As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates d.velop documents 2.5/5 and DocuWare 2.5/5 in Document Management (DMS). Weighted by what each judge cares about, 3 of the 6 judges pick d.velop documents and 3 pick DocuWare. d.velop documents scores higher on 3 of 6 criteria (Versioning, permissions & audit trail, Audit-proof archiving & retention and Search, retrieval & exit). DocuWare scores higher on 2 of 6 criteria (Capture, OCR & indexing and European sovereignty). Provenance — d.velop documents: EU-Made; DocuWare: EU origin, foreign-owned. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
d.velop documents leads on versioning and permissions, 3.8 vs 2.8 (5 judges lean d.velop documents, 0 DocuWare, 1 tie), and on audit-proof archiving, 4.7 vs 3.7 (5, 0, 1). DocuWare leads capture and indexing, 7.3 vs 7.0 (2 leans, 0, 4 ties). Document workflows is level at 6.8 (1 lean each, 4 ties); search and portability splits 2-2 with 2 ties; sovereignty reads 4.2 vs 4.3, 2 leans to DocuWare and 3 ties; pricing transparency, weighted only for d.velop documents because published prices exist, sits at 1.8 vs 1.5 with 5 ties. Judge totals split: DocuWare ahead with the tax auditor, 5.1 vs 4.8, and the IT integrator, 5.7 vs 5.6; d.velop documents ahead with the records analyst, the data protection officer and the skeptic. Attributes: d.velop documents — jurisdiction DE, data residency unknown; DocuWare — data residency EU only, ownership unknown. No overall winner: the lean differs by judge and criterion.
Choose d.velop documents if
You need tight control over document versions and access rights — versioning and permissions leans d.velop documents 5 judges to 0, mean 3.8 vs 2.8.
Your archive must stand up in a German tax audit — audit-proof archiving leans d.velop documents 5 judges to 0, mean 4.7 vs 3.7.
You require a vendor with a German legal-entity jurisdiction — the captured attribute for d.velop documents lists jurisdiction DE.
Your buying panel mirrors the records analyst or the data protection officer — their weighted totals favor d.velop documents at 4.8 vs 4.3 and 4.5 vs 4.2.
Published prices matter to your shortlisting — pricing transparency carries a 1-to-0 lean to d.velop documents with 5 ties, and its verdicts are the only ones weighted for pricing because published prices exist.
Choose DocuWare if
High-volume document intake is your priority — capture and indexing leans DocuWare, mean 7.3 vs 7.0, with 2 judges leaning DocuWare, 0 d.velop documents and 4 ties.
You must keep document data within the EU — the captured attribute for DocuWare lists data residency EU only.
Your priorities match the tax auditor's rubric — that judge's weighted total reads 5.1 vs 4.8 for DocuWare.
Your IT integrator leads the evaluation — that judge's weighted total reads 5.7 vs 5.6 for DocuWare.
Sovereignty is a scored criterion in your evaluation — it leans DocuWare 2 judges to 1 with 3 ties, mean 4.3 vs 4.2.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Skeptic
Has read "revisionssicher" on every DMS homepage and a Testat on almost none. Distrusts "AI-powered capture" without a validation step, "seamless SAP integration" without a scope, and "no vendor lock-in" from a vendor that documents no export — and treats "price on request from your partner" as an answer.
d.velop documents
This judge's pick
DocuWare
Criterion by criterion
Capture, OCR & indexing
d.velop documents
Digital post intake that captures, classifies, distributes and archives documents from any source, OCR-based recipient recognition, camera scanning, and intake via scanner, email and the Peppol e-invoice network are documented, with automatic extraction of invoice, order, date, creditor and position data and an AI-supported human review step that is skipped for purchase-order invoices. ZUGFeRD and XRechnung are processed as formats and email intake is client-independent. We found no public information on duplicate detection or on where the AI processing runs.
DocuWare
OCR and handwriting recognition, pre-processing, splitting and AI classification are documented, and the extraction engine is genuinely trainable: a custom model learned from a few sample documents, confidence scores per field, verified bank details, and a named validation step in the invoice process. What keeps it below the top band is that XRechnung and ZUGFeRD appear by name nowhere on these pages (only PEPPOL and generic e-invoice validation), and we found no public information on mailbox or Microsoft 365 intake, on duplicate detection at intake, or on where the AI that reads the documents is processed.
Versioning, permissions & audit trail
d.velop documents
A version is documented as stored for every change, archive access runs through individual permission structures, and the vendor states permission structures apply in every AI process and that AI answers respect access rights. We found no public information on restoring earlier versions, check-out, a role or group model, or a log of who read or changed which document; the auditable decisions documented concern AI agent decisions rather than document access.
