Assembly Line

Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap vs Mercur

Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap and Mercur are both marketplace platform software. Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap is open source under MIT, with 1.4k GitHub stars. Mercur is open source under MIT, with 1.9k GitHub stars.

Which to pick

Pick Ecommerce-CodeIgniter-Bootstrap when
A developer wants a simple, readable PHP shop to adapt for a small store.
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

What it does

A PHP online store with multi-vendor, multi-language, virtual products, admin panel, blog and PayPal payments, built on a patched CodeIgniter 3.

A multi-vendor marketplace platform on top of Medusa, with vendor onboarding, offers, commissions, payouts, storefront, vendor panel and admin.

Watch out

Runs on CodeIgniter 3 and Bootstrap 3, both long past their prime, with no releases.

Two years old and tied to Medusa's release cycle, so upgrades depend on both projects.

Ready for

Usable (both)

Runs as

Self-hosted server (both)

Built with

PHP, CodeIgniter, Bootstrap and MySQL

TypeScript, Medusa, Node.js and PostgreSQL

Source code

Open source, MIT (permissive) (both)

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice. (both)

How widely known

1.4k GitHub stars

1.9k GitHub stars

How established

Established: started 10 years ago, no tagged release yet.

Established: started 2 years ago, latest release v2.4.0.

Other comparisons

More multi-vendor marketplace platforms

Every marketplace platform product and project, ranked

Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.