Headless WooCommerce vs Medusa vs Saleor: Open Source Commerce Backends Compared

If you are building a headless ecommerce store in 2026, the backend decision is critical. It determines your development workflow, your hosting costs, your extension options, and how quickly you can ship new features. The Medusa vs WooCommerce debate is one that comes up constantly in developer communities — but Saleor deserves a seat at that table too. These three platforms are the leading open source options for headless commerce backends, and each brings a fundamentally different philosophy to the problem.

WooCommerce approaches headless from the WordPress ecosystem. Medusa was built from the ground up as a headless-first Node.js backend. Saleor takes a Python/Django approach with enterprise-grade GraphQL. Different strengths, different trade-offs, and different ideal use cases — but all three are production-ready and actively maintained.

The three contenders

Before diving into feature-by-feature comparisons, it helps to understand where each platform came from and what problems it was designed to solve. Their origins explain most of their architectural differences.

Headless WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a PHP plugin for WordPress that turns any WordPress installation into a full commerce backend. In headless mode, you ignore the WordPress frontend entirely and interact with WooCommerce through its REST API or via WPGraphQL (a community-maintained GraphQL layer). The backend handles products, orders, payments, shipping, and tax — everything a commerce engine needs.

The defining advantage of headless WooCommerce is its ecosystem. With 68,000+ plugins available, there is a solution for virtually every commerce requirement you can think of — from obscure payment gateways to complex tax rules to multi-vendor marketplaces. No other open source platform comes close to this breadth.

The other major advantage is WordPress itself. Your store gets a world-class CMS for blog posts, landing pages, and marketing content — all managed through the same backend. No separate CMS required.

Medusa

Medusa is a Node.js and TypeScript commerce backend built from day one for headless architectures. It uses a modular architecture where every component — payments, fulfilment, notifications, tax — can be swapped out independently. If you don't like how Medusa handles something, you replace that module without touching the rest.

Medusa v2, released in 2024, was a major rewrite that improved the module system, introduced a new data modelling layer, and made customisation significantly easier. The developer experience is genuinely excellent — TypeScript throughout, good CLI tooling, and a well-designed admin dashboard.

The trade-off is ecosystem size. Medusa has around 50+ official and community modules compared to WooCommerce's 68,000+ plugins. For common requirements (Stripe, PayPal, standard shipping), Medusa has you covered. For niche requirements, you may need to build custom modules.

Saleor

Saleor is a Python/Django commerce backend with a GraphQL-only API. It targets enterprise use cases with built-in support for multi-warehouse inventory, multi-currency pricing, multi-channel sales, and granular permissions. It ships with a polished React-based dashboard for store management.

Saleor's enterprise features are impressive out of the box. Where WooCommerce and Medusa need plugins or custom code for multi-warehouse support, Saleor includes it natively. The same applies to multi-channel selling, attribute-based permissions, and webhook-driven extensibility.

The trade-off is complexity. Saleor has the steepest learning curve of the three, requires Docker for deployment, and has fewer third-party integrations than either WooCommerce or Medusa. It is the most powerful option, but it demands the most from your team.

API comparison

The API is how your frontend communicates with the commerce backend. The choice of API style affects your development speed, data fetching efficiency, and the tools available to your frontend team.

WooCommerce offers both REST API (official, maintained by Automattic) and GraphQL via WPGraphQL (community-maintained but widely used). The REST API is simpler to get started with; GraphQL lets you fetch exactly the data you need in a single request. Having both options means you can pick the right tool for each use case.

Medusa provides a REST API and an official JavaScript SDK. The SDK offers typed methods for every endpoint, making it straightforward to integrate with Next.js, Nuxt, or any other JavaScript framework. There is no official GraphQL support.

Saleor is GraphQL-only. There is no REST API. If your team is comfortable with GraphQL, this is efficient and powerful. If your team prefers REST, Saleor is not the right choice — there is no alternative.

Developer experience

Developer experience covers everything from initial setup to daily workflow: how quickly you can get a development environment running, how well the codebase is typed, and how easy it is to find answers when you get stuck.

Setup time: Medusa wins here. A single npx create-medusa-app command gets you a running backend with admin dashboard in minutes. WooCommerce requires a WordPress installation (local tools like LocalWP make this quick, but it is still more steps). Saleor requires Docker and has the longest initial setup.

TypeScript support: Medusa is TypeScript-native throughout — backend, SDK, and admin. Saleor's backend is Python, but its storefront starter and dashboard are TypeScript. Same for WooCommerce: PHP backend, but your Next.js frontend is fully TypeScript. For backend customisation, Medusa has a clear TypeScript advantage.

Documentation quality: All three platforms have comprehensive documentation. Medusa's docs are particularly well structured with interactive examples. WooCommerce benefits from decades of community tutorials and Stack Overflow answers. Saleor's docs are thorough but assume more prior knowledge.

