Medusa vs Saleor

Medusa and Saleor are the two open-source headless commerce platforms we tested for people who want to build a custom storefront on an API rather than rent a Shopify theme. Both are listed on our site as Shopify alternatives, both give you an admin dashboard and an API, and neither is a ready-made shop: you build or adopt the customer-facing storefront yourself. The difference is the language and the weight. Medusa is TypeScript and Node.js with PostgreSQL, rated 3 out of 5. Saleor is Python and Django with a GraphQL API, Celery workers and PostgreSQL, rated 4 out of 5.

What you get

Medusa is a headless commerce platform and framework: products, carts, orders, payments, promotions and regions as modules behind a REST API, with a React Admin dashboard served from the same process. You extend it in code with modules, workflows and subscribers, and an optional Next.js starter exists for the storefront. The repository is MIT apart from its Enterprise Edition materials (role-based access control and SSO), which are proprietary.

Saleor is GraphQL-first: products and variants, multi-channel and multi-currency selling, checkout, orders, warehouses and promotions, run from a React admin Dashboard. It ships the API and Dashboard, not a storefront. The API and Dashboard are both BSD-3-Clause.

If your frontend team prefers GraphQL and you sell in several currencies or channels, Saleor's model is built around that. If your team is TypeScript throughout and wants to extend commerce logic in the same language, Medusa.

How the installs differed

Medusa did not use Docker in our test (the app is listed as not Docker-based). We installed Node.js, Git and PostgreSQL with apt, ran the official create-medusa-app installer pinned to a version, replaced the placeholder JWT_SECRET and COOKIE_SECRET the generated .env ships with, built it, and started it in production mode. The Admin is at /app on port 9000. Our install notes tell you to run it under systemd and add Redis before real traffic.

Saleor used the official saleor-platform Docker setup, which its README says is for local development, not production. We pinned the API and Dashboard images, generated a secret key, and added an override file that closes the published database, cache, Jaeger and Mailpit ports so only the API (8000) and the Dashboard (9000) are reachable. We ran migrations and created the superuser before bringing the stack up. Both installs passed verification on Ubuntu 26.04.

Footprint

Our minimum RAM figures are estimates: 2 GB for Medusa and 4 GB for Saleor. We measured Saleor at about 1,152 MB idle and 2.1 GB of disk on a GCP e2-standard-2 box. We did not record an idle figure for Medusa, so there is no like-for-like comparison to quote; do not read the lower estimate as a measurement.

Which to choose

Choose Medusa if your team writes TypeScript, you want to extend commerce behaviour with modules in the same codebase, and you are happy to run Node.js and Postgres directly on the server.

Choose Saleor if you want a GraphQL API, multi-channel and multi-currency selling out of the box and a permissive BSD licence, and you can afford the larger stack and the production hardening its Docker setup leaves to you.

Related

App pages are Medusa and Saleor. Both are covered under Shopify alternatives, and how we test explains what "tested" means for the install checks above. A different kind of backend to pair with a custom storefront is in Strapi vs Directus.