The technology you choose to build your marketplace technology is critically important.
A good choice of technology will help you stay competitive, scale fast and adapt to rapidly changing market conditions. A low quality solution will be a bottleneck that hampers growth.
Sharetribe is a technology that is often used to build marketplaces. It falls into the category of an “open source marketplace technology”. This means that 70 – 80% of the features that you require for an online marketplace are already there. You can then take these features and customize this with the help of a developer.
However, customizing Sharetribe’s code is slow and expensive. Furthermore, the code used by Sharetribe is developed on a dated technology stack (Ruby on the Rails) and does not include a mobile app. As such, many alternatives to Sharetribe have emerged in the last couple of years.
In this article we look at 7 Sharetribe alternatives so that you can find the best marketplace technology for you.
With this in mind, the top 7 Sharetribe alternatives are:
Our methodology
To be included on this list of Sharetribe alternatives, the technology must include a purpose built marketplace technology or, offer plugins that allow the platform to be converted into a two-sided marketplace technology.
As the reader will see, Sharetribe alternatives can be grouped into four main categories: hybrid no-code, open source, SaaS and traditional no-code tools. Each tool comes with a trade off between time to market and cost vs the customization.
1. Dittofi vs Sharetribe alternative
First on our list of Sharetribe alternatives is Dittofi which is a marketplace technology and a hybrid no-code platform that enables you to build an entirely custom, enterprise grade marketplace without writing any code.
To use Dittofi, you must first choose from a range of open source, marketplace templates. Each template has been carefully designed to include all of the must-have features for product, service and rental marketplaces.
Dittofi users can install a template into Dittofi’s visual development studio from where they can customize the template 10x faster than coding. All of your visual edits are immediately transformed into enterprise grade code, that you can either deploy in one click or export and hand off to a developer. This fusion of visual development and code is called hybrid no-code.
A quick comparison of Dittofi vs Sharetribe is shown below.
Dittofi is similar to Sharetribe since both platforms offer an easy start no-code marketplace builder and access to the underlying code for the marketplace. However, Dittofi’s no-code builder is far more advanced and allows for complete and rapid customization. By contrast, customizing Shartribe with their no-code interface is heavily limited. Customization with Sharetribe requires users to hire a developer and work with custom code which is slow and time consuming.
Dittofi also generates more advanced code than is available within Sharetribe, giving you a better quality, easier to manage and a solution that is more cost effective to scale in the long run. Lastly, Dittofi offers lots of marketplace specific training and blogs that can be helpful when building your marketplace.
2. CS-Cart an open source, Sharetribe alternative
Next up on our list of Sharetribe alternatives is CS-Cart.
The CS-Cart platform is an open source, multi-vendor marketplace solution that is a direct competitor to Sharetribe.
This means that CS-Cart comes with 70 – 80% of the features you need to build a marketplace. Then, similar to Sharetribe, you can then customize your marketplace with the help of a software engineer. The CS-Cart platform offers almost exactly the same set of features to Sharetribe with a few notable differences.
First, CS-Cart does not include marketplace hosting. This means that when you install CS-Cart, you will have to spend time developing your own marketplace hosting solution. This can be expensive and delay your launch. Second, CS-Cart was originally developed as a traditional ecommerce solution. For this reason, it has many more features for product marketplaces and far less for service or rental marketplace solutions.
Whilst both Sharetribe and CS-Cart include a no-code interface that you can use to customize your marketplace. This no-code marketplace builder is heavily limited. For a more advanced visual development solution and marketplace technology, check out Dittofi vs CS-Cart.
3. Mirakl, a marketplace SaaS Sharetribe alternative
Similar to Sharetribe, Mirakl offers a collection of backend code that you can customize for your marketplace development.
In contrast to Sharetribe, Mirakl falls into the category of SaaS marketplace technologies. The platform does NOT have a no-code interface that non-technical founders can use to configure the marketplace. This means that you will need to hire marketplace developers from the get go with Mirakl.
By contrast, Sharetribe’s no-code interface allows you to start without coding; however, most businesses will quickly outgrow Sharetribe and will therefore be quickly forced to use custom code. Therefore the benefit of Sharetribe vs Mirakl on this point is short lived
The major difference between Mirakl and Sharetribe is that the SaaS marketplace builders do NOT allow you to access your marketplace source code. This means that whilst it’s generally quick and easy to start developing, you will eventually run into platform limitations and these systems are very expensive to scale.
The diagram below does a comparison of Dittofi vs Mirakl.
Other platforms that are also very similar to Mirakl include Shuup, Yelo, Marktplacer, Nautical commerce and others. Each SaaS marketplace builder targets a slightly different section of the market. For instance, Nautical commerce focuses mainly on product marketplaces whereas Mirakl is more focused on service marketplaces.
4. Wordpress vs Sharetribe
Wordpress is not a marketplace technology however, it is possible to install plugins on top of wordpress to build a marketplace. The big advantage here is that it is very easy to install and set up. If you’re a skilled Wordpress developer, you can customize the Wordpress template without any issues and you can add new features by installing plugins on top of Wordpress.
