PrestaShop vs Shopify

If you want to sell quickly, without servers, version upgrades or module conflicts, choose Shopify. Hosting, security, updates and a high-converting checkout come in a monthly plan, and your team can run the store without a developer on call.

If you want software you own, a catalogue engine that handles complex products natively, multiple stores from one back office, and the freedom to change anything in the code, choose PrestaShop. It is free and open source, backed by a large network of agencies in France and Europe, and you can host it wherever you want.

The deciding question is not features: both can run a serious store. It is how much technical responsibility you want to carry, and who will carry it in three years.

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce solution created in France. You download it for free, install it on the hosting of your choice, and get a complete store: catalogue, cart, checkout, orders, customers, promotions, carriers and taxes, managed from a back office built for merchants. PrestaShop says it is used by 250,000 merchants worldwide, with more than 250 certified agencies.

The current Classic edition is based on PrestaShop 9. It ships with the Hummingbird theme, PrestaShop Checkout built with PayPal, an Update Assistant to simplify upgrades, the eShip shipping service and access to the Addons marketplace from the back office. Its catalogue is one of its historical strengths: products with combinations of attributes, customer groups with their own prices, multiple languages and currencies, and multistore management from a single installation.

For merchants who do not want to host it themselves, PrestaShop Hosted adds hosting, installation and support for a monthly fee. Either way, the store is built from modules, and the quality of a PrestaShop store depends a lot on the agency or developer who chooses and maintains them.

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform. You pay a monthly plan and everything technical is handled for you: hosting, SSL, security, updates, payment compliance and the checkout. You choose a theme, add products, connect payments and start selling online, in physical shops with Shopify POS, or on marketplaces and social networks from the same admin.

Its strength is the ecosystem. The Shopify App Store lists more than 21,000 apps, Shop Pay offers returning customers a one-tap checkout, and Shopify releases more than 150 updates twice a year through its Editions. Its AI assistant, Sidekick, is built into the admin, and its Agentic Storefronts make products available in AI conversations such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

The trade-off is control. You work within Shopify’s structure, its checkout and its URL formats, and many features come from apps billed every month. You cannot host Shopify yourself or take the code elsewhere; you can export your data.

Twelve criteria we look at on every e-commerce project. The last column says which platform has the edge, from our experience on client stores.

PrestaShop Classic is a free download. You pay for everything around it: hosting and a domain name, a theme if you do not keep the default one, the modules you add, and the development and maintenance work. PrestaShop Hosted, its managed offer, costs €29 excluding VAT a month with no commitment, or from €24 a month on a yearly plan, with a 14-day free trial (PrestaShop publishes this price in euros only). It includes hosting with Gandi (50 GB), store installation, automatic VAT calculation by customer country, GDPR and cookie management through PrestaShop Legal Assistant, and email or phone support six days a week. Modules and themes from the Addons marketplace are mostly sold individually, so the bill depends on your needs.

Shopify’s official US prices in November 2026: Basic costs $29 a month billed yearly ($39 billed monthly), Grow $79 ($105), Advanced $299 ($399), and Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term ($2,500 on a one-year term). Shopify also publishes an official euro price list: €24, €69 and €289 a month billed yearly (€32, €92 and €384 billed monthly), and Plus from €2,100. Hosting, security and updates are included. New stores get a short free trial, followed at the time of writing by an introductory offer of $1 (or €1) a month for three months. Apps from the App Store are extra, and many are billed monthly.

At the entry level, PrestaShop Hosted and Shopify Basic cost about the same. The difference lies in what you add: modules bought once and maintained by your agency on one side, monthly apps and a fully managed platform on the other.

PrestaShop takes no commission on your sales. You pay only the fees of the payment provider you choose. PrestaShop Checkout, built with PayPal and included in the Classic edition, lets you sell in 190 countries and 20 currencies, and French merchants can also plug in the modules of their bank, Stripe, Mollie or other local providers, and negotiate their rates. In November 2026, PrestaShop also announced a new solution, PrestaShop Payments, expected to reach stores in 2027 alongside PrestaShop Checkout; its pricing had not been published at the time of writing.

