I run stores on both PrestaShop and Shopify, which means I get asked the same question constantly: which one should I be on. The honest answer is that there is no winner, only a right fit for your situation. The mistake is picking based on a YouTube comparison instead of your own constraints.
Let me lay out how I actually decide, and the one question that settles it most of the time.
The real difference, in one line
Shopify sells you convenience and rents you control. PrestaShop gives you control and charges you in time and technical effort.
Everything below is a footnote to that sentence. If you want to plug in and sell by the weekend, Shopify is built for you. If you want to own your platform, shape it exactly to your business, and avoid paying a percentage to a third party forever, PrestaShop rewards the effort.
Total cost, honestly
People compare the monthly plan and stop there. That is not the real number.
Shopify looks cheap on paper, then the costs stack: the plan, the apps you genuinely need (reviews, upsells, a decent feed manager), and the transaction fees if you do not use Shopify Payments. Three or four essential apps at twenty dollars each add up faster than anyone expects, and they are recurring forever.
PrestaShop is open source, so the software is free. Your costs are hosting, a developer when something breaks, and your own hours. There are no transaction fees taken by the platform and no per-app subscription tax, but there is no support line either. You are the support line.
For a small store with little technical help, Shopify often ends up cheaper once you price in your own time. For a store doing real volume, the percentage Shopify takes can quietly become the most expensive line item in the business, and that is usually when PrestaShop starts to look very attractive.
Control and customization
This is where PrestaShop pulls ahead for the people who need it. You have the database, the code, and the freedom to build whatever your business actually requires. Complex pricing rules, deep B2B logic, a checkout that does something unusual: all possible, because nothing is locked behind a platform's permission.
Shopify is improving here, and for most stores its limits never get in the way. But you are always operating inside someone else's box. The day you need the one thing the box does not allow, there is no workaround, only a feature request.
Pick Shopify and you rarely think about the platform. Pick PrestaShop and you think about it often, sometimes because you want to, sometimes because you have to.
SEO and performance
Both can rank well, and both can be slow if you neglect them.
Shopify gives you clean technical foundations out of the box, but its URL structure is rigid and you cannot change certain things even when you want to. PrestaShop gives you full control over URLs, markup, and performance, which is a gift if you know what to do with it and a liability if you do not.
In practice, the store that wins on SEO is the one with someone who cares about it, on either platform. The tool is not your bottleneck. Attention is.
Maintenance and peace of mind
This is the trade people underestimate. On Shopify, updates, security, and uptime are not your problem. You wake up and the store works. That is worth real money and real sleep.
On PrestaShop, you own all of it. Updates can break a theme. A module can conflict. Security is your responsibility. When it runs well it runs beautifully, but it does not run itself.
If you do not have technical help and you do not want to acquire it, that single fact should weigh heavily.
So when do I migrate someone?
Here is the question I actually use: is the platform the thing holding the business back, or is it something else?
Most stores that want to migrate do not have a platform problem. They have a traffic problem, an offer problem, or a conversion problem, and a migration is an expensive way to avoid fixing it. Moving from Shopify to PrestaShop will not save a store that nobody visits.
I recommend migrating in two cases. First, when Shopify's transaction fees on real volume have grown larger than the cost of running and maintaining PrestaShop properly. Second, when the business genuinely needs customization that Shopify cannot give, and you have lived with the limit long enough to be sure it is real and not a passing frustration.
Going the other way, from PrestaShop to Shopify, I recommend when the maintenance burden is eating time that should go into marketing, and the store is small enough that the fees do not hurt.
The short version
If you are starting out, value your time, and want to focus on selling rather than servers, go Shopify. If you are doing volume, need control, and have or are willing to get technical support, PrestaShop will serve you for years and keep more of every euro you make.
Whatever you choose, do not let the platform become the project. The store exists to sell. The best platform is the one that gets out of your way so you can do that.