Open Source Ecommerce in 2026: WooCommerce, Medusa, and Saleor Compared

The open source ecommerce landscape has matured significantly since the early days of Magento and osCommerce. In 2026, three platforms dominate the conversation: WooCommerce with its 40%+ market share, Medusa as the Node.js challenger, and Saleor as the GraphQL-first enterprise option. Each takes a fundamentally different approach to solving the same problem — giving merchants full control over their store without paying licence fees or surrendering their data to a SaaS vendor.

But "open source" alone is not a buying criteria. What matters is the ecosystem around the platform, the developer experience, the hosting complexity, and how well the architecture fits your team's skills. Here is an honest comparison of all three, including where each one genuinely excels and where it falls short.

Why open source matters for ecommerce

Open source ecommerce platforms give you freedoms that no SaaS vendor can match. You own your code, your data, and your deployment pipeline. There are no transaction fees skimmed off every sale, no arbitrary platform rules that change overnight, and no vendor lock-in that makes migration a six-figure project.

The practical benefits are significant. You can customise every aspect of the checkout flow, build integrations that SaaS platforms would charge you extra for, and host your store wherever gives you the best performance and cost. When a SaaS platform raises prices or removes a feature, you have no recourse. With open source, you fork and move on.

Community-driven development also means faster innovation. Bugs get reported and fixed publicly. Security vulnerabilities are identified by thousands of developers, not just one company's internal team. And the extension ecosystems grow organically based on what merchants actually need, not what a product manager decides to prioritise.

WooCommerce: the WordPress giant

WooCommerce is built on WordPress, the content management system that powers over 40% of all websites. Its PHP backend handles product management, orders, payments, shipping, and tax — with over 68,000 plugins available to extend functionality in virtually any direction. If you need a feature, someone has almost certainly built a plugin for it.

The traditional criticism of WooCommerce has always been frontend performance. PHP-rendered pages, heavy themes, and plugin bloat can make a WooCommerce store feel sluggish compared to modern JavaScript storefronts. That criticism was valid in 2020. In 2026, it misses the point entirely.

Headless WooCommerce eliminates the frontend weakness completely. You keep WordPress as your backend — managing products, processing orders, handling payments through its mature plugin ecosystem — but replace the PHP frontend with a Next.js application that serves static and server-rendered pages at the edge. The result is sub-second page loads with the full power of WooCommerce behind the scenes.

WooCommerce exposes both a REST API and, through WPGraphQL, a GraphQL API for headless integration. This means your Next.js frontend can query products, manage carts, and process checkouts through clean, well-documented API endpoints.

Medusa: the Node.js challenger

Medusa is built from the ground up in TypeScript and Node.js. It was designed for headless commerce from day one, with no legacy monolithic frontend to shed. For JavaScript and TypeScript developers, the developer experience is genuinely excellent — you are working in the same language across your entire stack.

Medusa's modular architecture is its strongest selling point. You can swap out the payment provider, fulfilment engine, notification system, and more through a clean plugin interface. Need to replace Stripe with Adyen? Swap the module. Need a custom fulfilment flow? Write your own module without touching the core.

The trade-off is ecosystem maturity. Medusa's plugin marketplace is growing but still tiny compared to WooCommerce's 68,000+ extensions. You will likely need to build integrations that would be off-the-shelf with WooCommerce. For teams who enjoy building, that is a feature. For teams who need to ship quickly, it is a constraint.

Saleor: the GraphQL enterprise option

Saleor takes a different approach entirely. Its backend is built with Python and Django, exposing a comprehensive GraphQL API as the primary interface. For teams already comfortable with GraphQL, this means strongly-typed queries, efficient data fetching, and excellent tooling through the GraphQL ecosystem.

Enterprise features are where Saleor differentiates itself. Multi-warehouse inventory management, multi-currency support, and granular permissions come built in rather than bolted on. The included React-based admin dashboard is polished and functional, giving non-technical team members a clean interface for managing the store.

The learning curve is the steepest of the three platforms. You need Python/Django knowledge for backend customisation, GraphQL expertise for frontend integration, and Docker/Kubernetes knowledge for deployment. Saleor is not a weekend project. It is built for teams with dedicated backend and frontend developers who can invest in the architecture properly.