DocuWare
What is documented: documents can be locked against other users during editing, a workflow history shows which user made which decision, and the licence terms describe named and concurrent users. We found no public information on a version history with restore, on roles or folder-level permissions, on single sign-on or directory sync, or on an audit log covering reads and exports; the sentence about exporting the history is phrased as what a system 'should' offer rather than as a documented feature.
Audit-proof archiving & retention
d.velop documents
GoBD conformity and revisionssichere archiving are claimed, change protection is described via versioning and retention policies, and sample Verfahrensdokumentationen plus whitepapers and webinars are offered. We found no public information on an auditor's report or Testat, WORM storage, deletion after retention expiry or legal hold, or a Z1-Z3 tax-audit export, and retention configurability per document type is not described — the ten- and six-year periods shown are the statutory ones.
DocuWare
'Revisionssichere Archivierung' is claimed for invoice processing, and the archiving pages are largely legal education — German retention periods, when paper originals may be destroyed, that e-invoices must stay in original digital form — plus a generic statement that such systems offer workflow tools for protecting or destroying documents at set times. We found no public information on how immutability of archived documents is achieved, on WORM storage, on an auditor's report or Testat, or on a sample Verfahrensdokumentation; the captured page itself points to certifications on a separate page and makes no certification claim of its own.
Document workflows & integrations
d.velop documents
Individualizable approval steps, automatic invoice booking with three-way match, due-date and cash-discount management, approvals via SAP Fiori, absence delegation and a SAP invoice workflow integrated into purchasing and financial accounting are documented, alongside connectors for SAP, SAGE, APplus, Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, a REST API and e-signature. We found no public information on graphical workflow modelling, escalation handling, or webhooks and events; the process studio appears only as a webinar topic.
DocuWare
Workflow design is documented in depth: drag-and-drop modelling without programming, defined triggers, deadlines with escalation, substitution rules, task assignment to employees or roles, automatically updating task lists, a supervising controller and a decision history. The integration side is thinner than the '500+ applications' headline: the API is described only as seamless and available, and we found no public information on an API reference, webhooks or connector scope for named ERP systems — DATEV appears via export formats and a customer reference, and e-signature is covered only as an explanation of the three signature levels.
Search, retrieval & exit
d.velop documents
Search is well evidenced: enterprise search across documents, emails, file directories and business applications with saved search templates, cited sources under the user's access rights, browser, Teams and mobile access with offline download and sync, and an import path from the file system into the archive. We found no public information on any export or exit path — no bulk export with metadata or versions and no documented export structure or post-termination retrieval.
DocuWare
Full-text and index-data search with filters, remote and mobile access are documented, and there is a real export module: scheduled or click-triggered export of index and table-field data as CSV, filtered by document, included in every cloud licence and available on-premises via additional licences. But the documented export feeds accounting systems with index data — we found no public information on bulk export of the documents themselves with their metadata, versions and audit trail, or on an import path from other systems, and for the exit question that is the decisive gap.
European sovereignty
d.velop documents
The contracting entity is proven as d.velop AG in Gescher with commercial register entry HRB 4903 at Coesfeld and named DS-GVO responsibility, an on-premises and hybrid deployment is documented, and the vendor describes itself as fully under European ownership — a marketing claim, but a documented one. Data residency for the cloud edition, the subprocessor chain for hosting and AI processing, and the AI processing location are unknown in the captured material; the privacy policy names only website-related recipients such as Hygraph in Berlin and Hotjar in Malta.
DocuWare
The contracting entity is proven European — DocuWare GmbH in Germering, German governing law, Munich venue, personal data processed in Germany and other European countries — and dedicated data centres are offered in the EU and in the USA, alongside a documented on-premises edition. But the sourcing records Japanese ownership (Ricoh, since 2019), and we found no public information on a subprocessor list for hosting, support or the AI that reads document content, or on a data processing agreement; the named processors in the privacy policy are website tools such as Hubspot, SurveyMonkey and Matomo.
Pricing transparency
d.velop documents
The store publishes prices for live trainings — "d.velop documents individualisieren (Cloud) … 749,00 €*", "d.velop invoices anwenden … 749,00 €*" and the sales training at "290,00 €*" — but for the software itself we found no public pricing at all: the offer is directed exclusively at business customers and every path leads to an individual demo. A buyer cannot compute user, storage or module costs from the captured pages.
DocuWare
No public price appears on the captured pages: the terms speak of individually agreed prices ex works plus VAT, 14-day payment terms for insured deliveries or prepayment otherwise, detailed licence mechanics for named and concurrent users, and a price list that the terms reference but that is not shown on the captured pages. The buying path published is a free demo and a 30-day trial; a buyer cannot compute the cost of a given number of users from anything published here.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
d.velop documents
DocuWare
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates both 2.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 3 of the 6 judges pick d.velop documents and 3 pick DocuWare. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is d.velop documents or DocuWare European?
d.velop documents is European (EU-Made). DocuWare is European (EU origin, foreign-owned). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.