WooCommerce vs Magento vs PrestaShop for UK shops under £1m turnover

For most UK shops turning over less than £1m online, WooCommerce is the best choice of the three. It is the cheapest to build, host and maintain, it has by far the largest pool of UK developers, and because it sits on WordPress it handles content and SEO better than either rival. Magento is worth its much higher running costs only when you have a large or complicated catalogue, several storefronts, or serious B2B trading with an ERP behind it. PrestaShop is a capable platform with excellent multi-language support, but its thin UK ecosystem makes it a harder platform to own if your customers are mostly British.

Below we show the working: a side-by-side comparison, three-year cost of ownership at two shop sizes, and a plain “if you are this, choose that” list. We build and support all three platforms, so this is the advice we give paying clients rather than a pitch for one of them.

Who this comparison is for

The £1m line is a guide, not a rule. What it really describes is a business with a small team, somewhere between a few hundred and several thousand products, perhaps one warehouse or a third-party fulfilment partner, and no in-house developers. That covers most independent retailers in the UK, from a homeware brand in Bristol to a parts supplier in Birmingham or a fashion label in Glasgow.

Above that size, or with very unusual requirements, the decision is less about platform features and more about integration architecture, and Magento, Shopify Plus or a bespoke build come into play.

The three platforms in brief

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns WordPress into a shop. It runs on standard PHP hosting, has a huge extension library, and is developed by Automattic. Because WordPress powers a large share of the web, almost every UK web developer has used it.

Magento, owned by Adobe, comes as free Magento Open Source or as the licensed Adobe Commerce. It is built for scale: multiple websites and store views, complex catalogues, tiered and customer-specific pricing, and a mature API. It needs specialist hosting and specialist developers.

PrestaShop is a free, open-source platform from France with a strong retail core and very good multi-language and multi-store features. Many capabilities come from paid modules in its Addons marketplace. It is widely used in continental Europe and much less so in the UK.

Side-by-side comparison

What each one costs over three years

Build price is what people compare, but it is rarely the biggest number. Here are two worked examples for hypothetical UK shops, using our own rates: e-commerce development at £65 an hour, or £48.75 an hour when bought in blocks of 100 hours or more. Hosting and extension figures are typical market ranges. Everything excludes VAT.

Example 1: a small shop

About 300 products, £150k online turnover, one storefront, Stripe and Royal Mail.

The WooCommerce build price here is our fixed-price Business / E-commerce package at £2,650 plus VAT, which covers a custom WordPress shop with payments, CMS, search, SEO set-up and a free domain for five years. Details are on our packages page. For a shop this size, Magento costs more than three times as much to own and gives you nothing you would use.

Example 2: a growing shop

About 4,000 products, £600k online turnover, trade and retail pricing, stock synced with an ERP.

The gap narrows as the shop gets more complex. At this size Magento costs about £16,500 more than WooCommerce over three years, and whether that is money well spent depends on what it saves you. If trade orders, price lists and stock are causing hours of manual work every week, Magento’s native B2B tools and API can pay that back. If not, WooCommerce with a good integration does the job. Our Magento guide goes deeper on when the extra spend makes sense.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

All three can be fast, and all three can be painfully slow. The platform matters less than the theme and the hosting.

• WooCommerce is fast on a hand-coded theme with server-level caching and few plugins. It gets slow with page builders, bloated multipurpose themes and 40 plugins. We build WooCommerce themes by hand and aim for Lighthouse 95+ on every template.
• Magento with its default Luma theme struggles on mobile. With the Hyvä theme, which became free in late 2024, and Varnish properly configured, it can be very quick.
• PrestaShop is reasonable out of the box, but every module tends to add its own scripts and styles, which adds up.

Google uses Core Web Vitals as one of its ranking signals, and slow mobile pages cost sales regardless of rankings, so budget for performance whatever you choose.

SEO and content

This is WooCommerce’s clearest advantage. WordPress is a content management system first, so blog posts, buying guides, landing pages for campaigns and rich category descriptions are easy for your own team to publish. Yoast or Rank Math add structured data and sitemaps in minutes.

Magento and PrestaShop both handle product and category SEO well: clean URLs, meta fields, canonical tags and sitemaps. Where they fall down is editorial content. Their CMS pages are basic, and many shops end up running a separate WordPress blog on a subdomain, which splits authority and doubles the maintenance.

