What is the best headless commerce platform in 2026?

Shopify takes first place because it is the only engine here that ships the engine, a storefront framework and hosting for that storefront. Hydrogen is the framework. Oxygen, the hosting, comes at no extra charge on paid Shopify plans, with previews, caching, logs and rollbacks included across 300+ points of presence. That's one invoice you don't have to plan for.

Plus pricing is public: $2,500 a month on a one-year term, $2,300 a month on three years. Our math: $30,000 a year on the short term, $27,600 a year on the long one. Shopify adds that a variable platform fee may apply based on your revenue and business model, with different rules for B2B and D2C. The rate isn't listed, so get it in writing. Plus allows 25 headless storefronts; every other plan allows one. That matters if you want one storefront per country, a mobile app and a separate brand site.

Two limits shape the project. First, your apps don't come along. On Shopify's developer forum, a Shopify staff member confirms that apps stop working on a headless storefront unless they expose an API your team wires in. Reviews, loyalty, filters, subscriptions: list them before you start. Second, Oxygen has hard caps. Each worker is capped at 10 MB, must start within 400 ms, gets 30 seconds of CPU time per request and 128 MB of memory, and you can't put your own proxy in front of it. Oxygen isn't offered on Agentic plans.

Medusa is a commerce engine written in TypeScript and built for headless from day one. The repository is MIT-licensed, except for Enterprise Edition materials listed separately. You can download it, change it and host it without paying a license fee, and the pricing page states it plainly: you fully own and control your source code.

If you'd rather not run servers, Medusa Cloud does it for you. Develop starts at $29 a month, Launch at $99, Scale at $299, and Enterprise is a custom quote (99.99% SLA, SSO, bring-your-own-cloud, SOC 2). Plans are billed monthly in advance. The headline price doesn't cover a whole team, though. Develop and Launch include one developer seat, Scale includes three, and each extra seat is $30 a month. Admin users are unlimited. Our math for Launch with two extra developers: $99 + $60 = $159 a month before overages. Past 1,000 compute hours on Launch (2,800 on Scale), compute costs $0.16 an hour, and data transfer is $0.125 per GB.

On forums, Medusa has a reputation for being easy to deploy. In a GitHub discussion comparing open-source engines, one developer calls it one of the easiest deployments and extendable. Another finds its OpenAPI docs not very friendly. As with any self-hosted engine, security, upgrades and backups stay on you.

commercetools is the name almost every list reaches for once composable architecture comes up (separate services, each picked for its job, wired together by API). It has no storefront: it gives you the engine, and your team or agency builds everything else.

No price is published; the pricing page sends you to sales. What the vendor does state is its model. It bills per order, not on GMV, and says that approach means no hidden fees or penalties as you scale. For a brand with a high average order value, that's a real edge: a $500 order costs the same as a $50 one. You can also buy it through Google Cloud or AWS Marketplace, which helps if your company already has committed spend with either. A 60-day free trial lets you prototype before you sign.

The limit is everything around it. User reviews praise the API documentation but report that some promotions and discounts are hard to configure. The merchant admin isn't built for a small, self-sufficient marketing team, so plan developer time for each new business need.

Vendure is an open-source engine in TypeScript, built on NestJS, with a native GraphQL API. That's the reason one developer in a GitHub discussion gives for moving from Saleor to Vendure. Its plugin architecture lets you add features without touching the core.

The license needs a careful read. The framework is GPLv3 with a plugin exception. Paid plans include a commercial license as an alternative to GPLv3, which helps if your legal team won't sign off on the GPL. Vendure prices in euros, excluding VAT, on a 12-month term billed monthly: Starter €199 a month, Growth €599, Scale €2,499, and Enterprise from €60,000 a year. Our math for Starter: €2,388 a year. Each paid plan has a 30-day trial.

Two limits. Vendure Cloud, the managed hosting, is still in closed beta, with general availability planned for 2027, so hosting is on you for now. And starter storefronts are thinner than Shopify's or BigCommerce's, according to the same developer who switched to it. Your frontend team starts further back.

BigCommerce plays the headless card with Catalyst, its Next.js storefront. Catalyst ships under the MIT license, so your team starts from a working codebase, changes what it needs and hosts it wherever it likes. The engine stays with BigCommerce, which handles servers, security and upgrades.