Community size: WooCommerce's community dwarfs the other two. With 40% e-commerce market share, you will find answers to almost any WooCommerce question within minutes. Medusa has a growing and active Discord community. Saleor's community is smaller but focused and technical.

Plugin and extension ecosystem

This is where the platforms diverge most dramatically. The ecosystem determines how much you can achieve with existing solutions versus how much custom code your team needs to write.

WooCommerce has 68,000+ plugins covering payments (Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Afterpay, and hundreds more), shipping (ShipStation, EasyPost, Royal Mail, Australia Post), tax (TaxJar, Avalara), marketing (Mailchimp, Klaviyo), and every other commerce function imaginable. Many of these plugins work perfectly in headless mode because they operate on the backend.

Medusa has a growing module system with 50+ official and community modules. The core integrations are solid — Stripe, PayPal, Sendgrid, MinIO — but for anything beyond the common cases, you are likely building a custom module.

Saleor uses an app system for extensions. The marketplace is smaller than both WooCommerce and Medusa, with fewer third-party integrations available. Enterprise teams often build custom apps for their specific requirements.

Content management

Every ecommerce store needs more than product pages. You need a blog for SEO, landing pages for campaigns, an about page, FAQ sections, and other content that drives traffic and builds trust. How each platform handles this non-product content matters enormously.

WooCommerce runs on WordPress, which is a CMS. Blog posts, pages, custom post types, media management, user roles — it is all built in. Your marketing team can publish content through the WordPress admin without touching code. This is a massive advantage that is easy to underestimate until you realise how much content a successful store needs.

Medusa has no CMS capabilities. For content beyond products, you need to integrate a separate CMS like Contentful, Sanity, or Strapi. That means another service to manage, another API to query, and another bill to pay.

Saleor is in the same position as Medusa. Product descriptions live in Saleor, but everything else — blog posts, landing pages, help articles — requires a separate CMS.

Hosting and deployment

Where and how you host the backend affects your ongoing costs, operational complexity, and the skills your team needs to maintain the infrastructure.

WooCommerce runs on any PHP host. Managed WordPress hosts like Cloudways, Kinsta, and SpinupWP handle server management, updates, and backups for you. Costs start from around $10–30 per month for a production-ready setup. See our WooCommerce hosting guide for detailed recommendations.

Medusa runs on any Node.js host or Docker environment. Railway, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform are popular choices. Medusa Cloud (the managed offering) is also available for teams who want to avoid infrastructure management.

Saleor requires Docker for self-hosting, which makes deployment the most complex of the three. Saleor Cloud is the managed alternative, but it comes with enterprise pricing. Self-hosting Saleor demands DevOps experience with Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Celery workers.

For all three platforms, the frontend deploys to Vercel, Netlify, or any static/edge hosting provider. The frontend deployment story is essentially identical regardless of which backend you choose.

Performance comparison

In headless architectures, the frontend is almost always the performance bottleneck — not the backend. Your Next.js or Nuxt storefront, with its rendering strategy (SSR, SSG, ISR) and CDN configuration, determines what customers experience. The backend responds to API requests, and all three platforms handle this efficiently for typical store sizes.

That said, there are differences at scale. WooCommerce uses WordPress's wp_postmeta table structure, which can slow down at extreme scale (100,000+ products with complex attributes). The new High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) system addresses this for orders. For a deeper look at scaling strategies, see our WooCommerce at scale guide.

Medusa and Saleor both use PostgreSQL with properly normalised schemas, which scales more predictably with large catalogues. For the vast majority of stores (under 50,000 products), all three platforms perform comparably.

Which should you choose?

The right choice depends on your team's skills, your project's requirements, and what you already have in place. Here are the clearest signals for each platform.

Choose WooCommerce headless if:

Choose Medusa if:

Choose Saleor if:

The bottom line

The Medusa vs WooCommerce debate (and Saleor alongside it) ultimately comes down to what kind of team you are and what your store needs beyond products. All three are production-ready, open source, and actively maintained. None of them is a bad choice.

But for most stores, WooCommerce's combination of ecosystem breadth and WordPress content management makes it the most practical choice. 68,000+ plugins mean you rarely need to build custom integrations. WordPress means your marketing team can publish content without developer involvement. And going headless eliminates the traditional WooCommerce performance concerns by moving the frontend to a modern framework like Next.js.

If you are a Node.js team starting fresh with no WordPress history, Medusa is an excellent choice with a genuinely superior developer experience. And if you need enterprise-grade multi-warehouse, multi-currency capabilities from day one, Saleor delivers those out of the box.

For more on the open source commerce landscape, see our guides on open source ecommerce platforms, self-hosted ecommerce, why developers are leaving Shopify, and headless ecommerce platforms compared.