Saleor

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 761 words

Saleor does not give you a shop. It gives you a commerce API, an admin dashboard for it, and the expectation that you will build or deploy the storefront your customers see. Miss that and the first weekend goes badly; understand it and Saleor is the most complete open-source commerce engine you can run, BSD-3-Clause with 23,265 stars and 10 years of production history behind it. The Hard rating is deserved, and this guide is mostly about what "hard" contains.

Headless means 3 services before a single product is sold

The stack has 3 codebases. Saleor Core is the Python and Django application that exposes a GraphQL API at /graphql/: products, variants, channels, checkout, orders, payments, webhooks, everything. The Dashboard is a separate React app for staff. The storefront is whatever you point at the API: Saleor's own Next.js example, a mobile app, or a custom site your developers write. Nothing about the customer experience is decided for you, which is the whole point of headless and the whole cost. A team that wants to install, pick a theme, and add products on Tuesday is in the wrong category; that team wants WooCommerce or Bagisto. Saleor is for a team with front-end developers who want a strong API underneath.

The infrastructure bill

Core needs PostgreSQL. It also needs Redis, and a Celery worker for the asynchronous jobs: sending email, firing webhooks, running payment tasks. A minimal real deployment is therefore 5 containers (API, worker, dashboard, Postgres, Redis) and the 2 GB of RAM in the listing is a true floor, not a comfortable number. Budget 4 GB for a live store with a few thousand SKUs. The saleor-platform repository from the project gives you a compose file wiring all of it together, with a populatedb command that seeds demo products and an admin account; treat that as the evaluation environment and read every line before promoting it, because it is built for trying things rather than for surviving a reboot at 03:00. Object storage for product images (S3 or MinIO) is the other component you will want before launch, since local media on a container is a backup accident in progress.

What is open and what the company sells

Every feature of the platform is in the open-source release; the company's business is Saleor Cloud, which hosts the same code with the operations taken off your hands. That model is healthier than the "community edition minus the features you need" pattern common in commerce software, and it means the self-hosted path is not second-class. Extensions follow an apps model: an external service registers with Saleor, receives webhooks, and calls back through the API. Payment gateways, tax providers and search integrations all work this way, which keeps Core clean but means each integration is a small deployment of its own. Multichannel support (one catalogue, several storefronts, currencies and warehouses) is the feature that distinguishes it from smaller engines and the reason larger catalogues end up here.

Medusa, Vendure, WooCommerce: who wins which brief

Medusa is the closest rival: also headless, JavaScript rather than Python, with a module system that many front-end teams find quicker to extend, and a lighter footprint to start. Pick Medusa when the team lives in TypeScript; pick Saleor when they live in Python or when multichannel and B2B features are on the requirements list from day one. Vendure is the TypeScript-and-GraphQL option with a strong plugin ecosystem, sitting between the two on both weight and maturity. WooCommerce remains the honest answer for any shop that does not have developers on staff, and if the driver is leaving Shopify over fees rather than over API limits, WooCommerce or Bagisto will get you there in a fraction of the effort.

What I'd do

Only run Saleor if you have at least 1 developer who will own the storefront and 1 who will own the deployment, and they might be the same person for a small store. Start from saleor-platform on a 4 GB VPS to learn the API, then rebuild the deployment deliberately: managed or well-backed-up Postgres, Redis, a worker with restart policies, S3-compatible media, TLS in front of both API and dashboard. Ship the Next.js storefront example first and customise it, rather than building from a blank page. If that plan reads as more than your team can carry, it is, and Medusa or WooCommerce will make you happier.