Self-hostedHow to self-host your Shopify alternative
Replacing Shopify with a self-hosted alternative splits projects by where the storefront's frontend lives: already built into the platform, or assembled separately and connected over an API. The catalog's 7 alternatives fall exactly along that line.
Tools that meet this intent
Headless ecommerce in Node.js, an alternative to Shopify for developers.
TypeScript ecommerce framework, an alternative to Shopify for devs.
Ecommerce on Laravel, a free alternative to Shopify.
Established online store platform, a European alternative to Shopify.
Symfony ecommerce framework, a flexible alternative to Shopify.
Alternative to Shopify, Magento
Ecommerce with a visual editor and API-first design, an alternative to Shopify/Magento.
Ecommerce on WordPress, a free alternative to Shopify.
Real server requirements
Between 512MB and 2GB of RAM depending on the tool — never a single number.
Medusa and Vendure are headless commerce: both are, per their own projects, a commerce engine with an API — orders, inventory, pricing — with no visual storefront included; you build or connect the frontend yourself. Medusa is 100% FOSS (Node.js); Vendure is Open-Core (TypeScript/NestJS). The other five — Bagisto, PrestaShop, Sylius, Shopware, WooCommerce — are platforms with a storefront included: install, pick a theme, and you have a visible store without writing a separate frontend. All PHP, all MySQL, all Open-Core. WooCommerce has a quirk of its own within the group: it isn't a standalone platform, it's a plugin — it needs WordPress installed and running before it can be used at all.
Within the five with a storefront, Sylius and PrestaShop share a technical base (PHP/Symfony), but Sylius is built for more complex B2B/B2C business logic while PrestaShop has more years in the market, especially in Europe; Bagisto uses Laravel instead of Symfony; Shopware adds its own visual storefront editor.
What you gain and lose versus the SaaS
The choice comes down to team capacity: the headless model requires maintaining and deploying the frontend yourself, in exchange for full freedom over how the store looks and behaves; a platform with a storefront included cuts that operational overhead, at the cost of less room to go beyond what the theme allows. If your priority is a working store without writing frontend code, Bagisto, PrestaShop, Sylius, Shopware or WooCommerce fit better; if you have a dev team and want full control over that layer, Medusa or Vendure.