PrestaShop vs Medusa: modules, multistore and when to switch

PrestaShop is one of Europe's best-known open-source shop systems, with a loyal base of users: merchants who deliberately chose open source without being tied to WordPress. With PrestaShop 9, released in June 2025, the software has been modernised considerably. Is Medusa still a logical next step? That depends on what you want to do with the shop.

We compare PrestaShop and Medusa on licence and transaction costs, modules, hosting, cost over three years and flexibility for B2B, multiple stores and regions.

The comparison in one table

Licence and transaction costs

PrestaShop Classic is free to download and runs on your own hosting (PrestaShop download). If you want hosting and support included, there is PrestaShop Hosted: €24 per month excl. VAT billed yearly (€290 per year) or €29 per month with no commitment. It includes hosting via Gandi (50 GB), support six days a week and PrestaShop Checkout, among other things. Note: on 5 November 2026 the Hosted version is still based on PrestaShop 8 (PrestaShop Hosted).

PrestaShop charges no fee on your revenue. You pay your payment provider, just as with Medusa. At Mollie that is €0.32 per iDEAL payment and 1.80% + €0.25 for consumer cards from the EEA (Mollie pricing).

Medusa is free to use as well: the core is under MIT, apart from a few Enterprise features. Medusa Cloud costs €26, €88 or €266 per month for Develop, Launch or Scale, with a 0% fee on your revenue (Medusa pricing). On licence and transaction costs PrestaShop and Medusa are therefore close.

Modules: per store and per year

With PrestaShop the difference is in the modules. You buy a module or theme from the PrestaShop Marketplace once, with twelve months of Business Care: updates, compatibility with new PrestaShop versions and support. After that, Business Care renews automatically at 40% of the module price per year. Business Care is tied to one product and one store. If you buy the same module for several stores, you need Business Care for each store (PrestaShop Help Center: Business Care).

If you let Business Care lapse and later want updates again, since 20 March 2025 you pay the Business Care price plus 95% of the module price (PrestaShop Help Center: reactivation fees). This mainly affects shops that have not updated for a while and then have to catch up all at once during a major version upgrade.

A worked example. Fifteen modules at an average of €100, for three stores: €4,500 to buy, then 40% of that each year, so €1,800 per year in Business Care. Over three years that is €4,500 + 2 × €1,800 = €8,100, before themes.

With Medusa you pay no module subscriptions per store. Whatever you need that is not in the core, you build as your own module or workflow. That costs one-off development time and maintenance afterwards.

Hosting and operations

PrestaShop runs on standard PHP hosting and is lighter than Magento. PrestaShop 9 uses Symfony 6.4 LTS, which according to PrestaShop receives security updates until November 2027, and supports PHP 8.1 to 8.4 (PrestaShop 9 is available). If you still run PrestaShop 1.7 or 8, an upgrade is ahead, and modules without active Business Care get no compatibility updates for it.

Medusa needs a Node.js environment with Postgres, self-hosted or on Medusa Cloud, plus a separate storefront. That is a different stack, with a different pool of developers.

What PrestaShop 9 changes

To be fair: PrestaShop 9 is a big step. Besides Symfony 6.4 and PHP 8.4 support, it brings a completely new Admin API built on API Platform, with REST and JSON standards and OAuth2. There is a new theme, Hummingbird (Bootstrap 5, TypeScript), although it is not the default theme in version 9.0. The back office has been rebuilt in Symfony and there is native support for WebP and AVIF (PrestaShop 9 is available).

For an existing PrestaShop shop that means: the reason to leave is smaller than a few years ago. So do not compare against today's PrestaShop 1.7 shop, but against what PrestaShop 9 can do. If your shop mainly uses standard features, an upgrade to 9 is often cheaper than a migration. If the shop is becoming a hub for your own processes and integrations, the gap with an API-first engine like Medusa remains large.

What does it cost over three years?

For one store with standard processes, PrestaShop is cheaper over three years. The more stores, custom work and integrations, the faster that advantage disappears.

Flexibility: B2B, multistore and regions

PrestaShop has a built-in multistore feature: several stores from one back office. That is a real strength compared with WooCommerce. B2B features such as prices per customer group are partly in the core; quotes, company accounts and approvals usually come from modules.

The new Admin API in PrestaShop 9 makes integrations with ERPs and other systems easier. PrestaShop itself says the API is still in development and more endpoints will follow (PrestaShop 9 is available).

Medusa was built API-first from the start. Regions, currencies, sales channels, customer groups and price lists are in the core (Medusa documentation). Medusa's own site has no customer story about a migration from PrestaShop. Other customer stories do show what is possible with multiple countries:

• Partbase launched a B2B distribution platform for industrial parts in 26 EU markets with more than 500,000 products, in five months, built by two technical founders. Customer groups per tier, a personalised checkout and dynamic delivery planning are part of it (Medusa: Partbase).
• Palmes, a clothing brand, sold in more than 40 countries with four currencies from the start. The store was live within six weeks, without managing multiple stores or dashboards (Medusa: Palmes).

These are Medusa customer stories, with Medusa's figures. They are not Alpha Digital projects.

When should you choose PrestaShop?

PrestaShop remains the better choice if:

• you have a small to mid-sized store with standard processes;
• your budget is tight and a theme plus a few modules gets you far enough;
• you use the built-in multistore and it works well enough;
• you have a PHP developer or PrestaShop agency who knows your shop well;
• you have just upgraded to PrestaShop 9 and the shop runs stably.

When should you choose Medusa?

Medusa fits if:

• module subscriptions per store and per year start to weigh heavily;
• you want integrations with your ERP, WMS or PIM to run reliably, outside a module;
• you have B2B processes that do not fit standard modules;
• you want a fast headless storefront, for example a Next.js storefront;
• you have to do a major upgrade anyway and want to modernise the stack.

Where Medusa is not the best choice

• Budget. For a small store, PrestaShop with a theme is cheaper to build than a Medusa shop with its own storefront.
• Ready-made modules. The PrestaShop Marketplace has thousands of modules and themes. Medusa needs more custom work.
• Developers. PHP developers are easier to find than Medusa specialists.
• No evidence for this route. Medusa publishes no customer story of a PrestaShop migration. The benefits are therefore derived from comparable migrations, not from a PrestaShop case.

From PrestaShop to Medusa

A migration starts with an inventory: which modules do you really use, which data must come along and which URLs have traffic? How that works is covered in Migrating to Medusa and under Migrating to Medusa. Integrations are described under Medusa integrations. Other comparisons: WooCommerce vs Medusa, Magento vs Medusa and Lightspeed vs Medusa. Request a callback or book an intro call.

Sources

Dollar amounts from the sources are converted to euros at the ECB rate of 5 November 2026 (1 euro = 1.1224 US dollars) and rounded.