BigCommerce vs Medusa (2026): which should you pick?

Pick BigCommerce if

• Fits if you want discount types and shipping rules built in rather than added as apps
• Works for selling on Amazon, eBay and Walmart from one catalog

Look elsewhere if

• Tight if your sales are growing, as passing $30K a year moves you up to Growth at $79 a month
• Pricey if you want abandoned-cart emails, customer groups or stored cards, which start on Growth at $79 a month
• Watch out: paying through a provider outside BigCommerce's list adds 2% a sale on Core and 1% on Growth
• Watch out: Scale covers $33,333 of sales a month and charges 0.9% on anything above it
• Skip it if you want a free plan, as there's only a 15-day trial

Pick Medusa if

• Fits if your team writes JavaScript and wants a custom or headless store
• Works for builders who don't want a platform fee on sales

Look elsewhere if

• Not for you if you want a store without developers, as setup takes engineering work
• Skip it if you can't host a server, because the free version means doing that yourself
• Watch out: Cloud costs grow with usage, with edge requests past the allowance at $0.30 per 1M
• Watch out: Medusa Cloud can't accept cards issued by banks registered in India

BigCommerce

• Each plan caps sales over the past twelve months (gross order value minus 10%); passing $30K on Core or $100K on Growth moves the store up a plan.
• Orders paid through providers outside BigCommerce's embedded list carry a fee of 2% on Core, 1% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale.
• Scale covers $33,333 of sales a month and charges 0.9% on sales above that.
• Customer groups, abandoned-cart emails and stored cards need Growth or higher, and product filtering needs Scale.

Medusa

• It is a developer framework: the admin and a starter storefront exist, but a store takes engineering work to set up.
• Cloud prices start at the listed figure and grow with infrastructure and usage; edge requests beyond the allowance cost $0.30 per 1M.
• Cloud development access is billed per seat, and log drains are a $50 per month add-on on some plans.
• Medusa Cloud cannot accept cards issued by banks registered in India.

BigCommerce

Checkout and payment partners

A single-page checkout with Apple Pay, Google Pay and Amazon Pay, and more than 100 currencies through the payment provider you choose, such as Stripe, PayPal, Adyen or Klarna.

Discounts and promotions

More than 70 discount options, coupons and gift cards come built in on every plan, without a third-party app.

Shipping quotes and rules

Real-time shipping rates from carriers such as UPS, USPS and FedEx, with the ShipperHQ shipping rules engine available as well.

Inventory across locations

Track stock and fulfil orders from 4 locations on Core up to 8 on Scale, including in-store pickup and curbside collection.

Marketplaces, ads and point of sale

Connect the store to Amazon, eBay and Walmart, send product feeds to Google, Meta and TikTok through Feedonomics Surface, and link POS systems such as Square or Clover.

Several storefronts in one account

Run extra storefronts for other brands or regions from one dashboard, for $30 a month each on Core (up to 3) and more on higher plans.

Medusa

Commerce building blocks

Products, carts, orders and payments are provided as primitives inside a framework, so developers customize behavior instead of working around a fixed storefront.

Sales channels and regions

Several sales channels with their own rules and products, plus multiple currencies, local tax rules and region-specific shipping and payment settings.

Inventory and promotions

Multi-warehouse inventory with order reservations, and a promotion engine for campaigns, free shipping and customer or B2B pricing.

Medusa Admin

A merchant dashboard for daily operations. The Cloud FAQ says Admin users are free and unlimited, and only development seats are billed.

Cloud hosting

Medusa Cloud deploys from GitHub and hosts the backend, admin and storefront on a CDN, with previews, logs, backups and autoscaling on higher plans.

AI tooling

A Medusa MCP server, a development agent and a Cloud CLI are included on every Cloud plan; custom workflow agents are Enterprise only.

BigCommerce

• Core$29

  per month for up to $30K sales a year, billed annually ($39 monthly)

  For new stores: up to 4 inventory locations and 24/7 chat and email support, with a 2% fee on orders through payment providers outside BigCommerce's list.

• Growth$79

  per month for up to $100K sales a year, billed annually ($105 monthly)

  Adds customer groups, abandoned-cart emails, stored cards and phone support, with 5 inventory locations and a 1% fee on orders through other providers.

• Scale$299

  per month up to $33,333 sales a month, billed annually ($399 monthly)

  Adds product filtering and 8 inventory locations, charges 0.9% on sales above the monthly cap and 0.6% on orders through other payment providers.

• Performance$1,499

  per month and up, billed annually

  Custom pricing for high-volume stores, sold through sales, with a dedicated customer success manager and no fee on other payment providers under contract.

Medusa

• Open source$0

  The open-source platform from GitHub, which you host and run yourself on your own PostgreSQL database.

• Cloud Develop$29

  per month and up, billed monthly

  Hosted backend, admin and storefront, GitHub deploys, previews on pull requests, Medusa Search and Emails, with 1M edge requests.

• Cloud Launch$99

  per month and up, billed monthly

  Adds autoscaling, custom storefront domains, automatic backups, webhook events, a Redis-backed store and 5M edge requests.

• Cloud Scale$299

  per month and up, billed monthly

  Adds background workers, priority support, semantic search, longer backup retention, a custom backend domain and 10M edge requests.

• Cloud EnterpriseCustom

  Adds SLA-backed support, RBAC, SSO and audit logs, a dedicated support engineer and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Sold through sales.

BigCommerce

• Annual discount

  Pay annually to save 25%

  Core costs $29 a month billed annually against $39 billed monthly, Growth $79 against $105 and Scale $299 against $399.

Medusa

No public discounts listed.