Medusa

Medusa is an open-source commerce platform for developers. It provides the backend building blocks of an online store - products, inventory, carts, orders, payments, customers, pricing, promotions and fulfilment - as a modular, headless system written in TypeScript and running on Node.js. Headless means the commerce engine is separate from the storefront. Developers build the customer-facing experience with whatever front end they prefer, commonly Next.js, while Medusa exposes commerce functionality through APIs. That separation suits brands that want custom shopping experiences, multiple storefronts, marketplaces or commerce embedded in other products, where template-driven platforms feel constraining. Medusa's architecture emphasises customisation. Its commerce modules can be used together or individually, extended or replaced, and its framework lets developers define custom data models, workflows and integrations in the same codebase rather than fighting a plugin system. Common requirements such as multi-region and multi-currency selling, B2B features like company accounts and price lists, and integrations with payment providers such as Stripe, search engines, CMSs and fulfilment services are supported. An admin dashboard gives merchants a familiar interface for managing products and orders. Being open source means no licence fees or revenue share and full control over the code and data. Medusa also offers Medusa Cloud for managed hosting and deployment, which addresses the main drawback of self-hosting: operating and scaling the infrastructure. The trade-off is that Medusa is a developer platform. A merchant without engineering resources will be far better served by a hosted platform where the store works out of the box, and the total cost of building a custom storefront can exceed subscription fees for simpler stores. Alternatives include Shopify, including Shopify Plus and its headless APIs, for the most complete hosted platform; commercetools for enterprise headless commerce; Saleor and Vendure, other open-source headless options; BigCommerce for hosted commerce with headless support; and WooCommerce for WordPress. Choose Medusa when you have developers and need commerce you can shape completely without licence fees.