// the find
vuestorefront/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.
Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront) is a composable ecommerce frontend framework that sits between your backend platform (Shopify, Magento, commercetools, etc.) and your Vue/Nuxt or React/Next frontend. It provides a middleware layer, pre-built integrations, and a component library so you're not writing the same product-listing and cart plumbing from scratch. Aimed at agencies and merchants who need a production-grade headless storefront without building everything from zero.
The middleware abstraction is the real value: it normalizes wildly different backend APIs into a consistent interface, so switching from Magento to commercetools doesn't require rewriting your frontend. Storefront UI is a solid, ecommerce-specific component library — it knows what a product card and a checkout stepper are, unlike generic UI kits. Over 3,500 live production stores is a meaningful signal that the core architecture holds up under real load. Backend-agnostic design means you can escape vendor lock-in on the commerce platform while still moving fast.
The monorepo structure is a maze — the main repo is essentially a README and pointers; actual integration packages live scattered across the org, making it hard to understand what you're actually installing. The middleware being Express.js is showing its age; no native edge runtime support means latency you wouldn't have with a modern approach. Rebranding from vue-storefront to Alokai mid-stream has created documentation fragmentation: you'll find outdated v2 guides mixed with Alokai-era docs and it's not always clear which applies to your version. Nuxt/Vue is first-class; the Next.js/React path feels bolted on and lags behind in integration coverage.