Shopify’s logic depends on the provider. With Shopify Payments, you pay only the card rate, which falls as you move up the plans: in the United States, 2.9% + 30¢ per online card payment on Basic, 2.7% on Grow, 2.5% on Advanced and 2.25% on Plus, plus the fixed 30¢; in the euro zone, 2.1% + €0.30 on Basic, 1.8% on Grow, 1.6% on Advanced and 1.3% on Plus. With another provider, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of that provider’s: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus.

In practice, a merchant happy with Shopify Payments pays a fair rate with nothing to set up. A merchant who must keep a specific bank or acquirer, which is common in France, keeps more freedom and fewer fees with PrestaShop.

Shopify is built so that a merchant can open a store alone in a few days. The admin guides each step, nothing needs installing, and updates arrive without you noticing. Its interface is consistent from one screen to the next, and the mobile app lets you follow orders anywhere.

PrestaShop’s back office is complete and familiar to many French merchants, with fine-grained settings for catalogue, carriers, taxes and customer groups. The setup asks for more: hosting, installation, a theme, then the right modules, usually with help from an agency. PrestaShop Hosted removes the hosting part and adds a guided tour of the back office.

The real gap shows over time. On PrestaShop, the core, the theme and each module evolve on their own schedules, and a major version upgrade, such as moving to PrestaShop 9, is a project in its own right: modules must be compatible, overrides checked and the store tested. The Update Assistant helps, but many stores stay on old versions because upgrading costs time and money. On Shopify, that question simply does not exist.

This is where PrestaShop is strongest out of the box. Products with many combinations of attributes, features for filtering, packs, customer groups with their own prices and discounts, specific prices by country or quantity, several languages and currencies, and multistore management that runs several shops from one back office. For a B2B catalogue with negotiated prices, or a merchant running several brands, PrestaShop covers a lot without extra cost.

Shopify approaches the same needs differently. Variants handle most catalogues, Shopify Markets manages several countries, currencies and languages from one store, and up to 10 inventory locations are included on Basic, Grow and Advanced, 200 on Plus. Staff accounts grow with the plan: none on Basic, 5 on Grow, 15 on Advanced, unlimited on Plus. Full B2B, with unlimited B2B catalogues, and a fully customisable checkout are Shopify Plus features, which starts at $2,300 a month (€2,100 in the euro zone).

Our reading: for a complex catalogue or B2B on a mid-size budget, PrestaShop often does natively what Shopify needs apps or Plus to do. For a direct-to-consumer brand selling a clear range in several countries, Shopify is simpler and more than enough.

Both can rank well, and both have their constraints.

PrestaShop gives fine control over URLs, meta titles and descriptions per language, and friendly URLs for products and categories. Its weak points are well known to SEO specialists: duplicate content from product combinations and faceted navigation if they are not configured carefully, and a blog that usually needs a module. Performance depends on hosting and modules, and a slow store loses what its flexibility gains. A good PrestaShop agency handles all of this; a neglected store accumulates SEO debt.

Shopify covers the essentials cleanly with little effort: editable titles and meta descriptions, automatic sitemaps, canonical tags, structured data in most modern themes and a redirect manager. Its limits are structural: URLs follow fixed patterns, with products under /products/ and collections under /collections/, and the built-in blog is basic.

Our reading: well set up, PrestaShop offers more control, particularly for multilingual catalogues. Shopify gives a cleaner baseline with less maintenance. For a store that grows through content, either one gains from being paired with a dedicated content site.

Shopify runs every store on its own infrastructure, with a global CDN, SSL and payment security included. Traffic peaks such as sales or Black Friday are its problem, not yours. Speed then depends mostly on the theme and the apps you add, since each app can inject scripts into the storefront.

PrestaShop performance and security are what your hosting and your agency make them. On good hosting with caching, a lean theme and well-chosen modules, a PrestaShop store is fast and stable. On cheap hosting, with dozens of modules and an outdated version, it is neither. Security patches for the core are published by the PrestaShop project, but they only protect stores that apply them, and each module is a potential weak point.

The upside of PrestaShop is choice: you can host in France, with the provider and the server size you want, and keep your data where you decide. The upside of Shopify is that none of this is your concern.

