head to head · open source
Medusa vs pay
Medusa has 36,356 GitHub stars, 5,260 forks, 194 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pay has 5,367 stars, 1,052 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Medusa leads on adoption by 577% (36,356 vs 5,367 stars). Medusa is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; pay is written in PHP under MIT. Medusa has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, pay 20%. Medusa was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Medusa | pay | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 36K | ★ 5.4K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Medusa if
- You weight community size — 36K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pay if
- You want the pay feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and pay fits your workflow better
About Medusa
Medusa is an open source e commerce framework built with Node.js and TypeScript that enables developers to construct custom commerce applications without rebuilding core commerce logic. It provides modular, pluggable backend services for products, orders, inventory, payments, and customer management, all exposed via REST and GraphQL APIs. Medusa lives in the JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem and targets developers who need full control over their storefronts and business logic while relying on battle tested, open source primitives.
read the full Medusa overview →
About pay
Yansongda Pay is an open source PHP payment SDK that provides a unified interface to multiple Chinese payment gateways, including Alipay, WeChat, Douyin, Unipay, Jiangsu Bank, Tonglian Pay, and BestPay. It lives in the PHP ecosystem and is distributed as a Composer package under the MIT license. The project has been maintained for nine years, carries 5,367 stars and 1,052 forks, and its most recent push was on 11 September 2026. Framework specific wrappers exist for Laravel, Hyperf, and Yii, while the core package remains framework agnostic.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Medusa or pay more popular?
Medusa has 36,356 GitHub stars and pay has 5,367. Medusa has the larger community by that measure.
Are Medusa and pay free?
Both are open source. Medusa has no licence declared in this registry, and pay is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Medusa and pay?
Medusa is written in TypeScript and pay in PHP. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Medusa or pay?
Choose Medusa if you want the larger community (36,356 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose pay if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.