30 self-hosted Shopify alternatives

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 458 words

Do the arithmetic before the ideology. Shopify's Basic plan runs about $39 a month at last check, apps add their own subscriptions, and third-party payment gateways attract an extra platform surcharge. Self-hosting deletes the rent but not the card fees - Stripe or PayPal charge you the same roughly 2.9% + 30¢ either way - and it converts a monthly bill into hosting costs plus your own hours. For a store doing real volume the savings are genuine; for a five-order-a-month side project, $39 was the cheap part.

What you gain and what you give up

The gains are control-shaped: no platform lock-in, no revenue-based plan tiers, full access to code and database, and product data that lives in your Postgres or MySQL rather than someone's SaaS. The losses are operational and easy to underestimate. Shopify was quietly doing your PCI compliance scope reduction, DDoS absorption, checkout A/B testing, and Black Friday capacity planning. Self-hosted, an outage during your busiest hour is yours alone, and a checkout that loads slowly is now a performance-tuning project instead of a support ticket.

Which replacement fits which user

Most store owners: WooCommerce (10,474 stars) - it rides on WordPress, runs in 512 MB, and has the largest extension and theme ecosystem in self-hosted e-commerce, with the caveat that paid extensions can quietly rebuild a Shopify-sized bill. Non-WordPress people who still want turnkey: PrestaShop (since 2007, full back office, 512 MB) or OpenCart (difficulty Easy, 256 MB) give you a complete store admin without a build step. Developers building a custom storefront: Medusa (36,003 stars, MIT, TypeScript) is the modern headless pick - superb to extend, but "requires development effort for storefront" is doing heavy lifting; there is no store until you build one. Larger catalogs and teams with infrastructure: Saleor, GraphQL-first and scalable, at the price of a steep learning curve and 2 GB minimum.

The export reality

Shopify exports products and customers as CSV, and every platform above imports products tolerably. Customer passwords never export (they are hashed), so every shopper resets on first login. Order history is the trap: it exports, but clean import support varies, and many migrations end up keeping old orders in a read-only archive. Themes and Shopify apps transfer nothing. Preserve your URL structure or write 301 redirects, or your search traffic pays for the move.

What I'd do

WooCommerce for almost everyone: proven, documented, and escapable later. Medusa only if a developer is building the storefront anyway. And if the store is young and small, staying on Shopify until the fees actually hurt is a legitimate answer too.