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Those of us who work with CMS and e-commerce platforms on a daily basis have always seen in PrestaShop a bastion of open source philosophy in the world of digital commerce. A robust, self-hosted, highly customizable platform, designed to give developers, agencies and merchants full control over their online store. Unlike SaaS solutions, where the infrastructure, code and features are often locked away, PrestaShop has always offered the possibility of modeling eCommerce to measure, adapting it to specific needs both frontend and backend.
However, recent developments introduced by PrestaShop SA, particularly with the launch of the PrestaShop Integration Framework, foretell an important – and in some ways worrying – strategic change of direction that deserves in-depth reflection by those who care about the autonomy and technological independence of online businesses.
A bit of history: from open roots to the corporate turn
PrestaShop was born in Paris in 2007, in a context in which open source eCommerce platforms were still few, complex to manage, often designed for large companies and not very accessible to SMEs. The founding idea of the project was as simple as it was revolutionary: democratize e-commerce, offering a solution that was at the same time free, powerful, scalable and truly customizable. A platform that would allow even the small shop, startup or digital artisan to start an online business without having to deal with the costs and rigidities of proprietary or enterprise solutions.
Distributed under license OSL (Open Software License), PrestaShop quickly established itself thanks to a series of technical and functional features that distinguished it from the alternatives on the market: a lightweight and modular core a clear MVC structure, an administration interface accessible even to non-developers, and above all a architectural flexibility which made it easy to extend through plugins, modules, overrides and customizations. Its community-oriented model attracted thousands of developers in Europe and around the world, helping to build a rich ecosystem of extensions and themes. In just a few years, PrestaShop has become the European alternative par excellence to solutions like Magento, gaining significant shares in strategic markets such as France, Spain, Italy and Latin America.
However, in the 2021, a significant change occurs: MBE Worldwide (Mail Boxes Etc.), a multinational group specialized in Logistics, shipping and business services, acquires PrestaShop SA. This event represents a paradigm shift in project governance, which moves from a community-centric model to a strongly oriented towards business and monetization. The goal – increasingly evident as time goes by – is to transform PrestaShop from a simple open source CMS to PaaS platform (Platform-as-a-Service).
This new vision translates into a more centralized strategy, in which PrestaShop SA centralizes the development of "official" modules, promotes the use of integrated paid services and introduces tools designed to make management simpler but also more constrained. We are thus moving towards an ecosystem in which hosting, updates, modules and even interaction with the marketplace go through proprietary channels, creating a dynamic in which the end user – merchant or developer – becomes progressively more dependent on the choices of the parent company.
While this evolution has never been explicitly announced as a move to the SaaS model, the analogies with solutions like Shopify are increasingly marked. The introduction of the PrestaShop Integration Framework, the push towards the use of “certified” modules, the merging of cloud-based features and the differentiation between GitHub versions and those downloadable from the official website, are all signs of a path towards a more closed platform, less oriented towards the freedom and technical independence that have always represented the beating heart of open source.
If this path were to come to fruition, PrestaShop would radically change its nature, losing its original soul as a free, flexible and community platform to become a fully-fledged commercial product. A transformation that cannot fail to have profound impacts on its future and on the entire ecosystem that over the years has made it one of the most widespread eCommerce solutions in Europe.
PrestaShop Integration Framework
Il PrestaShop Integration Framework It is a component introduced starting from version 8 of the CMS with the aim of standardize and modernize the way external services integrate with PrestaShop. Technically, this is a set of interfaces, adapters and data structures designed to decouple integrations from the core of the platform, improve code maintainability, and ensure greater consistency in the development of modules and connectors. This approach promotes the creation of more robust, testable, and time-compatible extensions, especially in scenarios where PrestaShop is used in enterprise, multi-store, or managed environments.
One of the most relevant aspects of the framework is its orientation to support cloud-based environments and centralized architectures, typical of the solutions PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). According to the official documentation, the framework has been designed to work also in contexts where PrestaShop is provided as managed or integrated service within a larger platform, where the provider controls infrastructure, updates and related services.
