vue-storefront
Alokai is a Frontend as a Service solution that simplifies composable commerce. It connects all the technologies needed to build and deploy fast & scalable ecommerce frontends. It guides merchants to deliver exceptional customer experiences quickly and easily.
Open-source developer toolkit for building fully custom online storefronts that connect to any commerce platform, Magento, CommerceTools, and more, using Vue.js or React.
Alokai (previously called Vue Storefront) is a set of developer tools for building the customer-facing front end of an online store. Rather than tying you to a specific store platform, it is designed to work with almost any backend that exposes an API: Magento, CommerceTools, and several others are already integrated out of the box. The claim is 3,500+ live stores using it, and the project is open source.
The core problem it solves is that building an online storefront from scratch is slow, and most eCommerce platforms ship their own storefronts that are hard to customize deeply. Alokai sits in between: it connects to the platform of your choice through a middleware layer (an Express.js server), then renders the actual pages using either Vue.js with Nuxt or React with Next.js, depending on which framework your team prefers.
Out of the box you get a working storefront theme built on top of Storefront UI, a component library designed specifically for eCommerce pages (product grids, carts, checkout flows, and the like). The theme is a starting point, not a locked-in design, and the README says it is fully customizable.
The technology list includes Vue.js, Nuxt.js, React.js, Next.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, and Docker. Teams comfortable with modern JavaScript development would find it familiar. The project is hosted on GitHub, welcomes pull requests, and has an active Discord community for questions.
The intended user is a developer or development team building a storefront for a merchant who wants control over the look and behavior of their store without being constrained by what the underlying commerce platform provides. It is not a no-code tool; writing and editing code is required.
Where it fits
- Build a fast, fully customizable storefront on top of Magento without being locked into its default theme.
- Switch your store's front end from one commerce platform to another without rebuilding all your UI components.
- Use a pre-built eCommerce component library, product grids, carts, checkout flows, as a head start on a new store.
- Build a headless commerce frontend choosing either Vue with Nuxt or React with Next.js, depending on your team's preference.