Saleor

What is Saleor?

Saleor is an open source, API-first e-commerce platform built on Python and Django that runs entirely behind a GraphQL API. Instead of shipping a fixed storefront, it gives you the commerce engine — products, channels, carts, orders, payments, and a management dashboard — and you build the customer-facing frontend you want against its API.

What is Saleor best for?

Engineering teams building custom, multi-channel commerce who want to own the whole stack rather than rent a templated SaaS store. It fits brands selling across web, mobile, marketplaces, and retail in several currencies and regions, with developers on hand to design the storefront and integrations themselves.

What can Saleor do?

• Expose all commerce data over one GraphQL API, with 160+ webhooks for extensions
• Sell across multiple channels, currencies, warehouses, and languages from a single backend
• Run promotions, vouchers, gift cards, and cart-level discount rules
• Orchestrate multiple payment gateways with split payments and multi-warehouse fulfillment
• Manage catalog, orders, and customers from a separate React dashboard with 45+ UI extension points
• Extend through webhooks, apps, and metadata instead of a monolithic plugin system
• Self-host with Docker, or run it managed on Saleor Cloud

Where does Saleor fall short?

• It’s GraphQL-only with no REST API, so teams with existing REST tooling face extra integration work.
• There’s no built-in storefront — every customer-facing page is custom development, which is heavy for small teams without frontend resources.
• The Python/Django stack and relatively sparse docs add a real learning curve, and recurring/subscription billing isn’t built in.

Is Saleor free?

Yes — Saleor is fully open source under the permissive BSD-3-Clause license and free to self-host; you only pay for the infrastructure it runs on. Saleor Cloud is a separate paid, managed offering aimed at enterprises, with pricing quoted on request rather than published tiers.

What does Saleor replace?

Saleor is a self-hosted alternative to Shopify and commercetools. It does the same job — running your catalog, cart, checkout, and orders — but you own the code and data, customize every workflow, and avoid GMV or transaction fees and enterprise per-order licensing. If you’d rather build on a Node.js/TypeScript stack, Medusa is a comparable open source commerce engine, and you can browse more open source e-commerce platforms on the roster.

FAQ

Is Saleor open source? Yes. Saleor is released under the BSD-3-Clause license — genuine OSI-approved open source — so you can self-host, modify, and use it commercially without a separate license.

Can I self-host Saleor for free? Yes. The self-hosted version is free; you run it with Docker and pay only for your own server. Plan for roughly 5 GB of memory plus a PostgreSQL database.

Is Saleor a good Shopify alternative? For teams that want full control and a custom storefront, yes — no transaction fees and no lock-in. If you want a ready-made store with themes and no engineering, hosted Shopify is simpler.

What do I need to run Saleor? A server with Docker, a PostgreSQL database, and developers to build the storefront against the GraphQL API. Redis and Celery handle caching and background tasks in a production setup.