PrestaShop vs Shopify — self-hosted freedom against a rented checkout

On this page

• The short answer
• A licence against a subscription
• Where the two platforms actually live
• The monthly bill, line by line
• Taking the money: PrestaShop Checkout against Shopify Payments
• The checkout you can and cannot touch
• Themes, PHP versions and the cost of staying current
• Languages, currencies and EU VAT
• Moving a catalogue from one to the other
• Which one, for which merchant
• Crosslisting from either store with FLUF Connect
• What FLUF costs
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

The short answer

Choose Shopify if you want a storefront kept alive by someone else’s engineers, you are content to accept payments through Shopify Payments, and your buyers are mostly in the UK, North America or Australia. Choose PrestaShop if you sell into France, Spain, Italy or Poland, you want your checkout, your database and your payment margin under your own control, and you either understand a PHP server or are prepared to pay someone who does.

This page is written for a merchant with stock who will also want that catalogue on eBay, Etsy or Vinted. The storefront is where the catalogue lives; it is rarely where most of the sales happen.

A licence against a subscription

PrestaShop is published under the Open Software License 3.0 for the core and the Academic Free License 3.0 for the modules packaged with it. You can read it, alter it, fork it and host it wherever you please, and PrestaShop SA, acquired by MBE Worldwide in 2021, earns nothing from that. Its revenue is the Addons marketplace, PrestaShop Checkout and a hosted edition sold against its own download.

Shopify gives you no code. You hold a tenancy that lasts as long as you pay and comply with its terms; the theme is Liquid you can rewrite and the product data is exportable, but the application rendering the shop, holding the database and running the checkout is Shopify’s, and it changes beneath you. The company’s annual report frames its merchant base in more than 175 countries on exactly that footing. On PrestaShop any table, script or gateway is yours to add and nobody takes a percentage; on Shopify you get a governed set of hooks, an App Store for the remainder, and a fee schedule that pays you to stay within it.

Where the two platforms actually live

PrestaShop is a French product whose merchants are mostly Romance-language and Polish. Store Leads counted 149,297 live PrestaShop stores on 4 September 2026, with France on 22,232 (14.9%), Spain on 15,511 (10.4%), Poland on 13,321 (8.9%) and Italy on 11,046 (7.4%). Czechia, Germany and Romania come after. The United States is ninth on 2,565. The same report puts PrestaShop’s store count down 15% year on year in the second quarter of 2026.

Shopify is the inverse. Store Leads counted 3,027,144 live Shopify stores on the same date, up 11% year on year: 1,153,323 in the United States (38.1%), 226,510 in the United Kingdom, then Canada, Australia and India. France and Germany appear at 105,062 and 100,266: a French merchant on Shopify is one in thirty, on PrestaShop one in seven. W3Techs, which measures share of the web rather than store counts, puts PrestaShop at 0.7% of the CMS-identified web and Shopify at 7.7%.

Freelancers, hosts and payment modules cluster where the merchants are. A PrestaShop developer in Lyon, Madrid or Kraków is findable; one in Leeds is not. The mirror image is true of Shopify Partners.

The monthly bill, line by line

A PrestaShop store costs nothing to license and something to run. A Shopify store costs a fixed subscription and nothing to run. The mistake is to stop there, because the true PrestaShop figure depends on who hosts it, which modules you buy, and who does the updates.

Hosting first. OVHcloud, the Roubaix host that a great many French PrestaShop merchants sit on, lists its Performance plan for PrestaShop at £17.19 a month excluding VAT on renewal, with a discounted first year. PrestaShop’s own Hosted edition is €29 a month excluding VAT, or €24 a month invoiced as €290 a year, on Gandi servers with 50 GB of space, PrestaShop Checkout preloaded and a 14-day trial. Bargain cPanel hosting is available, but a Symfony application with a recommended 512 MB memory_limit per script is a poor fit for a £3-a-month plan.

Then modules. The Addons marketplace sells one-off licences, and PrestaShop’s own cost guide puts paid themes between €50 and €200 and promotional or SEO modules between €20 and €200 a month. A working shop carries several: a carrier module for Colissimo, Mondial Relay, Correos or InPost, a GDPR cookie banner, an SEO module, perhaps an eBay or Amazon bridge. Then there is the upgrade line, which nobody budgets for; it gets its own section further down.

Shopify’s bill is simpler to read. From the UK pricing page: Basic £25 a month or £19 paid yearly; Grow £65 or £49; Advanced £344 or £259; Plus from £1,800. From the Irish page, which is the eurozone reference: Basic €32 or €24 paid yearly; Grow €92 or €69; Advanced €384 or €289; Plus from €2,100. Hosting is unmetered with unlimited bandwidth on every plan. Apps are Shopify’s modules, and they are almost always monthly subscriptions rather than one-off licences, the reason a Shopify bill creeps up over time.

