Magento Open Source vs Saleor: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Shopify Plus. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Magento Open Source | Saleor | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | E-commerce | E-commerce |
| License | OSL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| GitHub stars | 10k | 21k |
| Tech stack | PHP, MySQL, Elasticsearch | Python, Django, GraphQL, PostgreSQL |
| Replaces | Shopify Plus, BigCommerce | Shopify Plus |
Saleor has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
Magento Open Source
Highly customizable enterprise ecommerce, an alternative to Shopify Plus.
Pros
- The most powerful option for very large B2B/B2C catalogs
Things to consider
- Considerably higher server requirements
Saleor
GraphQL headless ecommerce at scale, an alternative to Shopify Plus.
Pros
- Designed from the ground up for very high-traffic stores
Things to consider
- Steeper learning curve than all-in-one platforms
Key features
Magento Open Source
- Massive catalogs with complex attributes
- Native multi-store and multi-language
- Very wide extension ecosystem
Saleor
- Complete GraphQL API
- Fully customizable checkout
- Event-driven architecture (webhooks)