Pricing is public. Core costs $39 a month, or $29 billed annually. Growth is $105 ($79 annually), Scale $399 ($299). Above that, Performance starts at $1,499 a month, billed annually. Each plan has a trailing twelve-month GMV cap: past $30K, Core auto-upgrades to Growth; past $100K, Growth auto-upgrades to Scale. Scale covers $33,333 of GMV a month, then charges a 0.9% overage. BigCommerce counts GMV as order value minus 10%. Orders paid through its embedded payment providers carry no platform fee; with any other provider, add 2% on Core, 1% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. Card rates start at 2.89% + $0.29.

So the real cost is the Scale overage, not the jump. At $2M in TTM GMV, about $2.22M in sales, the account moves to Performance on its own. Our math: at that point Scale already costs $14,400 in overage plus $3,588 in subscription, or $17,988 a year, exactly Performance's entry price ($1,499 × 12). So the upgrade itself adds nothing: what you really pay is the 0.9% piling up before it. At $2M in sales you stay on Scale: $1.8M of GMV, $12,600 in overage plus $3,588 in subscription, $16,188 a year. And the cap is monthly ($33,333 of GMV a month): $400,000 a year only holds if your sales are even, so a peak month pays overage. Budget it from $400,000 of GMV, about $444,000 in sales. Also, hosting Catalyst is on you, unlike Shopify, which bundles Oxygen.

Swell is a hosted, API-first commerce engine. Like BigCommerce, it runs the servers; unlike commercetools, it publishes its tiers up to $5M in revenue. That transparency is its main edge in this ranking: you can model your costs without a sales call. It also makes Swell the direct comparable to BigCommerce, which also caps each plan by GMV too: run both grids on your own sales curve.

Prices below are billed annually. Starter is $29 a month up to $50K in revenue, Basic $79 up to $250K, Standard $299 up to $1M, Unlimited $2,250 up to $5M, and plans are custom above $10M. Each tier has a revenue ceiling. Swell's rule: a percentage fee on sales applies when you reach the ceiling within 12 months. That fee is 2% on Starter, 1.5% on Basic, 1% on Standard and 0.4% on Unlimited.

That's also the limit. Swell takes a cut of sales once you pass your tier, so a fast-growing brand needs to move up a plan before the ceiling, not after. It isn't open source, so there's no self-hosting fallback if you outgrow it.

Saleor is an open-source engine written in Python with a GraphQL API. Its repository uses the BSD 3-Clause license, one of the most permissive: you can use, modify and resell it without publishing your code. For a team already comfortable with Python and Django, it's the most natural engine in this ranking.

Saleor Cloud, the managed option, is expensive and scales with your sales. Select costs $1,599 a month up to $200,000 in monthly GMV, then 0.8% beyond. Volume costs $3,999 a month up to $1M a month, then 0.6%. Enterprise is negotiated, with no published rate. Our math: at $300,000 a month on Select, you pay $1,599 + $800 = $2,399. An Accelerator onboarding package is a one-time $6,000, 100% credited back over the first year at $500 a month. Free Sandboxes exist; read their terms on commercial use carefully.

Self-hosted Saleor takes more work than Medusa. In a GitHub discussion, one developer calls it too complicated, with too many moving parts for entry-level stores (a Saleor team member pushes back in the same thread).

Elastic Path is a composable commerce engine in the same family as commercetools. Its difference is a published entry price, which is rare at this level. Entry costs $49,500 a year, all-in, with a choice of model: up to 15,000 orders a year, or up to $5M of GMV a year.

Our math on the order model: $49,500 divided by 15,000 orders is $3.30 per order at the cap. On the GMV model, $49,500 on $5M is just under 1% of sales. Pick the model that fits your average order: high basket, take orders; many small orders, take GMV. Above Entry, Professional is "talk to us" and Enterprise has a volume-based rate. A subscriptions add-on is priced at 0.5% per transaction.

The limit is the floor. At $49,500 a year before any frontend work, Elastic Path is out of reach for a small store, and like commercetools it ships no storefront: your team builds it all.