For a small shop the columns converge: PrestaShop Hosted at €24 and Shopify Basic at €24 are the same price, and OVHcloud at £17.19 is a couple of pounds under Shopify Basic at £19. The real divergence is what happens to each sale.

Taking the money: PrestaShop Checkout against Shopify Payments

Both vendors sell their own payment product and price it to be the natural pick. PrestaShop leaves the gate open to rivals; Shopify charges you for walking through it.

PrestaShop Checkout is a module built with PayPal. Its pricing brochure lists, for domestic transactions in the United Kingdom, 1.2% + £0.30 on credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and local payment methods, 2.9% + £0.30 on PayPal, and 3.5% on American Express. France and Spain are 1.2% + €0.35 on cards and 2.9% + €0.35 on PayPal; Italy is 1.2% + €0.35 on cards and 3.4% + €0.35 on PayPal; Poland is 1.9% + 1.35 PLN on cards, 0.9% + 1.35 PLN on BLIK and 2.9% + 1.35 PLN on PayPal. Germany is the outlier at 2.99% + €0.35 on every method. There is no monthly fee for the module. Prefer Stripe, Adyen, PayPlug, Przelewy24 or your bank’s own gateway? Add that module instead; PrestaShop takes nothing.

Shopify Payments is Shopify’s Stripe-based processor. On the UK pricing page the online card rate is 2% + 25p on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow and 1.5% + 25p on Advanced, with American Express and international cards at 3.1%, 2.7% and 2.5%. The Irish page mirrors it in EUR: 2% + €0.25, 1.7% + €0.25 and 1.5% + €0.25, Klarna at 4.99% + €0.35 on every plan. If you use any other gateway, Shopify adds a transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus to every order, on top of what that gateway charges. Shopify’s help centre is explicit that this applies to all third-party gateways even when Shopify Payments is activated, with PayPal and offline payments the sole exemptions. Shopify Payments is available in a fixed roster of countries covering the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Czechia, Portugal and Romania; a merchant based elsewhere cannot escape the surcharge.

Local payment habits are where a French, Polish or Belgian shop lives or dies, and the brochures differ here too. PrestaShop Checkout prices Bancontact in Belgium at a flat €0.39, BLIK in Poland at 0.9% + 1.35 PLN, Verkkopankki in Finland at 1.2% + €0.35 and Ratepay invoice payment in Germany at 2.99% + €0.35, and bundles PayPal’s instalment products: Pay in 4X in France on baskets of €30 to €2,000, Pay in 3 in Spain, Italy and the UK. Shopify Payments lists Klarna at 4.99% + €0.35 and prices iDEAL and Bancontact separately on its pricing pages.

Two caveats. The PrestaShop brochure covers domestic transactions and defers cross-border rates to PayPal, where they climb; and Shopify’s card rate falls to 1.5% + 25p on Advanced, nearer to PrestaShop Checkout than the Basic figure suggests. On the entry plan, however, PrestaShop takes a visibly slimmer slice of every card payment.

The checkout you can and cannot touch

This is the part that merchants who have never run a Shopify store tend not to believe. On PrestaShop the checkout is controllers and Twig views in your theme folder. A one-page checkout, a mandatory SIRET or NIP field for B2B buyers, an InPost Paczkomat or Mondial Relay pickup-point map on the shipping step, iDEAL or Bancontact as the first payment option, a bespoke fraud heuristic: you write it or buy the module that does, and it runs on your server.

On Shopify the checkout is Shopify’s. The old checkout.liquid file stopped working for the information, shipping and payment pages on 13 August 2024, and its remaining use on the thank-you and order-status pages was retired for Plus stores on 28 August 2025 and for non-Plus stores on 26 August 2026. What replaced it is Checkout Extensibility, and its help page marks the boundary plainly: standard checkout customisations, meaning logo, colours and fonts plus apps on the thank-you and order-status pages, are available on Basic and above; apps on the information, shipping and payment pages and the Checkout Branding API are Shopify Plus only. Plus begins at £1,800 a month.

For most small merchants the Shopify checkout is excellent as delivered. The restriction bites when you sell B2B, when you need a courier or payment method the checkout lacks in your country, or when your conversion problem lives on the shipping step and you are not allowed in. Those merchants end up on PrestaShop, or paying for Plus.

Themes, PHP versions and the cost of staying current

Here the bargain flips. What PrestaShop grants in control it reclaims in upkeep, and the past eighteen months have demonstrated it.

