I'm the maintainer of Vendure, so I might be able to offer a bit of insight on your second question, after having studied the Medusa repo a little. Medusa devs, please correct me if any of this is wrong!
* The Vendure project is a bit older and I think a bit further ahead in terms of awareness and adoption.
* Medusa lists a team of 10 on their notion board, plus a bunch of investors. Vendure is just me (plus OSS contributors) and is bootstrapped.
* Medusa exposes a REST-style API, whereas Vendure uses GraphQL.
* Medusa seems to be mostly JS built directly on Express, whereas Vendure is TypeScript built on NestJS.
* We're both using TypeORM for the data layer.
* As mentioned, Medusa does not ship with an admin interface, whereas Vendure does.
* Medusa seems to have a whole bunch of supported integrations in the monorepo (Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, Sendgrid, Twilio), whereas Vendure does not currently have any official integrations like this.
* Vendure supports multi-channel, multi-language stores. Could not see much about Medusa's support for that, but maybe I missed it.
All in all, Medusa is very much the most similar project I've seen to Vendure. The Node ecosystem has long been neglected in terms of e-commerce dev tooling, so I'm glad to see more interest in this area. Full-stack JS/TS/Node can be very productive and really nice to work with, in my experience.
Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha.
Regarding your last comment, not sure if you’ve seen the info on this yet but you were incredibly close to having loads of upvotes. I think the current threshold for getting to HN’s front page is between 4 and 5 rapid upvotes. Once you clear it you suddenly get a very large set of eyeballs on your post and lots of new herd effect upvotes. It’s a little silly and sometimes frustrating but depending on how you posted it you could try again with a Show HN thread. Those have a separate section and have an even lower threshold to get onto the front page. I launched a few (mostly unsuccessfully) side projects on HN with this info. Hope it is helpful to you.
P.S.: don’t try to create fake accounts to upvote your posts. They don’t work well due to solid voting ring detection built into HN and will likely just devalue your posts/upvotes in the future.
> Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction
> compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha
Interesting. Maybe your title wasn't so "click-bait" as this one and you linked your github repo instead of your well made website https://www.vendure.io/?
I really like your landing page! In love with the little triangles everywhere, haha.
I'm not the target group for a headless e-commerce solution, but I think your landing page makes it more clear to visitors what your software is about. In contrast to the main article, which left me wondering what Medusa exactly is.
Self hosted eCommerce tools which can help small businesses do their commerce without being held hostage by the monopolistic platforms are always in need. Congratulations for building one.
Big fan of vendure, looking forward to seeing more from Medusa. Don't trip too much, you've had outsized impact considering you're working alone and bootstrapped, taht's worth celebrating
s_severus think you covered this one well. Also think what you have build with Vendure is a really strong solution and we have deep respect for what you have been able to set up almost on your own!
Three short comments on the functional differences:
- Admin interface: We have made our admin open source as well (happened this week) so this will be part of a Medusa setup when you launch our OS version
- On multi-regional support: We have built this into Medusa's core to make it easy to shift between currencies, shipping options etc. across different markets
- On Multi-tenant functionality: This feature will come soon; we will launch a concept called "Stores" in the near future to enable you to control multiple shops/branches from one place
s_severus, we should take an offline chat soon. Think we could learn a great deal from each other!
Thanks for the kind words, and good to hear you have open-sourced the admin panel app - I feel that is really key for allowing devs to quickly get a feel for using the system.
And yes, I'd be really interested to chat! You can email me at "contact at vendure.io"
1. It doesn't seem to be multi-tenant (that is, hosting multiple shops/companies with one db). Are there plans to add multi-tenancy?
2. What are the major differences vs https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure ? (another nodejs solution, with included Admin panel and storefront)
3. How do you plan to monetize?