head to head
Shopify vs Vendure
Vendure is the open source alternative to Shopify — e-commerce platform. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Vendure is a viable free replacement for Shopify. Vendure is open source under its own open-source terms, written in TypeScript, with 8,446 GitHub stars, 1,490 forks and 231 open issues; it was last pushed 6 hours ago. Shopify costs from $29, while self-hosting Vendure 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. Vendure ranks #4 of 4 tracked open source Shopify alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Medusa (36,356 stars), Saleor (23,339 stars), WooCommerce (10,514 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Vendure and 3 reasons to stay on Shopify.
choose Vendure 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
| Vendure (open source) | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $29-$299/month |
| License | Custom / other | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — vendure-ecommerce/vendure | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 8.4K · ⑂ 1.5K | — |
| Built with | TypeScript | — |
Why people look for a Shopify alternative
About Vendure
Vendure is an open source headless commerce platform built on a TypeScript stack that spans a Node.js and NestJS backend, a GraphQL API, and a React and TanStack admin dashboard. It lives in the TypeScript and Node.js ecosystem, and its topics place it among ecommerce frameworks, headless commerce platforms, and GraphQL commerce tools. The project is distributed as a monorepo containing the @vendure/core framework, the admin dashboard, the CLI, the official plugins, and an end to end testing harness. Vendure is licensed under GPLv3, with a plugin license exception that lets developers release their own Vendure pl…
read the full Vendure overview →
Other open source alternatives to Shopify
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Vendure a good replacement for Shopify?
Vendure is an open source alternative to Shopify (E-commerce platform). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under its own terms, with 8,446 GitHub stars.
Is Vendure free compared to Shopify?
Yes. Vendure 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 Vendure?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Vendure's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.