Spree Commerce vs WooCommerce API + MCP

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.

WooCommerce API + MCP

Free GPL software with no platform fee or revenue share. Uptime, speed and security depend on each store's host and plugins. No vendor status page.

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

WooCommerce API + MCP

1. Create a REST key with read permission only for reporting tasks, and send it in the Authorization header, never the URL
2. Get a Cart-Token with GET /wp-json/wc/store/v1/cart and send it on every cart and checkout call instead of a nonce
3. Add _fields=id,name,price to REST calls to cut response size
4. Page with per_page up to 100 and stop at X-WP-TotalPages
5. Product delete only trashes unless you pass force true, so check the trash before assuming it's gone