head to head · open source
reaction vs pay
reaction has 12,399 GitHub stars, 2,176 forks, 96 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. pay has 5,367 stars, 1,052 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. reaction leads on adoption by 131% (12,399 vs 5,367 stars). reaction is written in JavaScript under GPL-3.0; pay is written in PHP under MIT. reaction has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, pay 20%. pay 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
| reaction | pay | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 5.4K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-03-01 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick reaction if
- You weight community size — 12K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- 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 reaction
Mailchimp Open Commerce, formerly Reaction Commerce, is an API first, headless commerce platform built on Node.js, MongoDB, and GraphQL for development teams that want to run a custom storefront, marketplace, or multi shop operation on their own infrastructure — and the project has been discontinued.
read the full reaction 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 reaction or pay more popular?
reaction has 12,399 GitHub stars and pay has 5,367. reaction has the larger community by that measure.
Are reaction and pay free?
Both are open source. reaction is licensed under GPL-3.0 and pay under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between reaction and pay?
reaction is written in JavaScript 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, reaction or pay?
Choose reaction if you want the larger community (12,399 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pay if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.