The Merchant Engine compared with Salla
These two are not the same kind of product, and the honest comparison starts there. Salla is a hosted platform a merchant subscribes to, with a theme engine and an app market for developers who build on top of it. The Merchant Engine is software you install on a server you or your client control. If you are a merchant who wants a store this week, Salla is the better answer. If you are a developer who wants to own the stack, read on.
What Salla does better
Salla is a mature Saudi platform with an ecosystem this project does not have: its own documentation calls it one of the largest ecommerce platforms in the region, its partner portal reaches tens of thousands of merchants, and the Twilight theme engine and app store sit on top of that. Payment methods Saudi shoppers expect are connected for the merchant. Nothing here replaces that convenience. What this engine is behind on, stated here because the row set on this page has no place for it: its first public release is not tagged yet, no card gateway ships in it, and its admin interface is English and is not mirrored for right-to-left languages, so a merchant who administers a store in Arabic reads an English dashboard.
Row by row
Every claim about Salla was read from its own documentation on 2026-09-09 and carries the page it came from. Every claim about The Merchant Engine links the documentation page that proves it. If a row is wrong, it is a bug: write to bbadii@pm.me and it gets corrected.
| Criterion | Salla | The Merchant Engine |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A hosted Saudi ecommerce platform merchants sell on, with a partner programme for the developers who build for them. “Salla is one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the region, with a large and actively growing base of live stores.” Source: docs.salla.dev | A self-hosted ecommerce platform: a REST API, an admin dashboard and a server-rendered storefront, installed together on your own server with one command. Read the page that proves it |
| Who it is sold to | Merchants are the customer. Developers and agencies take part through the Salla Partners programme, building for those merchants. “Salla Partners is the program, portal, and community through which developers build software for Salla merchants.” Source: docs.salla.dev | The developer or agency that builds and runs stores for merchants. The merchant is the person the developer hands the admin to. Read the page that proves it |
| Code and hosting | No self-hosting path and no access to the platform's source appears anywhere in the developer material. What a developer gets is their own app or theme on Salla's platform. The corporate terms on salla.com state the same, and are not linked here because that host refuses automated readers. Searched, not stated: docs.salla.dev | You hold the source and run it on your own server or your client’s. Nothing about the store depends on a vendor staying online, and the licence check needs no network. Read the page that proves it |
| What a developer can change | REST Merchant APIs for store data, plus public or private apps published through the partner portal. “Salla Merchant APIs are a suite of RESTful endpoints, purpose-built for secure, fast, and easy access to Merchant data.” Source: docs.salla.dev | Every line. The API, the admin and the storefront are one repository you install from source, with recipes for adding an endpoint, a screen, a settings key, a payment provider or a storefront page. Read the page that proves it |
| Storefront customization | Themes on Salla's own Twilight engine, written in a Twig-flavoured template language, with source access to your theme. “complete control over every step of the development process, starting with editing the theme's source code” Source: docs.salla.dev | Two ways, and both are yours: brand the shipped storefront from the admin (palette, fonts, logo, locales, money), or edit its Angular source, or replace it entirely against the documented REST contract. Read the page that proves it |
| What it costs to run | Subscription plans: a free Basic tier, Plus, Pro and a Special package for large companies. The figures are on the pricing page of salla.com, which refuses automated readers, so no price is quoted here. “The subscription price varies depending on the package you wish to subscribe to and the duration you want to subscribe for.” Source: help.salla.sa | A yearly licence per number of paid stores, plus your own hosting. No subscription per store, no transaction fee, no percentage of sales, and no charge on a staging or demo store. Read the page that proves it |
| Data portability | Catalogue and order exports to XLSX or CSV, with reusable order export templates. No full-store export or migration-out document was found on this date. “You can create up to five order export templates.” Source: help.salla.sa | The database is yours: PostgreSQL on your box, dumped nightly by the installer’s own timer, restorable with a documented procedure. There is nothing to export from because nothing left. Read the page that proves it |
| Content languages | Arabic is the API default, and a store can be run in more than one language, translated automatically or by hand. “By default, Accept-Language header is set to the Arabic language, with an `iso_code` of `ar`.” Source: docs.salla.dev | French, English and Arabic catalogues ship. A store enables the ones it serves and picks a default; every user-facing field holds one value per locale in one database. Read the page that proves it |
| Payments and cash on delivery | Cash on delivery is available and, when Salla's own shipping labels are used, capped at 1,000 SAR per order. Card, wallet and buy-now-pay-later methods are connected through providers, which the help centre covers separately. “the maximum COD order value is capped at SAR 1,000” Source: help.salla.sa | Cash on delivery, manual bank transfer and gift cards ship and work, with no cap and no fee taken by anyone. No card gateway is in the first release; a local provider is written against the payment provider recipe. Read the page that proves it |
| Apps and marketplace | An app store developers publish to, which the partner page advertises as over sixty thousand merchants. The vendor's share of app revenue is not published as a percentage; the page shows an earnings example instead. “Expand your income by creating your own App and reaching over 60,000 Merchants on Salla.” Source: partners.salla.com | None, by design. There is no app store to publish to and no revenue share, because an integration is code you add to a repository you already own. Read the page that proves it |
Which one to pick
Pick Salla when
- You are the merchant, not the developer, and you want to be selling this week.
- You want Saudi payment methods and local shipping integrations connected for you.
- You want someone else responsible for uptime, updates and compliance.
- You are building a product for many merchants and the app market is your distribution.
- Your merchant administers the store in Arabic and wants the dashboard itself in Arabic and mirrored.
Pick The Merchant Engine when
- You build and run stores for clients and want one stack you own rather than a per-store subscription.
- The store's data has to live on infrastructure you or your client control.
- You need to change the checkout, the API or the storefront itself, not only the theme.
- You want no per-store subscription and no marketplace between you and your client.
Questions
Is this a Salla competitor?
Not directly. Salla sells a hosted store to a merchant. This sells a stack to the developer who builds stores. The overlap is the developer choosing between building on someone else's platform and running their own.
Does The Merchant Engine handle Saudi payment methods?
Not today. Cash on delivery, manual bank transfer and gift cards ship and work; no card gateway is in the first release, and a local provider would be written against the payment provider recipe.
Is Arabic as good here?
The engine ships Arabic as one of three locale catalogues, mirrors the storefront right to left from the store configuration, and stores every field per locale. Salla is a Saudi product with Arabic as its default and a much larger local ecosystem around it.
What happens to my store if the vendor changes terms?
That is the real question this page is about. On a self-hosted install the answer is nothing: the code, the database and the domain are already yours, and the licence check needs no network.
See it for yourself
The fastest check on any row above is to run the thing: install it locally in one command, or read what an install puts on a box. The other comparisons are on the compare index.
Last updated . Every claim on this page is read from a published source and cited beside it.