From a functional point of view, the framework introduces concepts such as IntegrationDefinition, IntegrationHandler e IntegrationConfiguration, which allow you to describe and orchestrate the integration of third-party services (payments, logistics, ERP, CRM, etc.) in a structured way and, above all, potentially certified or controlled. This means that in the future extensions may have to adhere to certain standards imposed by PrestaShop SA in order to be fully compatible or publishable in the official marketplace.
This approach, on the one hand improves the quality and consistency of the code, on the other hand opens the way to a progressive centralization of the ecosystem, where PrestaShop SA becomes the sole guarantor of compatibility and distribution. It is the classic PaaS model: users continue to interact with the software, but the operating environment, APIs, extensions and data flows are controlled by a central infrastructure, with a lower level of freedom than the traditional self-hosted model.
PrestaShop Integration Framework represents a significant technological evolution, but also a paradigm shift: from absolute flexibility to a more rigid and “guided” architecture, which could reduce the autonomy of developers and push the entire project towards a model hybrid or fully PaaS, more similar to Shopify or Adobe Commerce Cloud than a classic open source CMS.
From Community to Control: A Clear Monetization Goal
With the introduction of the PrestaShop Integration Framework, the plan begins to take shape more clearly: reduce the degree of freedom for developers, encourage the use of integrated modules and services, and start a transition to a more profitable model for the parent company. This framework aims to standardize the integration of external services through a set of APIs and practices that, while useful from an architectural point of view, are also more controllable and monetizable.
The obvious risk is to transform the entire ecosystem into a “closed” environment where every extension or service requires approval, certification or payment. In other words, we are approaching a model where the core is only apparently free, but the added value is constrained by commercial dynamics. This type of evolution has already led many open source CMS towards a slow but inexorable drift: less free code, more premium services.
Two PrestaShops, Two Directions
Today we are faced with a paradoxical situation: There are actually two different versions of PrestaShop, with objectives, logic and technical contents that are not always aligned. On one hand we have the open source version published on GitHub, the historical, official, transparent and traceable one. It is still updated regularly and is maintained, at least formally, with the contribution of the international developer community. Here the code is completely inspectable, developers can open issues, propose pull requests, and the evolution of the project follows (at least in theory) a collaborative model, in line with the original open source spirit.
On the other side, we find the downloadable version from the official website prestashop.com, often unofficially referred to as “MBE Edition”. This variant includes a number of changes compared to the core, including pre-installed business modules, tracking tools, integrated interfaces for external services and packages optimized to favor the monetization of certain flows. The technical and functional choices of this version reflect an approach more business oriented, with a push towards integrated and potentially binding services.
This duality creates an obvious fracture: those who download PrestaShop from GitHub get a relatively “clean” product, faithful to the open source model. Those who download from the official site get a modified platform, with logic and dependencies not documented in the public repository. The result is a dangerous divergence: incompatibility between modules, maintenance problems, ambiguity in updates and a growing uncertainty about which version should be considered "standard". In perspective, this scenario could lead to the birth of alternative forks or to the definitive fragmentation of the project, compromising the technical and commercial ecosystem built over the years around PrestaShop.
What do we risk losing?
PrestaShop's progressive transition towards a model hybrid or fully PaaS/SaaS involves a concrete loss of control, both for those who develop and for those who manage an online store. Historically, one of the main strengths of PrestaShop has always been its being entirely self-hosted: a platform that could be installed anywhere, freely managed, deeply modified and integrated with any external system – be it an ERP, an unconventional payment system or customized logistics flows.
This technical freedom has allowed thousands of merchants and system integrators to build solutions high-performance, safe and tailor-made, without depending on centralized infrastructures or imposed providers. It meant being able to choose your own technology stack, optimize databases and web servers based on the real needs of the project, and manage updates gradually and consciously, avoiding sudden breakdowns or imposed features.
