Open-source alternative
Replace Shopify with Medusa / Saleor / WooCommerce
The best open-source alternative to Shopify is Medusa (or Saleor) with WooCommerce, self-hosted on Railway. A store you host. Medusa is MIT headless commerce; Saleor is BSD-3 GraphQL commerce; WooCommerce is the GPL WordPress shop.
Estimated save $2,400 a year.
Open the stackStart on Railway
How Shopify compares
| Shopify | Medusa / Saleor / WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Plan subscription plus card rates | Open-source or fair-code license; you pay the host |
| Hosting | Vendor cloud | Self-hosted on Railway or any VPS |
| Rough monthly cost | Basic $29/mo billed yearly ($39 monthly) source | Hosting only — no SaaS seat meter in this repo |
- Medusa
MIT headless commerce (core; Enterprise Edition is separate)
- Saleor
BSD-3-Clause GraphQL commerce
- WooCommerce
GPL WordPress shop if you already have a CMS
FAQ
- Is it free?
- The Medusa / Saleor / WooCommerce licenses are open source or fair-code. You still pay hosting (Railway or any VPS) and any APIs the stack calls. There is no Shopify seat or task bill on this path.
- Can I migrate from Shopify?
- Yes. Start with the workflows or data you actually use, then cut over. The Medusa / Saleor / WooCommerce stack page has the agent prompt and the cost table; most teams rebuild the slice that matters and leave old Shopify links until they expire.
- How do I deploy it?
- Open the Medusa / Saleor / WooCommerce stack, copy the agent prompt, and deploy on Railway (one service, PORT, and a volume when the app needs disk). Placeholder: Medusa (Node + Postgres + Redis) plus a storefront, or WooCommerce + MySQL. No one-click template in this repo yet — Start on Railway. Order automation can sit on /stacks/n8n-automation.
- What does this replace?
- Shopify. The published small-team estimate on this stack is $2,400 a year.
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