PrestaShop has a dedicated following in European markets, particularly among merchants who needed serious customisation capability before Shopify Plus matured. The comparison today is different from what it was five years ago - Shopify has gained significant ground on the features that used to justify PrestaShop's complexity.
What PrestaShop offers
PrestaShop is an open-source ecommerce platform - free to download, self-hosted, and deeply customisable at the code level. Its module marketplace covers most standard ecommerce requirements, and the platform has been refined over 15+ years of active development.
The genuine advantages:
- No platform licence fee - the software is free
- Deep customisation without the constraints of a SaaS platform
- Strong multi-currency and multi-language support out of the box
- Mature B2B and wholesale functionality in the core
- Large European module marketplace with many EU-specific integrations
What PrestaShop actually costs
Like Magento, PrestaShop's "free" is the licence. Running it properly costs money:
Hosting. PrestaShop requires dedicated or VPS hosting with PHP, MySQL, and sufficient memory for a smoothly running store. A properly configured PrestaShop host costs £50–£200/month depending on traffic. Cheap shared hosting causes performance problems; adequate hosting is a material cost.
Modules. Core functionality often requires paid modules - advanced product options, shipping integrations, payment gateways, email marketing connections. A fully equipped PrestaShop store might carry £500–£2,000 of module licences, some with annual renewal fees.
Development. PrestaShop uses PHP and its own module architecture. PrestaShop developers are harder to find than Shopify developers, particularly outside France and Spain. UK and international developer rates are £80–£150/hour for competent PrestaShop work.
Ongoing maintenance. PrestaShop releases security patches and version updates regularly. Keeping a PrestaShop installation current - particularly with many modules installed - is a recurring developer cost. Module compatibility issues during upgrades are common.
Where PrestaShop falls short against modern Shopify
Checkout experience. Shopify's checkout converts at industry-leading rates and integrates natively with Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Buy Now Pay Later options. PrestaShop checkout is customisable but requires more effort to optimise and maintain to the same standard.
App and integration ecosystem. Shopify's app store has 8,000+ apps. PrestaShop's module marketplace is significantly smaller and many modern integrations (Klaviyo, specific loyalty programmes, headless options) don't have PrestaShop versions.
Developer availability. The Shopify developer community is an order of magnitude larger than PrestaShop's. Finding, hiring, and retaining PrestaShop development expertise is harder and often more expensive.
Hosting and infrastructure burden. Shopify is hosted infrastructure - you don't manage servers. PrestaShop requires ongoing hosting management. Security patches, database optimisation, server scaling - all become your responsibility.
When to stay on PrestaShop
PrestaShop still makes sense if:
- You have an existing in-house PrestaShop development team and significant custom development invested in the platform
- You require specific EU integrations or compliance features that your PrestaShop modules handle and that aren't available on Shopify
- Your store has custom functionality built at a depth that would require equivalent custom Shopify development to replace
When to migrate to Shopify
The signals that typically push PrestaShop merchants toward Shopify:
- Maintenance overhead is consuming development budget that should be going to growth
- The PrestaShop developer who built the site is unavailable and finding a replacement is difficult
- Performance is poor and improving it on the existing PrestaShop setup requires significant effort
- Module compatibility issues after a PrestaShop version upgrade broke functionality
- The business wants to add subscription selling, headless commerce, or checkout customisation that PrestaShop doesn't support cleanly
The migration from PrestaShop to Shopify covers products (with all attribute data), customers, order history, and 301 redirects. PrestaShop's URL structure doesn't match Shopify's, so redirect mapping requires care to preserve SEO equity. The migration service handles this end-to-end.
