Elastic Path vs Medusa (2026): which should you pick?

Elastic Path

• Engineering teams building a custom storefront on commerce APIs
• B2B sellers needing accounts, price books and promotions
• Enterprises that want a vendor-hosted commerce backend

Medusa

• Developer teams building custom or headless stores in JavaScript
• Teams that want to avoid a platform fee on sales volume
• B2B and marketplace builds that need custom commerce logic

Elastic Path

• No prices could be read from the vendor's site here: the pages answered with a bot check, so pricing is recorded as unverified.
• It is a developer platform with no theme-based store builder, so a storefront has to be built or bought separately.
• Self-managed (self-hosted) commerce is documented separately from the hosted product, so confirm which one applies.

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.

Elastic Path

Commerce APIs

Documented APIs with OpenAPI specifications cover carts, checkout, orders, catalogs, products, payments and application keys.

Commerce Manager

A web-based interface for merchants to manage products, orders, customers, promotions, subscriptions, analytics and team permissions.

Price books and promotions

Price books define pricing, and both a standard promotions engine and a promotions builder are documented.

Accounts and organizations

Accounts and account members can log in to the store and create orders for their accounts, which suits B2B buying.

Single- and multi-location inventory

Inventory is documented for a single location or for several, alongside subscriptions and single sign-on settings.

Composer integration layer

Composer is described as commerce intelligence IPaaS, with a builder, an integrations hub and monitoring for connecting other systems.

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.

Elastic Path

Pricing could not be confirmed. See elasticpath.com.

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.