Medusa vs Vendure: Two TypeScript Commerce Frameworks Compared

Medusa and Vendure are the two serious open-source TypeScript commerce frameworks. If you have narrowed a search to these two, you have already made the important decisions — self-hosted, TypeScript, headless — and are choosing between two good answers.

The differences are real but narrower than either project's marketing suggests.

The comparison

Structure versus flexibility

Vendure is built on NestJS, so you inherit its conventions: decorators, dependency injection, modules, guards, interceptors. If your team knows NestJS, Vendure will feel immediately legible, and the structure pays off on a large team where consistency matters more than velocity.

Medusa is lighter. Convention-based file loading, a simpler container, less ceremony per feature. Faster for small teams; less guardrail-heavy for large ones.

Neither is right. It is the same trade as any opinionated framework against a less opinionated one, and the honest answer depends on team size.

Custom fields versus modules

The most practical difference.

Vendure lets you add custom fields directly to core entities:

// Vendure
export const config: VendureConfig = {
  customFields: {
    Product: [
      { name: "warrantyMonths", type: "int", defaultValue: 12 },
    ],
  },
}

Two lines, immediately available in the API and the admin UI. Excellent developer experience for simple additions.

Medusa wants a module with its own table, linked to Product. More setup for the same simple case, and it keeps core and custom schemas separate, which is what makes upgrades uneventful.

For adding three fields, Vendure is meaningfully nicer. For building a domain with its own lifecycle and rules, Medusa's isolation is the better long-term shape. Most projects have both, so weigh which dominates yours.

Workflows

Medusa's workflow engine — steps with compensation functions that roll back on failure — has no direct Vendure equivalent. Vendure gives you database transactions and an event bus, which cover in-database consistency well and do not help when step two charged a card at Stripe and step three failed.

If your commerce logic spans several external systems — payment, ERP, 3PL, marketplace payouts — Medusa's workflows are a genuine advantage. If your operations are mostly database-local, Vendure's transactions are simpler and sufficient.

Admin

Vendure's admin is Angular. Extending it means writing Angular, which for a React shop is a real cost — often the deciding factor for teams that expect to build significant admin UI.

Medusa's admin is React, extended with widgets and routes in the same language as the storefront. Admin customisation.

If you will never touch the admin UI, ignore this. If you are building operations tooling, it is one of the largest practical differences between the two.

GraphQL versus REST

Same trade as Medusa versus Saleor: Vendure's GraphQL is excellent for fetching exactly what a page needs; Medusa's REST is easier to cache at the HTTP layer and more familiar to debug.

Vendure's generated TypeScript types from the GraphQL schema are a real benefit and worth weighing if end-to-end type safety is a priority.

Ecosystem

Both are smaller than Shopify's, obviously. Vendure has been around longer and has a mature plugin catalogue; Medusa has grown quickly and has strong momentum in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Check the specific integration you need on both before choosing. A payment provider or ERP connector that exists on one and not the other is worth more than any architectural preference.

Choosing

Choose Vendure if: your team knows NestJS, you want more imposed structure, you prefer GraphQL, and your customisations are mostly fields on existing entities.

Choose Medusa if: you want a lighter framework, your logic spans external systems and needs compensation, you are building admin UI in React, or you prefer REST.

Either is fine if: you are building a fairly standard store. Both will do it well, and the cost of the wrong choice here is small compared with the cost of not choosing.

Community and support

Both projects have engaged communities and neither has Shopify's ecosystem. What differs is shape.

Vendure has a longer history, a mature plugin catalogue and commercial support from the core team. Its documentation is thorough and its NestJS foundation means much of what you need is answered in NestJS's own ecosystem.

Medusa has grown faster recently, has more momentum in the wider JavaScript ecosystem, and benefits from being close to the Next.js community many storefront developers already live in. That means more storefront examples and fewer backend plugins.

If your project depends on an existing integration, check both catalogues before choosing. A ready-made ERP or payment connector on one side is worth more than any architectural preference.

Prototyping to decide

Two days on each, building the same thing, answers this better than any comparison:

The fourth task is the one that surprises people. Teams who assumed they wanted GraphQL sometimes find they preferred debugging REST by URL, and teams who assumed REST find the generated types worth the change. Four days of a developer's time is cheap against a three-year commitment.

Licensing

Both are MIT at the core, and the details differ enough to check before committing.

Medusa is MIT throughout, with an optional commercial cloud product. There are no separately licensed components to audit.

Vendure is MIT for the core, with some enterprise plugins under commercial terms. Nothing wrong with that model — it funds the project — and it does mean checking whether the specific plugin you need is one of them before you build a plan around it.

For most projects this is a non-issue. For organisations with legal review of every dependency licence, the audit is shorter on the Medusa side, and that occasionally matters more than any technical difference.

We build on Medusa and have evaluated Vendure seriously. Happy to talk through a specific case.