The big challenge with Wordpress as a Sharetribe alternative is that Wordpress does not come with a no-code marketplace builder. This makes it much harder to configure for non-technical teams. Whilst there are various video tutorials, these are mostly out of date and therefore screens in the tutorials do not match what you’ll see on the screen.
In addition, managing development on Wordpress gets complex after a while. There is also the risk of introducing bugs into your marketplace with each new plugin that you install and the code architecture for a Wordpress marketplace is big and difficult to scale.
In the end, Wordpress is similar to Sharetribe in that it is a good prototyping solution for marketplaces. It can help you learn what your market is about, refine your value proposition, and it’s not going to cost you a fortune to set up. That being said, you should not think about Wordpress as a marketplace solution that will work in the long run.
For a more sustainable marketplace tech stack, we recommend you to consider Dittofi vs Wordpress.
5. Shopify (with multi-vendor plugin)
Although Shopify is not a Sharetribe alternative in the strictest sense, it can be turned into one by installing the Shopify multi-vendor plugin. We’ve tried to build a marketplace on top of Shopify in the past and it is NOT easy to do.
There are however some benefits to building a marketplace on Shopify. This includes:
- Cost of getting started: It can be lower cost to build a marketplace on Shopify compared to Sharetribe and it is certainly going to be cheaper than custom code. However, the actual price will depend on the quality of the team that you hire to do the work, what their experience levels are and what is the market’s demand for their services.
- Built in marketing tools: The number one benefit of using Shopify to build your marketplace is that it comes with a number of powerful marketing tools. These will allow you to attract and engage with your early adopters.
- Low total cost of ownership: Low cost to set up.
In contrast to these positives, there are also some major challenges, such as rate limits which prohibit scalability, complications with tax, challenges integrating shipping APIs and more.
For a complete list of the pros and cons of Shopify as a marketplace solution, read Pros & cons of building a multi-vendor marketplace on Shopify.
Ultimately, Shopify is not a marketplace solution and therefore, although it is often categorized as a Sharetribe alternative, it really isn’t.
6. Magento (with multi-vendor extension)
Similar to Shopify, Magento is traditionally a single sided ecommerce platform and not an online marketplace solution. That being said, it can be converted into a marketplace with the use of a multi-vendor extension.
Magento has many powerful ecommerce features however, these were originally designed for a single sided ecommerce store and not for marketplaces. Therefore they require significant customization to make work. In addition to this, Magento is a very big system that requires time and expensive, experienced developers in order to customize.
In the long run, you will probably get a better result with Magento compared to Sharetribe (for instance, did you know Amazon was built on Magento) however, getting there will be cost prohibitive for most people. For this reason Magento is typically used by larger organizations who have deeper pockets compared to Sharetribe founders.
A strong alternative here is Dittofi, which has been purpose built to offer founders an enterprise grade tech stack in a low cost way.
Learn more about Dittofi’s no-code marketplace solution.
7. Bubble, a no-code Sharetribe alternative
Bubble is a traditional no-code tool. This means that it allows you to build apps fast and without having to write any code.
Bubble makes it onto our list of Sharetribe alternatives because the platform includes several marketplace templates that you can use to jump start your marketplace development. Each template has been developed and are maintained by Bubble’s community of developers. This means that they are only as good as the development team that created them and, as such, are (for the most part) worse than all of the other marketplace technologies on this list.
Bubble’s no-code interface is also limited in terms of your ability to customize your marketplace. Although the Bubble interface is more advanced compared to Sharetribe, marketplaces built on Bubble are generally low quality, scale poorly, have bad SEO and are expensive to run. Worst of all, Bubble does not allow you to own your marketplace source code. This means that you will suffer from the risk of vendor lock-in.
To learn more about Bubble, read Dittofi vs Bubble.
Conclusion: Sharetribe alternatives - which is best for you?
Choosing the best marketplace technology can be difficult. Whilst there is a lot of marketing and sales materials trying to grab your attention and persuade you to build your marketplace with them.
That being said, every one of the Sharetribe alternatives on our list comes with trades offs. The primary ones are costs vs quality and time to market vs customizations.
Whilst it is unrealistic to think that you’ll own a solution that is advanced as Amazon or Airbnb for a minimal investment and in days, this would probably not be the right solution for you anyway.
The technology your choose to build your marketplace on should be one that you can (A) afford, (B) fits the stage of the business you’re in e.g. idea stage vs scaling up and (C) lays a solid foundation for your business and future development.
For this reason, having the option to customize and own your marketplace source code is absolutely essential. Marketplace hosting should also be affordable and, you should choose a technology that is quick and easy to iterate on.
Sharetribe and the other open source technologies therefore represent a good choice. They are quick to get started and give you code access for heavy duty customization. However, for faster product iteration, low cost customization and a more modern tech stack (React and Google Go), we recommend Dittofi’s hybrid no-code approach.
Of course, we are the Dittofi team, so we are bound to be a little biased. So make a list of what is important for your business e.g. code ownership, speed and cost of customization ongoing product iteration, quality tech stack, marketplace hosting, marketplace training etc.
Use this list to see which of the Sharetribe alternatives is best for you.
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