Shopify alternatives open source: the real cost — comparison table

Shopify alternatives open source: the real cost

by

This site participates in affiliate programs. If you sign up through a link on this page, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

By Jason Feng, Founder & Researcher. See how this review was researched.

Quick answer

The open-source label on an ecommerce platform tells you about the license, not the bill. WooCommerce charges $0 for the software and $25 to $350 a month for the hosting that runs it. Medusa Cloud starts at $29 a month and reports a 0.0% GMV platform fee on every plan. Saleor Cloud starts at $1,599 a month for a non-commercial sandbox and a production plan capped at $200,000 in monthly GMV.

The license is the cheapest part of every option below. The recurring cost is hosting, extensions and whoever maintains the code, and that last line is the one most comparisons leave blank.

Table of contents

Seven wooden blocks arranged in a straight row on a white desk

Why the license is the wrong number to compare

An open-source ecommerce platform gives you the code and no invoice for it. That is a real advantage, and it is also where the comparison usually stops.

The work the platform would do for you as a service does not disappear. It moves. Now you buy a server, you buy extensions that replace capabilities a hosted platform bundles, and you either learn to run the stack or hire someone who already does. The hosting costs for an ecommerce store are the first of those three, and they are the easiest to forecast.

The second and third are harder and matter more. A WooCommerce store with ten extensions is not a smaller version of a hosted platform. It is a server, a payment gateway, an email service, a security posture and a backup routine that you own end to end.

If you are still deciding whether to leave a hosted platform at all, our broader Shopify alternatives comparison covers the closed-source options that sit closer to plug and play.

The four options, by published price

Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, fetched on 2026-10-01 through a US exit IP.

Platform License Managed or cloud price Published GMV fee
WooCommerce Free, open source Hosting $25 to $350/mo for most stores; extensions $29 to $299/yr each None published; no revenue share
Medusa Open source framework Cloud Develop from $29/mo; Launch from $99/mo; Scale from $299/mo 0.0% on every plan
Saleor Open source engine Cloud Sandbox free; Select $1,599/mo; Volume $3,999/mo 0.8% above $200K monthly GMV on Select; 0.4% above $1M on Volume
Vendure Open source core Vendure Cloud and Platform quoted per project None; flat annual subscription, no order or user fees
Magento Open Source Free, open source [DATA NOT VERIFIED: the Adobe Commerce pricing URL returned no response from the US exit on 2026-10-01, so no Magento or Adobe Commerce cloud price is cited] [DATA NOT VERIFIED: same capture failure]

WooCommerce is the outlier in that table and the most familiar. Automattic publishes the software at $0, says "no platform fees, no revenue share," and puts the money in the hosting band and the extension catalog. Its comparison table on the same page lists a competitor fee arrangement of "1-3% of GMV" for a platform it does not name, which is a polite way of making the point.

Medusa and Saleor both sell managed infrastructure rather than a license. Medusa’s page states the framework is yours and the infrastructure is theirs, with "0.0%" GMV platform fees across Develop, Launch, Scale and Enterprise, and unlimited orders and products on every tier. Saleor splits the two: the engine is open source and the Cloud plans carry a GMV ceiling with an overage rate. Its $1,599 Select plan covers up to $200,000 in monthly GMV and charges 0.8% above that. The $3,999 Volume plan covers up to $1,000,000 monthly and charges 0.4% above.

Vendure takes the flat-subscription route. Its pricing page says the Platform uses "a flat annual subscription with no GMV, order, user, or separate capability fees," and that each project is quoted individually. That means the cost is real but not published, and I am not going to invent a number for it.

Hosting is the subscription you cannot skip

An open-source store runs on a server you pay for, and the server price is the closest thing to a fixed subscription.

Hosting route Published price What it handles
Shared WordPress host SiteGround StartUp $2.99/mo intro, renews at $17.99 The site up to a modest traffic level
Managed WordPress host Flywheel Starter $25/mo billed at $300/year Updates, backups, CDN, support
Entry cloud VPS DigitalOcean 1 GiB droplet $6/mo Everything, if you run it
Mid cloud VPS DigitalOcean 2 GiB droplet $12/mo A store with real cart traffic
Backup add-on DigitalOcean daily backups at 30% of droplet cost 7-day retention

A WooCommerce store on a $6 droplet and the same store on a $25 managed plan can be identical in software. The difference is whether you are the person who patches PHP on a Sunday. That is not a rhetorical question; it is a staffing decision with a dollar value attached.

Sales channels add a line most people miss. Shopify charges nothing for the first 50 synced marketplace orders per month and then 1% up to $99 a month. An open-source stack does not meter that, but you pay a connector or a developer to build the integration, and the store absorbs the maintenance.

Extensions, and how they add up

This is where a free platform quietly becomes an expensive one. WooCommerce publishes the range as $29 to $299 per year per extension, which sounds modest until you count.

Extension Published annual price What it replaces
WooCommerce Subscriptions $279 Recurring billing, which Shopify builds in
WooCommerce Bookings $249 Appointment and rental products
Product Add-Ons $79 Custom product options
Shipment Tracking $59 Tracking numbers for customers
USPS Shipping Method $109 Carrier rate integration
Table Rate Shipping $119 Weight and zone based rates

Four or five of those and the yearly extension bill crosses $500 before you have paid a developer. The same table on the WooCommerce site shows most of these as "Free download" or "Price $X annually," so the number is verifiable, and the total is arithmetic you can do yourself.

