Vendure vs commercetools

Yes, when the B2B rules are the hard part and you would rather license that depth than build it beside a platform you cannot see into. If you have a permanent platform engineering team and a genuine composable mandate across many brands and regions, commercetools is built for that and we would not argue otherwise.

Company accounts, quotes, lists, quick order and store credit from Starter. Organization hierarchy, managed lists, packaging, gift cards and global search at Growth. Contract pricing, order approvals, the audit log, single sign-on, search analytics and the Next.js B2B storefront at Scale. Negotiation, access policy, advanced approvals, audit governance, Configurator and PunchOut at Enterprise. They are licensed capabilities rather than services you commission.

Vendure Core is free under GPLv3. Four cumulative paid plans sit on top: Starter at €199, Growth at €599 and Scale at €2,499 a month on a 12-month term, with Enterprise from €60,000 a year. Each plan inherits the one below, and there is no GMV charge, per-order surcharge or per-user fee, so growing revenue does not reprice the platform.

Yes. Vendure Core is a complete open-source commerce framework under GPLv3, written in TypeScript on Node.js with GraphQL Shop and Admin APIs. It is free to run and self-host, and the licence cannot be revoked or discontinued for you. The commercial B2B capabilities are separately licensed plugins layered on top of that core. Every paid plan also includes a commercial licence for Vendure Core for your project, as an alternative to GPLv3.

Yes, on any cloud or on-premises, in any region, with your data in your own SQL database. That is what makes EU-mandated and otherwise regulated deployments possible today. Vendure Cloud, our managed hosting, opens as a closed beta for paid plans, with general availability planned for Q1 2027. Each paid plan will include a base set of Cloud resources, and usage above that is billed on top.

Yes, headless by default, with GraphQL Shop and Admin APIs and any frontend you choose. The difference from a headless-only platform is that the Next.js B2B storefront is included from the Scale plan, so a frontend build is a starting point rather than a prerequisite before anything ships.

Through plugins that live beside the core rather than patching it: strategies, custom fields that propagate straight into the GraphQL schema, custom entities and typed events. There is no cap on how many you write and no fork to reconcile at upgrade time, so your business logic stays first-class TypeScript inside one backend.