Why Cartwright
How Cartwright compares to Shopify, Medusa, Saleor, and next-forge — and when not to use it.
Cartwright exists for shops that want a full codebase, not a platform account.
Shopify is the right default if you want managed commerce and accept SaaS constraints. You get a mature admin, hosting, payments, apps, and support. You also accept lock-in, platform rules, app-chain complexity, and limited control over the core runtime. Cartwright flips that tradeoff: you own the app, database, checkout flow, admin, and source.
Medusa and Saleor are commerce engines. They are strong choices when you want a dedicated backend and are happy to bring or build the frontend. Cartwright is a complete shop template. It includes the storefront, admin, data model, checkout integration, AI assistant, MCP endpoint, and deployment recipe in the same Next.js app.
next-forge is a SaaS starter. It solves a different shape of problem: accounts, billing, emails, and application scaffolding. Cartwright takes the same "opinionated spine" idea and applies it to commerce: products, categories, carts, orders, Stripe checkout, admin media uploads, and commerce-specific AI workflows.
The main tradeoff is maintenance. Cartwright gives you code ownership, but ownership includes upgrades, bug fixes, integration drift, migrations, observability, and security. There is no commerce-specific support contract baked into the template. Community and paid setup help exist, but this is not a managed platform. When you outgrow the self-hosted setup, Plus and Cloud tiers layer on hosted services, premium MCP integrations, and (in Cloud) managed Vercel + Turso without breaking the open-source spine.
Migrating from Shopify or WooCommerce
Switching shouldn't mean rebuilding from scratch. Hoptify — the engine's tongue-in-cheek Shopify pendant — ships a parody "import from Shopify" onboarding (/admin/hoptify) that, with a Firecrawl key, genuinely brings your brand palette (via design-import) and products across, fail-soft to a demo otherwise. It's a self-hosted on-ramp; the full agentic five-step migration (customers, deploy) ships with Plus.
Coming from WooCommerce, the parity toolkit covers the everyday surface you'd miss: a wishlist, abandoned-cart recovery email, admin-managed redirects (so old URLs keep their SEO), product CSV import/export, and a translation-management UI. Tax/VAT (Stripe Tax or built-in single-rate) and zone/weight shipping are in the box too — the things that are usually an app-chain on the incumbents.
When NOT to pick Cartwright
Do not pick Cartwright if you want zero ops. Shopify or another hosted tool is usually better when uptime, checkout, apps, tax, and hosting should be somebody else's problem.
Do not pick it if your team has no JavaScript or TypeScript capacity. The setup wizard removes some environment-file work, but production customization is still normal Next.js work.
Do not pick it if you need EDI, advanced B2B pricing, marketplace multi-tenancy, complex ERP sync, or multiple storefront tenants out of the box. Cartwright can be extended, but those are projects, not checkboxes.