Medusa and Saleor move the extension model into code. Their clouds ship commerce features with the platform and charge for infrastructure, so the recurring cost looks smaller on the page. What replaces the extension bill is development time, and a headless storefront built on Next.js is not something a store owner assembles from a template.

A worked year on each stack

Assumptions stated so you can argue with them: one store, about $200,000 in annual sales, no paid developer, and extensions chosen to match what a hosted platform bundles. Hosting is annualized.

Cost line WooCommerce Medusa Cloud Saleor Cloud Managed hosted platform
Platform or license $0 $0 $0 Included
Cloud or hosting $300 to $4,200 $348 to $3,588 $19,188 to $47,988 Included
Extensions or app subscriptions $500 to $1,500 Included in cloud tiers Included in cloud tiers $0 to $600
Development and maintenance $0 if self-maintained Storefront build required Storefront build required $0
Rough annual total $800 to $5,700 $348 plus build $19,188 plus build Plan price plus apps

The middle columns are where the argument lands. Saleor’s cheapest production tier is $1,599 a month, which is $19,188 a year, and that is before anyone builds a storefront. WooCommerce can be cheaper by an order of magnitude on infrastructure and more expensive on time. Both statements are true at once, and which one wins depends on whose time it is.

A dropshipping store has a different cost shape again, because supplier apps carry their own subscriptions. Our dropshipping-specific alternatives guide covers those app tiers.

Where open source actually wins

Three situations favor open source, and none of them is "free."

First, you are selling something the hosted platforms price you out of. A large catalog, unusual product logic or a B2B pricing model can push a hosted plan up the tiers fast. Vendure’s page markets this directly, saying flexibility came with "a permanent integration bill" on some composable stacks, and pitches one subscription instead.

Second, you want to own the customer relationship and the checkout. WooCommerce says you can "use any gateway or BNPL provider without penalty," which is a real structural difference from a platform that charges a third-party transaction fee.

Third, you have in-house engineers who are already paid. At that point the marginal cost of running your own stack is low, and the openness of the code stops being a risk and starts being a feature.

The reverse is also true. Without an engineer, the cheapest plan on this page can become the most expensive one.

Our verdict

The right choice depends entirely on who maintains the code.

  • No developer on staff: WooCommerce on managed hosting at $25 to $35 a month, with extensions added only where a feature is genuinely missing. It is the only stack here a non-developer can plausibly run.
  • Developer on staff and a standard storefront: Medusa Cloud at $99 a month for Launch, with the 0.0% GMV fee keeping the ceiling predictable as sales grow.
  • High-volume B2B or a custom storefront: Vendure, because its flat annual subscription does not meter orders or users, even though the number is a quote rather than a published rate.
  • Very large catalogs with a platform team: Saleor Cloud, understanding that Volume at $3,999 a month is the realistic production tier rather than the free sandbox.
  • Just want out of subscription lock-in without owning infrastructure: stay closer to hosted and read the WooCommerce to Shopify migration path in reverse before committing, because moving between these worlds is where the hidden work sits.

How we researched this

  • Prices come from vendor pricing pages and feature pages fetched on 2026-10-01 through a US exit IP with an en-US locale.
  • Where a vendor quotes per project rather than publishing a rate, that is stated as a quote rather than converted into a number.
  • The worked year is arithmetic on published prices at a stated revenue level. It excludes payment processing, cost of goods and paid developer rates.
  • Magento and Adobe Commerce could not be fetched from the US exit on the research date, so those cells are marked rather than filled. The full method is on our how we research page.

Sources

All URLs fetched 2026-10-01 via a US exit IP with Accept-Language: en-US.

  1. WooCommerce pricing (https://woocommerce.com/pricing/): $0 platform fee, hosting band, extension band, WooPayments rate, competitor comparison table
  2. WooCommerce Subscriptions (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/): annual extension price
  3. WooCommerce Bookings (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-bookings/): annual extension price
  4. WooCommerce Shipping (https://woocommerce.com/products/shipping/): related extension prices
  5. Medusa pricing (https://www.medusajs.com/pricing): Develop, Launch and Scale prices, 0.0% GMV fee, unlimited orders and products
  6. Medusa documentation (https://docs.medusajs.com/): framework scope
  7. Saleor pricing (https://saleor.io/pricing): Sandbox, Select and Volume prices, GMV caps and overage rates
  8. Saleor open source (https://saleor.io/open-source): engine scope and self-hosting position
  9. Vendure pricing (https://vendure.io/pricing): flat annual subscription terms, no GMV or order fees
  10. Vendure site (https://vendure.io/): open-source core and self-hosted or cloud options
  11. Shopify pricing (https://www.shopify.com/pricing): synced marketplace order allowance and fee
  12. Kinsta pricing (https://kinsta.com/pricing/): managed hosting comparison point
  13. Flywheel pricing (https://getflywheel.com/pricing/): managed hosting entry price
  14. SiteGround web hosting (https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm): shared hosting intro and renewal prices
  15. DigitalOcean Droplets pricing (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets): VPS prices
  16. DigitalOcean backups (https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/backups): backup pricing

Directly comparable breakdowns on this site:

Leave a Comment