 | 91 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Pricing | Free and open source. You pay for hosting and the developers who build the storefront. | Free and open source. Saleor Cloud is an optional paid hosted tier. |
Medusa is Macrostack's recommended Shopify alternative, so it's our pick here.
Medusa
Strengths
- +MIT with no revenue share — growth does not raise the software bill
- +TypeScript throughout, which is where most web teams already are
- +Modular by design: use the commerce parts you need, ignore the rest
- +Headless, so the storefront is yours entirely
Trade-offs
- −You build the storefront — Shopify gives you one on day one
- −No app store; integrations are code you write and maintain
- −Needs a developer permanently, not just at launch
- −Checkout conversion is your problem to solve and optimise
Saleor
Strengths
- +BSD-3-Clause — the most permissive licence in this comparison
- +Handles multi-channel and multi-warehouse properly, not as an add-on
- +GraphQL API is comprehensive and well documented
- +Proven at large catalogue sizes
Trade-offs
- −Heavier to run than Medusa — Python, Postgres, Celery, Redis
- −GraphQL-first is a commitment for the whole team
- −Smaller plugin ecosystem than Shopify by orders of magnitude
- −Overkill for a straightforward single-region shop
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-07. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.