Shopify vs PrestaShop: freedom, or upkeep.

Shopify has one fee: Basic €32, Grow €92 a month, roughly a quarter less paid annually, plus apps as you need them and the Shopify Payments card rate of 2% down to 1.5% + €0.25 depending on plan and market. Hosting, security and updates are in the price.

PrestaShop’s software is free, but the running costs sit elsewhere: hosting from around €10 a month, a premium theme, paid modules (€30–550 each) each carrying annual Business Care at 40% of its price, plus developer time. For a comparably equipped store the totals converge – the difference is how much of it is your problem. I will send an exact calculation for your case in writing within 24 hours.

The licence is free, not a finished store. You download the software for nothing, but you then pay for hosting, a premium theme, paid modules and their annual renewals, and above all the time of somebody who looks after running it, securing it and upgrading it. What you pay extra for and handle yourself on PrestaShop, Shopify puts in the monthly fee and does for you. So "free" catches up with Shopify quickly on a real store – with more worry on your side.

On Shopify the platform does. Hosting, scaling at peak, backups, security updates and PCI DSS Level 1 certification (the strictest standard for card payment security) are included and handled by Shopify. On PrestaShop all of it is on you or your developer: you choose and pay for hosting, watch for updates, take backups and answer for card payment security yourself. This is not theory – in 2022 a critical flaw hit PrestaShop and was being exploited before the fix shipped, and every operator had to apply it themselves. For my clients I watch the running and the security on their behalf.

Business Care is an annual subscription attached on PrestaShop’s official marketplace to every paid module and theme. You buy the module once, but you only get updates and support while Business Care is active, and it renews automatically at 40% of the module price each year. A handful of paid modules therefore takes a bite out of the budget annually – and without it you are left on an older version with no updates, which on a self-hosted platform is a security risk as well. On Shopify a great many of the 16,000+ apps are free, and the paid ones run on a predictable monthly subscription.

If you have a reliable long-term developer, PrestaShop can serve you well. The catch is that running, security and upgrades then rest on one person – one developer is one point of failure. The ecosystem of agencies and developers around Shopify is larger, so a replacement is easier to find, and the routine work (hosting, updates, payment security) is not paid to anyone at all, because the platform does it. The question is not whether your developer can handle it, but how many of their hours you buy each month to do so. Those hours could go into things that earn instead of maintaining a server.

Owning the code and the data is a genuine PrestaShop advantage and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But you are not imprisoned on Shopify either: products, customers and order history export through CSV and the API at any time and move elsewhere. You do not own the platform; in exchange it handles running, security and scaling for you. Owning the code is worth something only when somebody can and will maintain it – and on a self-hosted platform that maintenance is the expensive part.

With Shopify Payments you pay the card rate – from 2% + €0.25 on Basic down to 1.5% on Advanced, varying by market – with no platform fee on top. Use a different gateway, such as Mollie, Adyen or PayU, and Shopify adds a surcharge: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. PrestaShop has no such surcharge – you install the gateway as a module and pay only the gateway’s own rate. That is a real PrestaShop advantage for a store committed to a specific local gateway. Neither platform takes a percentage of your revenue.

Yes, by a different route. PrestaShop has modules for all of it – some official and free, most of them paid third-party add-ons that you choose and maintain yourself. On Shopify I handle them through apps or custom work on the API: carriers with pickup point selection in the cart, feeds for Google Shopping, idealo or Ceneo, invoicing through Xero, Lexware Office or DATEV. The difference is not whether they work, but who keeps that assembly current – on Shopify I treat it as part of the build and watch it for you.

Multistore is a solid argument for PrestaShop and I will not pretend otherwise – several stores from one admin sits in the free core, whereas on Shopify it is handled through Markets or several stores. On B2B, though, that stopped being true in April 2026: native B2B is part of every paid Shopify plan, not just Plus, and at no extra charge – company accounts, wholesale price lists, volume discounts and payment terms. Plus then unlocks unlimited catalogues and assigning a price list to a specific company (outside Plus there are three active catalogues). If multistore is the core of your business, I will go through your specific model with you before recommending anything.

In one respect PrestaShop is ahead: it lets you shape addresses and the whole URL structure freely, while Shopify has fixed /products/ and /collections/ prefixes you cannot change. In practice that is Shopify’s only substantial SEO drawback – and Shopify has a native blog for content SEO, which PrestaShop lacks in the core (it is a module, or a separate WordPress you then maintain on the side). Redirects, meta tags, sitemaps, canonicals, structured data and site speed all favour Shopify. Precisely because of those prefixes, a migration maps every URL to a 301 so you keep your rankings.

It does – PrestaShop Hosted, around €29 a month, which takes hosting and basic maintenance off your hands. But it is a smaller package built on the older version 8, and above all it removes exactly the reason people choose PrestaShop: full control and your own server. Against Shopify it then has neither the 16,000+ app ecosystem, nor Markets, nor Shop Pay. If what you want is a platform that hosts and looks after itself, going straight to Shopify makes more sense. Most people mean the classic self-hosted version when they say "PrestaShop" anyway – and that is what this page is about.

Products, categories, customers and orders all transfer – on a self-hosted platform like PrestaShop they can come straight out of the database. Passwords do not transfer (on Shopify a customer does not need one; they sign in with a code sent by email). I go through what moves and what stays behind in modules on the migration page.

No. I build the new store alongside the running one – PrestaShop keeps selling the whole time. On launch day the domain switches and the redirects go live; downtime is measured in minutes, not days. You lose no orders and no customers.

Typically two to eight weeks from brief to launch. Price is driven by the volume and cleanliness of the data, the number of addresses to redirect and the number of modules I replace with native functionality – in the low thousands to low tens of thousands of euros depending on scope. Send me a few sentences through the form below and you have a written estimate within 24 hours. No call, no commitment.

Expect short-term movement – Google itself calls that normal and allows several weeks for a mid-sized site before the index settles. A lasting drop is caused by missing redirects and lost metadata. PrestaShop also tends to have addresses ending in .html and a URL structure of its own, so I start with an audit of every address, each one gets a 301, I carry over meta and structured data – and for the first 30 days after launch I actively watch indexing and rankings on Google and Bing.

It is not an exaggeration. Moves between major versions (1.6 → 1.7 → 8 → 9) are known for breaking themes and modules, and the official one-click upgrade tends to be unreliable from older versions. In practice a major update is a development project – you either pay for it, or you stay on an old version and accumulate security debt. Shopify by contrast updates itself, invisibly; a new checkout or admin version arrives without you doing anything at all.

When you have your own developer, you want full ownership of a self-hosted platform, and the free core (multistore, B2B price lists, languages) covers most of what you need – and the time spent on hosting, security and upgrades feels like a fair price for that control. Then PrestaShop will serve you well, and it remains a serious platform in its strongest markets, France, Spain, Italy and Poland, even as the global install base shrinks. If that is not you – if you want a store that simply runs and the operational worry left to the platform – I will say so plainly in my reply to your enquiry.

Yes. WooCommerce is PrestaShop’s closest neighbour – also self-hosted, also with ownership of the code, just built as a plugin for WordPress rather than as a dedicated ecommerce package. It has its own detailed comparison against Shopify, and the comparison hub puts the platforms side by side if you want the overview first.