# commercetools vs Vendure

> commercetools and Vendure score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 71.3 (BB) and 70.9 (BB). Vendure leads on reliability, schema & documentation and payments & pricing. Both do commerce products. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/commercetools-vs-vendure
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/commercetools-vs-vendure.md (~2,450 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/commercetools-vs-vendure.min.md (~680 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/commercetools-vs-vendure.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-08

commercetools and Vendure score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 71.3 (BB) and 70.9 (BB). Vendure leads on reliability, schema & documentation and payments & pricing. Both do commerce products.

- commercetools: grade BB, 71.3/100, rank #110 of 629. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/commercetools.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/commercetools.json
- Vendure: grade BB, 70.9/100, rank #117 of 629. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/vendure.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/vendure.json

## Which one, for what

### commercetools (BB)

Good for: Enterprises that already run or plan a composable commerce stack and want agents working across catalogue, pricing, carts and orders under scoped credentials.

Ahead on:
- Agent ergonomics, 83 against 68
- Security & auth, 70 against 65
- Transparency & trust, 81 against 67

Also in its favour:
- Runs on your own machine
- No incidents deducted, where Vendure loses 3 points for them

Watch for: No public price. The pricing page describes order-based pricing and sends buyers to sales

### Vendure (BB)

Good for: TypeScript teams that want a typed GraphQL commerce server and will host it.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 89 against 73
- Schema & documentation, 91 against 86
- Payments & pricing, 45 against 20

Also in its favour:
- Open source

Watch for: No vendor-hosted API. Vendure Cloud is only partly available


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | commercetools | Vendure | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 73 | 89 | Vendure +16 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 86 | 91 | Vendure +5 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 83 | 68 | commercetools +15 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 70 | 65 | commercetools +5 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 20 | 45 | Vendure +25 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 85 | even |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 81 | 67 | commercetools +14 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -3 | |
| **Total** | | **71.3 · BB** | **70.9 · BB** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | commercetools | Vendure |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | commercetools GmbH | Vendure (Elevantiq GmbH) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.{region}.commercetools.com/{projectKey}` | `https://readonlydemo.vendure.io/shop-api` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under the commercetools Master Service Agreement. The API specifications are public, the SDKs are MIT (TypeScript, PHP) or Apache 2.0 (Java, .NET) and Commerce MCP is MIT | GPL-3.0-or-later |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-07 | 2026-09-02 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | no date given |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 221k npm/wk | 8.5k stars, 30k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**commercetools.** A public OpenAPI file with 822 operations, per-resource OAuth scopes and a managed MCP server whose tools an administrator selects per agent. Prices are quoted by sales only, and the HTTP API publishes no platform-wide rate limit. A 60-day trial needs no card.

**Vendure.** Full cart, coupon, shipping and payment flow in the GraphQL Shop API, with ErrorResult types an agent can branch on. No vendor-hosted API. Vendure Cloud is only partly available.

## Before you call either

### commercetools

1. Use the auth and API hosts for the project's region, such as auth.europe-west1.gcp.commercetools.com and api.europe-west1.gcp.commercetools.com. There are five regions
2. Send the resource's current `version` with every update or delete. On 409 ConcurrentModification, re-read the resource and retry only if the change is still needed
3. Retry 502 and 503 with exponential backoff from 200 ms, honour Retry-After, and check Content-Type before parsing an error body
4. For MCP, ask for an API Client scoped to `mcp:{projectKey}:{mcpServerKey}` and a server limited to the tools the task needs, not `all`
5. Keep page size at or under 500 and offset at or under 10,000. Product Search returns at most 100 per request

### Vendure

1. Keep the session token from the first Shop API response and send it on every call. It holds the active order
2. Check each mutation result's `__typename` and `errorCode`. Expected failures return 200 with an ErrorResult
3. Don't retry addItemToOrder blindly. Read the active order first, since a repeat adds the quantity again
4. For server-side work, enable `api-key` in authOptions.tokenMethod and give the key one role in one channel
5. Run 3.7.3 or later, and purge old job records, which may still hold session tokens

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, commercetools or Vendure?

commercetools and Vendure score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 71.3 (BB) and 70.9 (BB). Vendure leads on reliability, schema & documentation and payments & pricing.

### Do commercetools and Vendure need an API key?

commercetools uses an OAuth sign-in. Vendure takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call commercetools and Vendure without installing anything?

Yes. commercetools has a hosted endpoint at https://api.{region}.commercetools.com/{projectKey} and Vendure at https://readonlydemo.vendure.io/shop-api.

### Are commercetools and Vendure open source?

No open-source release is listed for commercetools. Vendure is open source (GPL-3.0-or-later).


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/commercetools-vs-vendure.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/commercetools-vs-vendure.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "commercetools", "b": "vendure"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare commercetools vendure`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/commercetools.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/vendure.json

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