Medusa

Medusa is an open-source commerce platform built for developers who need more than Shopify’s walled garden but don’t want to wrestle with Magento’s complexity. It ships as a Node.js backend with a modular architecture: swap out the payment module, drop in your own fulfillment logic, or extend the product model without forking the core.

The platform covers the full commerce stack. Product management, inventory, pricing rules, promotions, multi-region support, and order workflows are all built in. A default admin dashboard handles day-to-day operations, and a storefront starter (Next.js-based) gets a working frontend running quickly.

What makes Medusa different from other headless commerce options is that it is genuinely headless. Your frontend can be anything: a web app, a mobile app, a POS terminal, a wholesale portal. Region-specific tax rules, multi-currency pricing, and warehouse-level inventory sync are handled server-side, so the client stays thin.

Pricing starts at $29/month on their cloud hosting. Self-hosting on your own infrastructure has no license fees and requires Node.js with a PostgreSQL database, accessible to any developer comfortable with those tools.

The GitHub repository has over 28,000 stars and documentation is thorough. The trade-off is that customizing Medusa properly requires developer time; it is not a no-code option.