PrestaShop

Not good! Requires lots of hacks to get to work properly. Bug-ridden. Lots of badly written expensive plugins. Looks pretty but once you really start using it it falls apart pretty quickly.

very simple tool and full of bugs. I've tried prestashop coming from Woocommerce and was baffled by the fact that to do the most simple things in prestashop you need to pay some random extension 30€. I.e. to add a meta tag in the header, there aren't extensions that can do that for free (wtf?). Yes there is a way to edit the source code and do it yourself, but so does Wordpress and someone had the vision to encapsulate that hack into a plug in and make it easy for users)

Woocommercer/Wordpress on the other hand has a much better freemium model where you can definitely find ways to do what you want and the free extensions are good enough for most things, so you end up paying only for real premium services, not some opportunistic developer who added a price tag in an html tag (no pun intended).

Prestashop is also riddled with bugs. It may have some nice functionality to manage taxes/shipping but it's so complicated and unrealiable.

Bottom line is: it may have a better UI for managing a shop (especially an European shop that has multiple countries, localization and different taxes) but it does require having more technical knowledge, because you'll either have to go in and change stuff in the PHP code or have someone to do it for you. Not to mention that updates are a bit weird. I tried to update from 1.6.something to 1.7... I couldn't find a way to do it like wordpress does (just click a button in the dashboard's home page and go have a coffee). I had to nuke my set up and deploy a whole new thing. Lucky me I was just trying out the software but if I had a shop with customers and real orders that would've been very disappointing

If you're starting out, maybe wordpress/woocommerce might be a better alternative as one can set up a nicely professional shop without having to pay any modules nor edit source code (just using community extensions and googling around). As you grow and have the resources to hire a developer maybe the trade-off in the UI/selling functionality might make Prestashop a good option for you.

Even here wordpress is better: if you want to export your products their feed services do work. And there are plenty of free extensions that can help you sanitize the final xml/json feed/file. The same can't be said about Prestashop. So easy to move into, hard to move out

PrestaShop could be a great alternative to Magento if it were not for one thing-- PrestaShop lacks the ability to do partial shipments.