If PrestaShop follows in the footsteps of solutions like Shopify or BigCommerce, this flexibility will inevitably be compromised. Theaccess to the code could become partial or mediated, making it difficult (if not impossible) to make advanced changes. customizations may be restricted to a predefined set of approved features, and the forced updates – managed remotely – could introduce changes incompatible with previous developments or custom solutions.
Additionally, modules and extensions may only be available through official marketplaces, subject to certification logics, revenue sharing and – inevitably – recurring costs. This scenario not only limits technical freedom, but slows down innovation and places economic barriers that penalize smaller or independent companies. For those who work in contexts where they are required complex integrations, regulatory compliance (GDPR, PSD2, etc.), or high-level performance, a PrestaShop caged in a SaaS model risks become unusable.
The alternatives are already there
In the current e-commerce landscape, There is no shortage of alternatives, and it is important to recognize that each model – SaaS, self-hosted or hybrid – already has its own reference platforms, mature and tested. For those looking for a turnkey solution, ready to use, with centralized management and a simplified interface, there are established options such as Shopify, which was born with this very approach and carries it forward consistently. In Shopify everything is controlled, maintained and supported, with automatic updates, managed security, included hosting and a well-structured marketplace – at the cost, of course, of a total loss of freedom and customization of the code.
On the other hand, those who wish full control over infrastructure, performance, security and software ecosystem can turn to solutions truly open source, as WooCommerce on WordPress, Magento Open Source (Adobe Commerce) or, even today, GitHub version of PrestaShopThese platforms offer the freedom to choose where and how to host your store, to build custom logic, to scale the architecture based on real traffic and to integrate any system, without going through any intermediary.
La strength of the self-hosted model that's all there is to it: being able to choose, optimize, integrate, innovate. It is the preferred model for those who work with enterprise customers, for those who develop customized solutions, for those who need an environment that grows organically with the business.
On the contrary, aill-conceived hybridization, which tries to mix the simplicity of SaaS with the flexibility of open source, often ends up generating inconsistent platforms, full of technical limitations, difficult to maintain and unattractive to both developers and merchants. This type of compromise satisfies neither those looking for a simple solution, nor those looking for a solid base to customize.
In this scenario, if PrestaShop continues to push towards a hybrid direction, without a clear vision that respects its DNA, risks losing its historical identity. And with it, too the trust of its community of reference: the one made up of independent developers, digital agencies and expert merchants who, so far, have made it one of the most widespread open source platforms in Europe.
Conclusions (and an appeal)
we at Managed Server SRL We experience the reality of CMS and eCommerce platforms every day in the field. We have been working with PrestaShop for years, taking obsessive care of every aspect related to performance, stability and scalability of our customers' stores. We offer dedicated infrastructure, advanced server-side caching, MySQL database tuning, custom PHP configurations and constant monitoring to always guarantee maximum reactivity and reliability. But all this work – technical, in-depth, tailored – is made possible only thanks to the open and self-hosted nature of PrestaShop.
As software evolves towards a closed model, centrally controlled or partially constrained by external commercial logic, This type of optimization would become increasingly difficult, if not impossible.. Customizations would be limited, bespoke integrations would be hindered, and the value of the infrastructure itself would lose relevance in favor of pre-packaged and inflexible solutions. In this case, we would be forced to rethink the solutions to propose, favoring other truly open and collaborative CMS.
we wish that PrestaShop SA fully understands the value of its community, the one made up of developers, agencies, system integrators and merchants who have made the success of the project possible in all these years. Abandoning this living, dynamic and technically prepared fabric to pursue more closed business models could prove to be an irreversible strategic error.
As long as there is the possibility of choose, configure and improve freely, we will continue to defend and support open source. And we will continue to offer our customers solutions high performance, truly tailor-made and above all free – because we believe that technological freedom is the basis of every solid and sustainable innovation over time.
