Medusa vs Saleor: the licence says the opposite of what you expect

Choose Medusa if your team works in TypeScript and you want a platform bill that stays predictable and unlinked to revenue. Choose Saleor if your team is a Python team, or if you need roles, permissions and company sign-on without a separate licence agreement.

This is a comparison of two platforms from the same shelf. Both are headless, both give you an API instead of a theme, both ship an admin and both can run on your own servers, so the difference between them is not a difference of class but of choices. Putting Medusa next to Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce compares different kinds of thing, and those settle quickly. Here the gap is narrower, which makes it harder, because almost every argument has a counterweight on the other side. Every figure below was checked at source on 30 September 2026: in the licence files on GitHub and on both vendors’ pricing pages.

We start with the thing almost every comparison gets backwards.

The licence: the popular shorthand is inverted

The received version goes like this: Medusa is MIT, therefore free and open, while Saleor is the commercial one. We read both licence files, and that version does not hold.

Saleor: BSD 3-Clause, no carve-out

The LICENSE file in the Saleor repository is BSD 3-Clause, a permissive licence that places no restriction on commercial or production use. The same licence covers the separate dashboard repository. The README states it plainly: everything is open and free to use as long as you comply with the licence, and there are no hidden charges.

On Saleor’s pricing page the "Non-Commercial Use Only" heading sits over the free Sandbox cloud plan, not over the code you host yourself. That distinction is easy to miss and worth getting right: the restriction applies to a free sandbox on the vendor’s cloud, not to the licence on the source.

Medusa: MIT with an exception carved out

Medusa’s licence file opens with a sentence the shorthand leaves out: the repository is MIT except for the Enterprise Edition materials identified in a separate file. GitHub cannot classify the result and shows Medusa’s licence as unrecognised, while it labels Saleor plainly as BSD-3-Clause.

The ENTERPRISE-LICENSE.md file leaves no room for interpretation. The Enterprise materials are proprietary software, usable only under a separate, valid commercial agreement with MedusaJS, Inc. Holding the source code grants no licence by itself, and enabling an Enterprise feature flag counts as a representation that you hold such an agreement.

So Medusa’s licence bill is not zero. It is conditionally zero.

To be straight about where we stand: we build on Medusa, so this comparison goes against us. We describe it the way the files describe it anyway, because the client will find it regardless, only later and at a worse moment, usually mid-quote, when the scope is already agreed and the budget already closed.

LICENSE and ENTERPRISE-LICENSE.md of both projects, checked 30 September 2026.

Cloud pricing: an order of magnitude apart

The licence is one side of the bill. The other is the vendor cloud, if you would rather not run servers yourself. Here the proportions flip sharply in Medusa’s favour.

Public pricing at medusajs.com/pricing and saleor.io/pricing, checked 30 September 2026.

The first commercial production plan costs $99 on Medusa and $1,599 on Saleor. That is sixteen times the entry price before you count anything else. On top of it Saleor takes a percentage of revenue above the plan cap, while Medusa states zero percent and caps neither orders, products nor sales channels.

Here the proportions swing back to Medusa.

The third route is the same on both sides: your own servers. The vendor cloud then leaves the bill entirely and what remains is the cost of running it, which we break down in our piece on the true cost of owning your platform.

Stack choice: the question that settles it fastest

Before comparing features, check what your team writes in. That single question eliminates more candidates than the rest of this article.

GitHub API, read 30 September 2026. Stars measure popularity, not quality.

If your storefront runs on Next.js and your team writes TypeScript, Medusa means one language from the database to the browser. If you already run a data team or a Python backend, Saleor fits the skills you have rather than the ones you would have to hire.

Saleor grew out of a Polish company. It shows in the licence header, where Mirumee Software sits beside Saleor Commerce with the years 2010 to 2020. For a European team that is sometimes an argument in itself: the documentation and the community grew up close to the market you sell in.

When this comparison does not matter at all

The most common mistake in choosing a platform is starting from the platform. If you do not yet know what the store has to do, either choice will miss, and you will find out six months later.

• Your scope is not costed. Then the criteria for choosing a platform come first and the platform second.
• Your advantage sits in an integration, not in the store. If the decision rests on the link to a warehouse or accounting system, read about integrating a B2B store with an ERP instead. Both platforms will carry it; the difference comes from the data quality on the other side.
• You sell mostly on marketplaces. Then your own store platform is secondary and how you run Amazon and Allegro accounts is primary. That is the work of our sister brand, Amazonway.
• You have a working store and one thing that hurts. Changing platforms is the most expensive available answer to that. When it is justified, we set out in our piece on the signs you have outgrown your SaaS platform.

How we choose, and why

We build eCommerce platforms on Medusa inside the BEAM framework: Blueprint settles what to build and whether to build it at all, Engineering delivers it. We picked Medusa for one language across the whole stack and for a bill that stays predictable instead of growing with the client’s revenue.

We pay for that choice with exactly the line described above: roles and permissions are Enterprise material on Medusa. On B2B projects where company accounts with order approval are a requirement, we say so during the Blueprint rather than after the contract is signed. What that looks like in practice is visible in our DrillStom wholesale case study.

An honest caveat: if a client arrived with a Python team and a requirement for roles without a separate licence agreement, Saleor would be the better choice and we would be the wrong builder. We would rather say that at the start.

Our other platform comparisons sit together in the comparison hub, and our pricing model is published openly on our pricing page.