About Swell
Swell is a commercial headless commerce platform for brands that want a flexible back end and full control over their storefront. It models complex catalogs and supports recurring physical and digital products sold next to one-off items, which makes it suited to subscription businesses.
The admin covers products, subscriptions, discounts such as coupons and buy-one-get-one promotions, wholesale with volume pricing and invoicing, customer management, order editing, multi-location fulfillment with split shipments, and reporting. Storefronts are fully customizable, checkout can be hosted, built with a partner or custom, and multiple payment gateways can be connected at once.
Internationalization supports region-specific languages, pricing and payment methods, and more than 40 no-code integrations connect marketing, payments, fulfillment and automation services. Swell is a hosted service with a free trial and a pricing page, and it has sections on its site for developers and AI.
Key features
- Headless commerce with developer APIs
- Subscription and recurring product billing
- Wholesale pricing and invoicing
- Multi-location fulfillment and inventory
- Hosted or custom checkout
- Multiple payment gateways at once
- Region-specific languages and pricing
Good fit for
- →Direct-to-consumer brands with subscriptions
- →Selling B2B and DTC from one catalog
- →Developers building custom storefronts
- Tags
- headless-commerce
- ecommerce
- subscriptions
- wholesale
- api
- dtc
- saas
Swell: questions and answers
- What is Swell used for?
- Swell is a headless commerce platform for subscriptions, wholesale, physical and digital products, with a hosted checkout and developer-focused APIs. It is a good fit for direct-to-consumer brands with subscriptions, selling B2B and DTC from one catalog, and developers building custom storefronts.
- How much does Swell cost?
- Paid plans for Swell start at $29 per month, and there is no free plan. A free trial is available.
- Is Swell open source?
- No. Swell is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Swell include Saleor, Medusa and Spree Commerce.
- What are some alternatives to Swell?
- Swell competes with commercetools, BigCommerce and VTEX. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Swell alternatives.
Open-source alternatives to Swell
See all
Saleor
E-commerce
Saleor Core: the high performance, composable, headless commerce API.
BSD-3-Clausevs commercetools★ 23k
Medusa
E-commerce
The world's most flexible commerce platform for agents and developers
OSSvs BigCommerce★ 37k
Spree Commerce
E-commerce
Open Source Platform for DTC, B2B Commerce, Marketplaces & Omnichannel. REST APIs, TypeScr
BSD-3-Clausevs BigCommerce★ 16k
Vendure
E-commerce
Open-source headless commerce platform built with TypeScript, NestJS, React, and GraphQL
OSSvs commercetools★ 8.5k
EverShop
E-commerce
🛍️ Typescript E-commerce Platform
GPL-3.0vs BigCommerce★ 10k
Sylius
E-commerce
Headless open-source eCommerce platform on top of PHP/Symfony/API Platform
MITvs commercetools★ 8.5k
SaaS alternatives to Swell
See all
commercetools
E-commerce
API-first headless commerce platform for enterprise retailers
SaaS
BigCommerce
E-commerce
Hosted ecommerce platform with built-in B2B features and headless options
SaaS
VTEX
E-commerce
Enterprise commerce platform with marketplace features, popular in Latin America
SaaS
Foxy
E-commerce
Hosted cart and checkout that adds ecommerce to existing websites
SaaS
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
E-commerce
Enterprise B2C and B2B commerce platform from Salesforce
SaaS
Elastic Path
E-commerce
Composable commerce platform with APIs for catalogs, carts and orders
SaaS

