MedusaJS vs Shopify: An Honest Comparison for UK E-Commerce

Shopify's Basic plan advertises £25/month. Factor in transaction fees, apps, and theme costs, and a growing UK store actually spends £650–£2,500/month (Charle Agency, 2026). MedusaJS costs nothing to license — but "free" has its own price tag. We've helped UK businesses evaluate both platforms, and the honest answer is more nuanced than either community wants to admit.

This analysis uses current UK pricing, CrUX performance data from March 2026, and real total-cost-of-ownership models. No affiliate links, no vendor bias — just the numbers.

What Shopify Actually Costs in the UK

Shopify's headline pricing obscures the real spend. The subscription is the smallest line item.

Monthly plan fees (annual billing) range from £19 for Basic to £259 for Advanced. Shopify Plus starts at roughly £1,800/month on a three-year term. Monthly billing adds a 25% premium across all tiers.

The transaction fees are where costs compound. Shopify Payments charges 2.0% + 25p per online transaction on Basic, dropping to 1.7% + 25p on Grow and 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. Use a third-party payment gateway and Shopify adds a surcharge on top: 2.0% on Basic, 1.0% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. For a store processing £50,000/month through a non-Shopify gateway on the Basic plan, that surcharge alone is £1,000/month.

Then there's the app tax. Shopify's 8,000+ app ecosystem is a strength — until you realise that basic functionality like advanced analytics, loyalty programmes, or multi-currency support often requires paid apps running £100–£500/month combined.

What MedusaJS Actually Costs to Run

MedusaJS is MIT-licensed with zero platform fees and zero transaction fees. You pay only your payment processor's standard rate and your infrastructure costs.

Hosting a production MedusaJS instance runs $20–100/month — a PostgreSQL database, a Node.js server, and object storage for media. That's the easy part. The real cost is developer time. MedusaJS requires fluency in Node.js, TypeScript, and React. There are no drag-and-drop themes. Every storefront is built from code.

For a business processing £100,000/month in revenue, Born Digital estimates the three-year total cost of ownership at £15,000–£25,000 for MedusaJS versus £40,000–£60,000 for Shopify. The inflection point sits around £30,000–£50,000 in monthly revenue — below that, Shopify's convenience outweighs MedusaJS's cost savings. Above it, the compounding transaction fees and app costs tip the economics decisively.

DBot Software reports a sharper breakeven for customisation-heavy businesses: as early as £1M annual revenue when complex workflows would require Shopify Plus pricing.

Performance — The Numbers That Move Conversion

We pulled Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data from March 2026 to compare headless and traditional commerce architectures on real-world metrics.

Platform-specific: Shopify Liquid delivers a 2.0s LCP versus 1.4s on Hydrogen (Shopify's headless framework) — a 30% improvement within the same ecosystem. Core Web Vitals pass rates tell a similar story: 72% for headless versus 48% for traditional stores.

The conversion impact is material. PageSpeedMatters found that stores migrating to headless with proper implementation saw 12–18% conversion rate lifts on average. At £2M annual revenue, a 15% lift is worth £300,000/year with an 8–12 month break-even on the migration investment.

Where Each Platform Wins

Neither platform is universally better. The right choice depends on your business model, team, and growth trajectory.

Shopify wins when speed to market matters more than customisation. A non-technical team launching standard B2C products under £30,000/month revenue will get more value from Shopify's managed infrastructure and plug-and-play apps than from building a custom stack.

MedusaJS wins when the business model demands flexibility Shopify can't provide. Custom B2B pricing tiers, complex multi-warehouse fulfilment, legacy ERP integrations, and multi-vendor marketplace logic are areas where MedusaJS's full source code access creates genuine competitive advantage. DD Bricks reported $500,000 in annual savings after migrating to MedusaJS with a 60% reduction in operational workload.

We won't pretend MedusaJS has no drawbacks. The documentation has gaps. Community support response times are inconsistent. The plugin ecosystem is a fraction of Shopify's. And the microservices architecture introduces complexity — inefficient service communication and suboptimal configurations can negate the performance advantages if your team lacks the architectural experience to avoid them.

The deciding factor isn't which platform is "better." It's whether your business model fits a rented storefront or demands a custom-built one. Under £30k/month and launching fast — Shopify is the pragmatic choice. Above that threshold, especially with custom workflows or integration complexity, MedusaJS pays for itself within 12–18 months. At SOHOB, we've built on both. The question we always ask first isn't "which platform?" — it's "what does your business actually need to do?"