What it does
Medusa is an open-source commerce platform for developer-built stores. Its administration tools manage products, channels, regional prices and stock locations. The core has an MIT licence excluding Enterprise materials; teams arrange their own hosting or pay for Medusa Cloud.
Medusa suits a store whose catalogue and operations need custom development. Products can have variants, channel-specific availability and prices for configured currencies and regions. Merchant administration sits alongside the framework used by the technical team.
Prepare the product and its stock behaviour
Sign into the store's Medusa Admin with the email and password supplied by the team that deployed it. In Products, choose Create. The Details stage collects the title, description, images and options. Organize assigns categories, a shipping profile and sales channels. A product must belong to the storefront's channel to be purchasable there.
In Variants, set SKUs, prices and stock behaviour. Disabling Managed Inventory treats the variant as always in stock; Allow backorder permits purchases after stock runs out. Those choices need to match the actual fulfilment promise.
An inventory kit connects a variant to its component stock. A desk set could consume one notebook and two pens. Enable Has inventory kit, continue to Inventory Kits, select each component and its quantity, then Publish. Products without kits finish with Publish after Variants.
Hosting and licence scope
The MIT-licensed core can be used without a software licence fee. Enterprise Edition materials have separate commercial terms. Self-hosting still requires development, infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance.
| Cloud plan | Selected operating difference |
|---|---|
| Develop | GitHub deployments, storefront/backend hosting and pull-request previews |
| Launch | Adds autoscaling, custom storefront domains and automatic backups |
| Scale | Adds background workers, longer backup retention and a custom backend domain |
| Enterprise | Tailored infrastructure, commercial licence and support terms |
Cloud plans have recurring hosting charges and no percentage platform fee on gross merchandise value. Choose the production operating requirements as well as the commerce modules; free core code does not include a managed production service.
Strengths
- Product channels and regional prices support custom selling arrangements
- Inventory kits connect bundles or assembled goods to component quantities
Watch out for
- Implementation and technical operation require a development team
- Enterprise Edition materials are excluded from the core MIT licence
Best for
- Development teams building custom commerce operations
Sources
- Medusa - Open-Source Agentic Commerce Platform (Oct 25, 2026)
- Medusa Cloud pricing (Oct 27, 2026)
- medusa/LICENSE at develop · medusajs/medusa · GitHub (Oct 25, 2026)
- Create a product in Medusa Admin (Oct 27, 2026)
- Medusa Admin user guide (Oct 27, 2026)
- Self-hosting or Medusa Cloud (Oct 27, 2026)