CS-Cart Multi-Vendor vs Mercur
CS-Cart Multi-Vendor and Mercur are both marketplace platform software. CS-Cart Multi-Vendor is a commercial product from CS-Cart. Mercur is open source under MIT, with 1.9k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick CS-Cart Multi-Vendor when
- A small team wants to own and host a multi-vendor marketplace on a budget and has PHP skills to customise it.
- Pick Mercur when
- A company wants to run a B2C or B2B marketplace on its own infrastructure instead of paying a share of sales to a SaaS.
Side by side
Self-hosted PHP marketplace software with vendor storefronts, commissions, split payments and admin panels, sold under a one-time licence.
A multi-vendor marketplace platform on top of Medusa, with vendor onboarding, offers, commissions, payouts, storefront, vendor panel and admin.
You carry hosting, security patching and add-on compatibility yourself.
Two years old and tied to Medusa's release cycle, so upgrades depend on both projects.
Production-ready
Usable
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Self-hosted server
PHP and MySQL
TypeScript, Medusa, Node.js and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by CS-Cart
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
No Wikipedia article of its own
1.9k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 2 years ago, latest release v2.4.0.
Other comparisons
More multi-vendor marketplace platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.