PrestaShop’s ecosystem is particularly dense in France and southern Europe. There are many agencies and freelancers who know it well, more than 250 certified agencies worldwide, and modules built for local needs: French carriers, banks, marketplaces and accounting tools. Documentation and community discussions in French are plentiful, and Hosted customers get support six days a week by email or phone. The flip side is that quality varies: choosing the right agency matters as much as choosing the platform.

Shopify’s ecosystem is global and larger. More than 21,000 apps, thousands of partners, and a strong presence of French agencies and apps that has grown quickly in recent years. Support is provided by Shopify itself, and Plus customers get priority 24/7 phone support. Most new e-commerce tools, from marketing to logistics, now launch on Shopify first.

If you want a local partner who knows French commerce inside out, both ecosystems have them. If you want the widest choice of ready-made tools, Shopify has the edge.

Shopify has built AI into the platform. Sidekick, its assistant inside the admin, helps write product content, analyse sales and automate tasks. Its Agentic Storefronts let shoppers discover and buy products from Shopify stores inside AI conversations, in channels such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, and Shopify even offers an Agentic plan with no monthly fee for merchants who want to sell in AI chats without a Shopify online store.

PrestaShop takes the modular route. AI features come from modules, agencies and your own integrations, with the model and the hosting of your choice, which can matter for data control. The Classic edition already includes automated advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook and Instagram. It is flexible, but assembling and maintaining it is your job.

If being visible and sold through AI assistants matters to you soon, Shopify is ahead today. In both cases, clean product data, with clear titles, complete attributes and accurate stock, is what makes your products show up in AI answers.

For a small business opening its first online store, Shopify is usually the safer start: launch in days, nothing to maintain, a predictable monthly cost. PrestaShop Hosted is a credible alternative for a merchant who prefers a French solution and a back office in the PrestaShop tradition.

For a merchant with a complex catalogue, B2B customers with negotiated prices or several brands to run from one place, PrestaShop’s native features are a real advantage, provided an agency maintains the store. For a direct-to-consumer brand that sells through ads, launches and retail, Shopify’s checkout, POS and ecosystem are hard to beat.

For a merchant already on PrestaShop, the question is often not which platform is better, but whether the current store, its version and its modules are still worth maintaining. An old version with many custom overrides is often the trigger for a move.

What we recommend when a client asks, and why. We build brand sites in Webflow, Framer and Next.js with Payload, and integrate Shopify when a project sells online. For PrestaShop projects, we work alongside specialised agencies. We resell neither platform, so our advice follows the project.

Most migrations we see between the two go from PrestaShop to Shopify, usually when a version upgrade or the cost of maintaining modules forces a decision. There is no official one-click tool: Shopify’s migration guides do not include a dedicated PrestaShop guide, and the move relies on CSV imports, third-party migration apps or services, or Shopify’s APIs.

The order matters. Shopify advises importing products first, then customers, then historical orders, so that everything links correctly, and turning off order notifications during the import. PrestaShop combinations become Shopify variants, which is the step to check most carefully on complex catalogues. Customer groups, specific prices and some modules have no direct equivalent and must be rebuilt with Shopify features, apps or Plus.

SEO continuity is the part to get right. PrestaShop and Shopify do not structure URLs the same way, so every product, category, CMS page and article URL with traffic or backlinks needs a 301 redirect to its new address; Shopify lets you import redirects from a CSV file. Customer passwords do not carry over: plan an email inviting customers to reactivate their accounts.

A quick summary of where each platform is strong and where it holds you back. The full details are in our PrestaShop and Shopify reviews.

Pick Shopify if you want to focus on selling, with hosting, security, updates and checkout handled for you and costs you can predict. Pick PrestaShop if you want software you own, a catalogue engine that handles complex products and B2B natively, the freedom to host where you want, and you have a trusted agency or developer to maintain it.

Neither is better in general. Shopify is the better default for most new stores and for brands that grow through marketing and multiple channels. PrestaShop remains a strong choice for merchants with complex catalogues, multi-brand setups or a strong attachment to open source, as long as maintenance is planned and budgeted. And when an old PrestaShop store reaches the point where upgrading costs as much as rebuilding, moving to Shopify is often the moment to start again on cleaner ground.

Prices, fees and features were checked on the official pages below on 11 November 2026. The PrestaShop Payments announcement was reported by the trade press; check PrestaShop’s own pages for its availability and pricing.