Why PrestaShop Wins Precisely Because It Is NOT a SaaS
If you read the tech press or listen to marketing gurus, the verdict seems clear: “The future is SaaS (Software as a Service). If you’re not in the all-in-one Cloud, you’re outdated.”
Solutions like Shopify or BigCommerce have popularized this appealing model: you pay a subscription, and they take care of everything. It’s clean, it’s reassuring, it’s turnkey.
So why does PrestaShop, with its historical “Open Source” model that you must install yourself, continue to power hundreds of thousands of stores, including market leaders? Is it resistance to change?
No. It’s a cold and rational strategic calculation.
In this article, we’ll see why PrestaShop’s refusal to become a “pure SaaS” is not a weakness, but its major asset for your business value in 2025.
1. The Real Estate Analogy: Tenant vs Owner
To understand the stakes, let’s step away from technology and talk real estate. It’s the best way to grasp the model difference.
The SaaS Model = The Hotel Room
SaaS is like renting a room in a luxury hotel.
- Advantages: Housekeeping is done, security is managed at the entrance, service is impeccable.
- Disadvantages: You can’t knock down a wall to expand. You can’t change the carpet. And especially, if the hotelier decides to double the nightly rate next year, you pay or you pack your bags (leaving the furniture behind).
The PrestaShop Model = The House You Own
PrestaShop is buying land and building your house.
- Disadvantages: You must mow the lawn (maintenance) or pay a gardener (agency) to do it.
- Advantages: The land belongs to you. If you want to build a pool, repaint the facade pink, or add a floor, no one can forbid you.
In e-commerce, owning your infrastructure means owning your business goodwill. On SaaS, you rent your business goodwill.
2. The Dictatorship of the Roadmap
In a SaaS solution, you endure the vendor’s vision. You’re a passenger on a bus driven by someone else.
Imagine you sell products in a specific niche (Vaping, CBD, Adult, or even technical spare parts). If tomorrow, the SaaS platform decides, often for moral reasons dictated by their (often American) shareholders, that your sector is no longer welcome: they can close your store overnight.
It has happened. This isn’t science fiction.
PrestaShop is neutral. The software is a tool, not a judge. As long as you respect your country’s law and your host’s conditions, you’re the only master on board. This digital sovereignty is vital.
3. The Financial Equation: The Success Tax
This is often where SaaS hurts when scaling.
The SaaS business model often relies on:
- A monthly subscription.
- A commission on revenue (sometimes hidden via imposed payment fees).
- Subscriptions for each feature (Apps).
This is called a success tax. The more you sell, the more you pay.
With PrestaShop, your costs are essentially fixed (hosting, maintenance). Whether you make €10,000 or €1 million in revenue, your server might cost a bit more in resources, but PrestaShop won’t take “royalties” on your work.
The calculation is quick: Over 5 years, for a performing store, the savings with Open Source often amount to tens of thousands of euros. Enough to hire an employee.
4. The Myth of Technical Complexity
“Yes, but I don’t want to manage servers!”
This was a valid argument in 2015. In 2025, it no longer holds. The ecosystem around PrestaShop has matured.
Today, managed hosting solutions exist. These are providers who manage all technical complexity (backups, server updates, security) for you. You thus get the best of both worlds:
- The comfort and peace of mind of SaaS.
- The freedom and ownership of Open Source.
5. Data Portability: Your Life Insurance
The technical term is “Data Portability”. If you’re not satisfied with your PrestaShop host, you take your database, your files, and go elsewhere. It takes a few hours.
Leaving a proprietary SaaS ecosystem is a technical nightmare known as Vendor Lock-in. Often, you lose your precise history, your URLs (thus your SEO), and your customer accounts must be reset.
As regularly highlighted by data protection authorities and sovereignty experts, data control is the decade’s major challenge.
Conclusion
SaaS is a fantastic technology for quickly launching a project (MVP) or for standard needs. But to build a sustainable business, whose value rests on its digital assets, ownership of the work tool is essential.
PrestaShop is gaining ground not because it’s “old-fashioned,” but because it guarantees a freedom that SaaS can never offer by definition.
In an increasingly centralized digital world, choosing to own your technology is not a technical constraint: it’s an act of commercial independence.