PrestaShop 9.0 shipped on 10 June 2025, moving the application to Symfony 6.4 LTS. The version matters because of PHP. PrestaShop 8 runs on PHP 7.2 through 8.1 and is marked unsupported on PHP 8.2 or later. PrestaShop 9.0 runs on PHP 8.1 through 8.4, with 8.4 recommended, and 9.1 extends that to 8.5. Hosts are retiring PHP 8.1 as it ages out of security coverage, so a merchant still on 8.x has an upgrade coming whether they want one or not, and every paid module must be checked for a 9-compatible release first. The project keeps releasing on both lines meanwhile: 9.1.5 and 8.2.8 both landed on 18 August 2026, with a 9.2 beta in July.

The theme moved at the same time. PrestaShop’s Classic theme, which every 1.7 and 8 store started from, has been succeeded by Hummingbird, built on Bootstrap 5.3 with BEM, SCSS, colour modes and no jQuery, the default theme from PrestaShop 9.1 and the reference implementation for new themes, with Classic deprecated for new development. If your front end is a customised Classic child theme, moving to 9 leaves you either dragging Classic forward on a deprecated foundation or rebuilding on Hummingbird. Neither is a weekend job.

Shopify has none of this. No version number, no PHP, no database migration, no theme deprecation notice. Themes are Liquid on the Online Store 2.0 architecture, apps update themselves, and the quarterly Admin API retirements are the app developer’s concern rather than yours. The price of that calm is that you cannot decline an update you dislike, and checkout.liquid shows what that looks like.

Languages, currencies and EU VAT

PrestaShop grew up in a market where a shop in Strasbourg needs German by default, and its internationalisation is in the core rather than the app store. Languages are added from a localisation pack and enabled per language; currencies are added the same way with an update button that refreshes conversion rates; and multistore lets you run several front offices, on different domains, from one back office with per-store pricing. A French-and-Spanish shop with EUR and a distinct PLN storefront is a configuration task, not a shopping trip.

Tax is where PrestaShop’s core stops short. Its tax rules engine lets you declare a rate per country, optionally per state and postcode range, and combine rules, which suffices to charge the destination country’s VAT after you pass the EU’s €10,000 distance-selling threshold. What it does not do is the One Stop Shop return itself. PrestaShop’s own guidance on the July 2021 EU VAT changes steps merchants through configuring destination rates under International and Taxes and is silent on OSS reporting; that, along with VIES validation of business customers, is module territory.

Shopify handles the same ground through Markets and Shopify Tax. Markets gives a single store per-market currency, language, pricing, domains and shipping. Selling in a currency other than your payout currency carries a conversion fee of 1.5% for US stores and 2% elsewhere, a line PrestaShop’s currency handling does not carry. On VAT, Shopify’s EU reference documents OSS registration as a supported registration type beside a local registration and the micro-business exemption. Shopify Tax, the automated calculation service, covers the EU and the UK in addition to the US and Canada, and its pricing is nothing up to $100,000 of sales, then 0.25% of taxed orders in the EU and UK (0.15% on Plus), capped at $0.99 an order. Shopify computes; it neither files nor remits, so the OSS return is still yours to submit. Managed Markets, the merchant-of-record option, is open only to merchants based in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom.

For a European merchant: PrestaShop bundles the storefront side of cross-border selling and leaves the OSS return to a module or an accountant; Shopify charges a percentage for conversion and, above a threshold, for tax calculation, but presents OSS as a checkbox rather than a project.

Moving a catalogue from one to the other

Moves between these two run mostly one way, from PrestaShop to Shopify, and Shopify has noticed. Its own migration guides cover Amazon, Clover, Etsy, eBay, GoDaddy, Lightspeed, Square, Squarespace, Wix and WooCommerce; PrestaShop is not among them, and the Store Migration app in Shopify’s own App Store lists Square, WooCommerce, Etsy, Wix, Amazon, eBay, Clover and Lightspeed as sources, not PrestaShop. A PrestaShop merchant takes one of the paths the help page suggests for uncovered platforms: a CSV of products and customers reimported through Shopify’s importer, a third-party migration app such as MigrationPro or Cart2Cart, a Shopify Partner, or a custom script against the Admin API.

What survives a CSV move is products, combinations, images by URL, customers and, handled carefully, categories as collections. What does not survive is customer passwords, which no platform exports, and past orders in any form your bookkeeper would trust. Google positions survive only if you redirect every old URL, and PrestaShop’s numeric-ID URLs do not map to Shopify’s handles without a redirect table.

Going the other way is rarer: PrestaShop’s importer takes CSV for products, combinations, categories and customers; what stays behind is app data and any Markets or checkout configuration. For a marketplace merchant the move that matters is neither: the catalogue’s link to eBay and Etsy lives in the listing tool, and if that tool reads from the store, a storefront swap need not touch a single marketplace listing.

