PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a free, open-source e-commerce platform with 250,000+ active merchants and a large module ecosystem. It covers the full online store workflow: product catalog, payments, shipping, customer management, and marketing tools out of the box, with thousands of community and official modules extending it further.

The self-hosted Classic edition is free to download, install, and run. You bring your own hosting (it requires PHP and MySQL), your own payment integrations, and your own server, but you own the full stack without monthly platform fees. Managed and enterprise hosting tiers are available for merchants who want PrestaShop without the server maintenance.

The customization model is built around modules and themes from the PrestaShop Addons marketplace. This is both a strength and a potential cost center: the core is free, but building a professional store often involves purchasing paid modules for specific payment gateways, shipping integrations, or marketing automation.

Multi-language and multi-currency support are built in, which matters for merchants selling across regions. The admin interface is mature and well-documented after 15+ years of development, though it lags behind newer platforms visually.

PrestaShop is the standard self-hosted alternative to Shopify for merchants who want technical control without moving to WooCommerce. The difference versus WooCommerce is that PrestaShop is a standalone e-commerce application rather than a WordPress plugin, which simplifies the stack but limits the content management side.