WooCommerce strengths and weaknesses

Medusa strengths and weaknesses

Saleor strengths and weaknesses

Head-to-head comparison

Comparing these platforms directly reveals clear patterns. Each one leads in different areas, and the "best" choice depends entirely on your team's skills and priorities.

Developer experience: Medusa > Saleor > WooCommerce for modern JavaScript developers. Medusa's TypeScript-first approach and clean module system make it the most pleasant to work with if you live in the Node.js ecosystem. Saleor's GraphQL API is elegant but requires Python knowledge for backend work. WooCommerce's PHP backend feels less modern, though the REST API and WPGraphQL bridge the gap for frontend developers.

Ecosystem size: WooCommerce >> Saleor > Medusa. This is not even close. WooCommerce's 68,000+ plugins dwarf everything else in the open source ecommerce space. Need a specific payment gateway, shipping calculator, tax engine, or marketing integration? WooCommerce almost certainly has it. With Medusa and Saleor, you will build many integrations yourself.

Content management: WooCommerce >> everything else. WordPress gives you a battle-tested CMS with 20 years of refinement. Blog posts, landing pages, SEO metadata, media management — it is all built in. Medusa and Saleor have no content management at all. You need to integrate a separate headless CMS (Strapi, Sanity, Contentful) which adds complexity and cost.

Hosting complexity: WooCommerce is the simplest. Any shared hosting provider can run WordPress and WooCommerce. Managed WordPress hosts like Cloudways, RunCloud, or GridPane make it even easier. Medusa requires a Node.js hosting environment. Saleor is the most complex, typically requiring Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Celery — which usually means Kubernetes in production.

The headless WooCommerce advantage

The most compelling argument for WooCommerce in 2026 is not the traditional WordPress theme experience. It is headless WooCommerce: keeping the WordPress backend for product management, order processing, and content, while deploying a modern Next.js frontend for the storefront.

This architecture gives you the best of both worlds. Your backend team manages products, inventory, and orders through WordPress's familiar admin interface. Your frontend team builds a blazing-fast React storefront with server-side rendering, static generation, and edge caching. Content editors publish blog posts and landing pages through WordPress, and they appear instantly on the Next.js frontend.

If you are already running a WooCommerce store, going headless is an upgrade path, not a replatforming project. You keep your products, customers, orders, and integrations intact. You simply replace the frontend layer. Compare that to migrating to Medusa or Saleor, which means rebuilding your entire backend from scratch. Read more about migrating WooCommerce to headless and connecting WooCommerce's REST API to Next.js.

Which should you choose?

Choose WooCommerce if you want the largest ecosystem, built-in WordPress content management, or you are migrating from a traditional WordPress site. WooCommerce is the pragmatic choice for teams who value a mature ecosystem over cutting-edge developer tooling. It works especially well when paired with a headless Next.js frontend that eliminates its traditional performance weaknesses.

Choose Medusa if you are a Node.js team building a new store from scratch with no WordPress dependency. Medusa's TypeScript-first architecture and modular design make it a joy to work with for JavaScript developers. Just be prepared to build more integrations yourself and accept a smaller support community.

Choose Saleor if you need enterprise features like multi-warehouse inventory and multi-currency support, and your team has strong Python and GraphQL expertise. Saleor is the most powerful of the three but also the most complex to deploy and maintain. It is best suited for larger teams with dedicated DevOps resources.

The bottom line

Open source ecommerce in 2026 offers three genuinely production-ready options, each optimised for a different type of team. WooCommerce wins on ecosystem breadth and content management. Medusa wins on developer experience for JavaScript teams. Saleor wins on enterprise features and GraphQL architecture.

For the majority of stores, WooCommerce remains the most practical choice — not because it is the most modern, but because the WordPress ecosystem solves more real-world problems than any alternative. When you pair it with a headless frontend, you eliminate the one area where WooCommerce traditionally lagged behind.

Whichever platform you choose, the open source model ensures you own your code, your data, and your future. No vendor can raise your prices, remove features, or hold your store hostage. That freedom is worth more than any individual feature comparison. For deeper dives into related topics, read our guides on self-hosted ecommerce, headless ecommerce platforms compared, why developers are leaving Shopify, and headless WooCommerce vs Medusa and Saleor.