head to head · open source
Saleor vs mall4j
Saleor has 23,339 GitHub stars, 6,122 forks, 263 open issues and last shipped yesterday. mall4j has 5,255 stars, 1,360 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Saleor leads on adoption by 344% (23,339 vs 5,255 stars). Saleor is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; mall4j is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0. Saleor has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, mall4j 26%. Saleor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ecommerce), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| Saleor | mall4j | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.1K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Saleor if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick mall4j if
- You want the mall4j feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and mall4j fits your workflow better
About Saleor
Saleor is an open source e commerce platform written in Python and released under the BSD 3 Clause license. It positions itself as an open alternative to Shopify and describes itself as a high performance, composable, headless commerce API. The project lives in the e commerce ecosystem, where teams separate the backend order and catalog logic from the storefront, CMS, and dashboards.
read the full Saleor overview →
About mall4j
Mall4j is a Java mall system source code product family whose main open source repository provides a Spring Boot 4 and Vue3 B2C single merchant e commerce storefront and admin backend, written for developers and teams who want to study, evaluate, or build on a Java mall codebase.
read the full mall4j overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Saleor or mall4j more popular?
Saleor has 23,339 GitHub stars and mall4j has 5,255. Saleor has the larger community by that measure.
Are Saleor and mall4j free?
Both are open source. Saleor is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and mall4j under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Saleor and mall4j?
Saleor is written in Python and mall4j in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Saleor or mall4j?
Choose Saleor if you want the larger community (23,339 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose mall4j if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.