Spree Commerce vs Swell

Spree Commerce

A self-hosted BSD 3-Clause platform with public OpenAPI files for the Store and Admin APIs, scoped secret keys, documented rate limits and idempotency keys on cart and checkout calls. GitHub lists six security advisories between January and July 2026, four rated High, and the default docs describe the 6.0 release candidate while 5.6.1 is the stable release.

Swell

Live /:models schema with field types and descriptions for every store. One full-access secret key per environment, with no scoped or read-only key.

Spree Commerce

1. Send a publishable key in X-Spree-Api-Key on every Store API call. Add X-Spree-Token with the cart token for guest carts, or a customer JWT as a Bearer token
2. Send Idempotency-Key with the cart token or a customer JWT on cart, payment and completion calls. A request carrying only the publishable key is never cached
3. Ask for fields and expand explicitly. Relations are left out by default and limit stops at 100
4. Use a secret key with the narrowest scopes for the Admin API. read_all gives a read-only key, and the CLI's auto-minted local key is read-only
5. Read the docs under /docs/v5 for a 5.6 store. The default docs describe 6.0, which renames shipments to fulfilments and splits carts from orders

Swell

1. Call GET /:models once and cache it. It's the ground truth for custom fields
2. Check result.errors after every write. A failed validation still returns 200
3. Use $set to replace an array. A plain PUT merges arrays by element id and never shrinks them
4. Use an sk_test_ key while testing. A bare sk_ prefix is live
5. Keep expand and include small. Each level past the first three points adds rate-limit weight