Medusa
Top pickA headless commerce engine in TypeScript, MIT, no revenue share.
93
sovereigntyMedusa 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.
OPEN SOURCEMITSELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseMIT
PricingFree and open source. You pay for hosting and the developers who build the storefront.
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes
What it does well
- +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
Where it falls short
- −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
Medusa as an alternative to
Where Medusa shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Medusa head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.