Which one, for which merchant

PrestaShop, when two or more of these hold: you sell mainly into France, Spain, Italy or Poland; 1.2% against 2% on cards is real money to you, or you have a gateway you intend to keep; you need something in the checkout Shopify reserves for Plus; you want several storefronts or languages without a second subscription; you have, or will pay for, someone who can upgrade a PHP application and keep its modules compatible.

Shopify, when two or more of these hold: your buyers are in the UK, North America or Australia; you would rather pay a fixed £19 to £65 a month than worry about PHP versions, memory ceilings or who patches what; Shopify Payments is acceptable to you, which dissolves the surcharge problem; you are one person and the store is not your day job.

Neither, as the centrepiece, if most of your sales come from marketplaces. Plenty of merchants on FLUF Connect sell more on eBay, Vinted and Depop than on their own site; the store is the system of record for stock and a landing spot for repeat customers. Choose whichever is cheapest to keep alive that your listing tool can read from.

Crosslisting from either store with FLUF Connect

FLUF Connect regards PrestaShop and Shopify identically: as a source store. It reads your products into one catalogue, publishes them to the marketplaces you choose, and keeps stock aligned in both directions. Sell a jacket on eBay and FLUF writes the new quantity back to your store; sell it on your store and FLUF ends the eBay listing. Store orders land in the FLUF orders view next to the marketplace orders.

Connect Shopify in FLUF Connect and grant the requested permissions for your catalogue, inventory, orders and locations. Shopify sales update connected marketplace availability automatically; allow time for changes to complete.

Connect PrestaShop with your store URL and a Webservice key with the required permissions. FLUF Connect supports catalogue import, crosslisting and stock updates. Review your categories, images and stock before publishing, and check availability after a sale or restock.

What FLUF does not do, on either platform, is manage the storefront: no theme edits, no checkout changes, no Markets or tax configuration. It is a catalogue and inventory bridge between your store and 51 marketplaces, indifferent to which of the two you chose.

What FLUF costs

7 days for £1, then from £9/month, then plans from £9 a month.

Crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations are on every plan, and every plan carries unlimited listings. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing come with the plans above Starter. Paying yearly saves 40%.

For this pairing: a store connection costs the same whichever platform you choose, and swapping one store for the other leaves your marketplace listings untouched, because they belong to the FLUF catalogue rather than to the store.

Sources and verification

Every fee, date, version and figure above was checked against the linked primary source on 8 September 2026.

• PrestaShop LICENSE.md on GitHub
• PrestaShop 9.0 release announcement and GitHub releases
• PrestaShop 9 system requirements and PrestaShop 8 system requirements
• Hummingbird theme documentation
• PrestaShop Checkout pricing brochure (PDF), linked from the PrestaShop Checkout page
• PrestaShop Hosted
• OVHcloud PrestaShop hosting
• PrestaShop’s own cost guide
• Languages, currencies, multistore and tax rules in the PrestaShop user guide, plus PrestaShop’s 2021 EU VAT guidance.
• PrestaShop Webservice getting started
• MBE Worldwide announcement
• Shopify UK pricing and Shopify Ireland pricing
• Shopify on third-party providers and Shopify Payments supported countries.
• Shopify changelog on checkout.liquid, the checkout upgrade page and customise checkout configurations
• Shopify Markets, international pricing fees, Managed Markets requirements, EU tax reference, Shopify Tax and Shopify Tax pricing.
• Migrating to Shopify, the Store Migration app and MigrationPro
• Shopify hosting
• Shopify FY2025 annual report
• Store Leads PrestaShop report and Store Leads Shopify report (both updated 4 September 2026) — live store counts, country breakdowns and year-on-year change.
• W3Techs on PrestaShop and W3Techs CMS overview

What we could not verify: Shopify’s Starter plan price and transaction fee, which the UK and Irish Starter pages no longer state, so Starter is omitted; the module count on PrestaShop Addons, whose pages refused to load; BuiltWith’s live-site counts, which sit behind a script we could not run, so Store Leads and W3Techs are used instead; PrestaShop Checkout’s cross-border surcharges, which the brochure defers to PayPal; and Cart2Cart’s PrestaShop-to-Shopify pricing, whose page was unreachable. The PrestaShop 9 requirements page lists PHP 8.4 as the 9.0 recommendation in its table and 8.5 in its prose; the table is used here.

Related guides

• Sell on PrestaShop — the complete merchant guide
• Sell on Shopify — the complete merchant guide
• PrestaShop vs WooCommerce
• Shopify vs WooCommerce
• Crosslist from PrestaShop to eBay
• Crosslist from Shopify to eBay
• All marketplaces and store platforms
• All crosslisting guides
• Crosslist from PrestaShop to Amazon
• Crosslist from PrestaShop to Depop