If organic search is how customers find you, and for most small UK retailers it is, that tips the balance towards WooCommerce.

B2B, trade and multi-currency selling

Magento leads here. Customer groups, tiered prices, multiple websites sharing stock, and a strong API for ERP links are all native. Adobe Commerce adds company accounts, quotes and credit limits, but at a licence cost few sub-£1m businesses can justify.

PrestaShop handles customer group pricing and multi-currency natively and does multi-language better than WooCommerce.

WooCommerce needs plugins for trade pricing, quick order forms and multi-currency. They work well for straightforward trade accounts. Once you need dozens of customer-specific price lists synced from an ERP every hour, it starts to feel stretched.

Payments and UK VAT

All three support Stripe, PayPal and the main UK card processors, and all three handle 3D Secure for Strong Customer Authentication. All three can be configured for the 20 % standard rate, the 5 % reduced rate and zero-rated goods, with VAT shown properly on invoices.

The difference is in the surrounding tools. WooCommerce has the widest choice of UK-focused plugins for Royal Mail Click & Drop, Xero, Sage, QuickBooks and the major UK couriers, many of them maintained by UK companies. Magento’s integrations are fewer but generally solid and enterprise-grade. PrestaShop has the thinnest UK selection. If you want to compare payment providers’ UK fees, see our Stripe vs PayPal vs GoCardless guide on the blog.

Security and upkeep

Any of the three is secure if it is kept up to date and insecure if it is not. In practice:

• WooCommerce updates are frequent and usually painless, as long as you avoid abandoned plugins.
• Magento security patches arrive several times a year and each 2.4.x release has a fixed support window, so you will face a substantial upgrade every two to three years.
• PrestaShop major upgrades can be heavy, and plenty of UK stores are still on 1.6 or 1.7 for that reason. Version 1.6 no longer gets security fixes.

Whatever you choose, budget for monthly maintenance from day one. You can book hours with us at a fixed rate; they never expire, so a quiet month carries over to a busy one.

Day-to-day running: what your team will notice

Platform comparisons tend to focus on features. The people who use the admin every day care about different things.

Adding a product. In WooCommerce it is one screen, and anyone who has edited a WordPress page picks it up in an afternoon. In Magento, a configurable product with sizes and colours involves attribute sets, a configuration wizard and indexers that need to run before changes appear on the site. PrestaShop sits in between.

Processing orders. All three give you an order list, statuses, invoices and refunds. Magento’s order screen is the most capable for split shipments and partial refunds. WooCommerce’s is the simplest, and plugins for printing Royal Mail labels or packing slips from the order list are cheap and plentiful.

Running a sale. Cart rules and coupons are strong in all three. Magento’s catalogue price rules are the most flexible; WooCommerce’s are the easiest to set up without a developer.

Publishing a landing page. Easy in WooCommerce, a developer job in the other two unless you add a page-building module.

Getting help. If your WooCommerce developer is unavailable, you can find another in Leeds, Cardiff or Belfast within days. With PrestaShop, it may take weeks. With Magento, you will find people, but at higher day rates.

That last point matters more than most feature checklists. A platform you cannot get support for is a risk, however good the software.

What about Shopify?

It is the obvious fourth option, and for many small UK retailers it is a sensible one: no hosting to manage and a polished admin. The trade-offs are monthly fees, transaction fees if you do not use Shopify Payments, paid apps for many features, and the fact that you rent the platform rather than own it. If you want full ownership of your code and data, and the freedom to change hosting or developers, one of the three open-source platforms here is the better fit.

Our recommendation

• If you sell mostly to UK customers, have up to a few thousand products and care about content and search: choose WooCommerce.
• If you have a large or complex catalogue, multiple storefronts or demanding trade pricing with an ERP: choose Magento Open Source, ideally with Hyvä.
• If you sell into several European countries in several languages: consider PrestaShop, provided you have reliable developer support.
• If you are already on PrestaShop and it works: stay, but keep it on a supported version. Our PrestaShop guide has a stay-or-migrate checklist.
• If none of the three fits your process: talk to us about a custom build.

We are based in St Albans and work with retailers all over the UK, by video call or in person in London. If you are weighing these platforms for a new shop or a replatform, send us a short brief with your product count, turnover band and the systems you need to connect, and we will tell you which we would choose and why.

Photo: Shutter Speed via Unsplash