Mercur vs Sharetribe

Mercur is an open-source, headless platform for building multi-vendor marketplaces on Medusa v2. Its MIT-licensed core covers vendor management, catalogs, offers, split orders, commissions, and payouts, including vendor payouts through Stripe Connect. A typed REST API spans admin, vendor, and storefront scopes. Teams can deploy Mercur in their own cloud, on-premise, or an air-gapped environment; managed Mercur Cloud hosting is separate. Open Source lists HTTP-only session authentication, per-vendor data isolation, and TLS in transit at the deployment layer. Enterprise adds financial settlement, BuyBox, vendor integrations, and enterprise access controls, plus Shopify and Magento / Adobe Commerce connectors. Enterprise support includes a Platform Specialist, dedicated Slack and email, architectural guidance, and an SLA for maintained-code defects and incidents. Enterprise licensing is quoted. Connecting an organization’s ERP, PIM, OMS, or custom feeds and building the marketplace require separate implementation work.

Sharetribe helps founders create online marketplaces, including a functional marketplace built without writing code. Its tools cover profiles, listings, search, transactions, messaging, reviews, bookings, and availability. Live marketplaces can take online payments through Sharetribe’s payment functionality. Integrations include Stripe, Zapier, Google Analytics, Plausible, Google login, and Facebook login; developers can connect third-party applications or custom backends through the Integration API, Events, and single sign-on. Sharetribe hosts the backend and infrastructure, while users with custom code host their own frontend. A responsive web marketplace is supported, as are iOS and Android apps through wrappers, templates, or custom development. Plans include 1M usage credits per month, with additional usage billed separately. Build costs $39 a month and includes test-mode API access. Live costs $199 a year and supports real users, listings, transactions, and reviews without transaction fees. The listed starting price is $39/mo, with a 14-day trial and no free plan. Digital-download listings allow up to ten files, each with a 1GB limit.