It is open source, written in JavaScript/TypeScript, and fits naturally into the kind of stack we already use. If the documentation is not enough, you can actually open the source code and understand what Medusa is doing instead of treating the platform as a black box.

We use it as part of a larger architecture with Next.js and PayloadCMS, so being able to extend the backend, add our own routes and logic, use webhooks, and generally integrate Medusa into our application was much more important to us than having an all-in-one platform.

The documentation is also quite extensive, and overall Medusa is pleasant to work with as a developer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Medusa?

When we started the project, some fairly standard e-commerce use cases were either missing, incomplete, or still a bit rough.

One example was tax-inclusive pricing, which is extremely common in Europe but was not handled as naturally as the US tax model at the time. We also ran into bugs in the core coupon logic.

Draft Orders were another example. At the time they were available through a premium plugin, but in practice the feature felt maybe 80% finished. We still had edge cases to work around ourselves.

Medusa was moving quickly, which was generally a good thing, but it also meant that sometimes you had to be ready to dig into the source code instead of assuming every e-commerce feature was already mature. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Medusa:

I would recommend Medusa mainly to teams that actually want to own their e-commerce stack.

If what you want is something like Shopify where most things are configured rather than developed, Medusa will require more engineering work.

On the other hand, if you already have developers, custom business requirements, and you want to avoid vendor lock-in, expensive plugins and platform limitations, it is a very good foundation.

I would also recommend checking the maturity of the specific features you need before starting. The core is very flexible, but depending on the feature, you may still need to implement part of the behavior yourself.

We also used Medusa's paid support. As a developer I was not involved in the pricing side, but technically we generally got the answers we needed. There was a period where response times became very long because there seemed to be some confusion around the level of support included in our contract. Once that was clarified, things improved. Overall, the team was available, listened to our feedback, and was open to discussing issues we found in the product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Medusa solving and how is that benefiting you?

Medusa gave us a way to move away from Shopify without giving up the foundations of an e-commerce platform.

Our project had quite a lot of custom business logic, and we were reaching the point where working around Shopify, adding more plugins and dealing with its limitations made less sense than owning the backend ourselves.

With Medusa, we keep the usual e-commerce concepts such as products, variants, pricing, carts, orders and promotions, but we can build our own logic around them. For us, the main benefit is simply being able to treat the commerce backend like the rest of our application instead of adapting the application to the limitations of the platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.