head to head
Shopify vs Saleor
Saleor is the open source alternative to Shopify — e-commerce platform. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Saleor is a viable free replacement for Shopify. Saleor is open source under BSD-3-Clause, written in Python, with 23,339 GitHub stars, 6,122 forks and 263 open issues; it was last pushed 8 hours ago. Shopify costs from $29, while self-hosting Saleor carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 3 other open source Shopify alternatives are tracked here, led by Medusa at 36,356 stars. Saleor ranks #2 of 4 tracked open source Shopify alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Medusa (36,356 stars), WooCommerce (10,514 stars), Vendure (8,446 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Saleor and 3 reasons to stay on Shopify.
choose Saleor if
- Your Shopify bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Shopify if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Shopify integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Saleor (open source) | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $29-$299/month |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — saleor/saleor | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 23K · ⑂ 6.1K | — |
| Built with | Python | — |
Why people look for a Shopify alternative
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 →
Other open source alternatives to Shopify
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Saleor a good replacement for Shopify?
Saleor is an open source alternative to Shopify (E-commerce platform). It is written in Python and licensed under BSD-3-Clause, with 23,339 GitHub stars.
Is Saleor free compared to Shopify?
Yes. Saleor is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Shopify is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Shopify to Saleor?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Saleor's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.