Gambio vs Shopware

Gambio

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers, B2B and unlimited categories are all listed in the features, but checkout specifics stop at 'Zahlungsabwicklung mit PayPal & Co.' — no invoice, no direct debit, no guest checkout, no bundles evidenced. That sits between the 3 and 5 anchors: more than a flat list, less than the payment spread a German shop needs.

Shopware

Variants are properly modelled — parent-child inheritance, a configurator assembled for each variant product, hierarchical categories — and payments sit on a documented handler architecture with synchronous and asynchronous flows, PayPal the one provider named. We found no public information on bundles, tiered pricing, guest checkout, or German-standard payment methods such as invoice and direct debit; customer-specific prices appear only in the Beyond tier. The checkout is clearly extendable, but the conversion machinery itself is not evidenced.

Gambio

'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit' plus individual legal texts with liability assumption in all cloud plans points toward vendor-maintained legal correctness, which I'd normally welcome. But the evidence says nothing about VAT determination, OSS, VAT-ID validation, reverse charge or e-invoicing — silence on the mechanics, only marketing on the outcome.

Shopware

What the platform itself does is expose tax settings in the administration and orchestrate external tax providers — since version 6.5 an app can be called during checkout with signed requests, priority ordering and a five-second timeout, its sums used as-is. The German-law work — destination VAT, OSS, reverse charge with VAT-ID validation, checkout legal texts, e-invoicing — rests on whichever tax app the merchant connects, and we found no public information on any of it being handled by the platform. That is configuration plus an extension point, not maintained correctness.

Gambio

API access appears as a plan feature and there are 200+ interfaces and partners, but 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig' and the StyleEdit tool suggest bounded theming rather than a developer surface. No evidence of webhooks, headless storefront, staging, or a real plugin lifecycle, so I can't go past the middle.

Shopware

The developer surface is real: plugins are Symfony bundles and Composer packages with a dependency model, the Store API is a documented service-based route system with decorators, and the payment flow is explicitly designed for headless use. The Community Edition is open source and self-hosted, so a team can run the whole thing. We found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits, and the documentation states plugins are not compatible with the cloud stores, where apps are required instead.

Gambio

Invoices and delivery notes, import/export and multichannel selling are listed, but the evidence is mute on stock, returns, shipping or any named ERP link — the Afterbuy offer is a separate product with six months of credit, not an evidenced order workflow. Order states and stock are the level I can confirm, no more.

Shopware

The order model is workflow-built: three state machines for order, transaction and delivery with configurable, otherwise blocked transitions, and partial states throughout — shipped partially, returned partially, refunded partially — so partial shipments, returns and refunds are worked into the core. Multi-inventory arrives only with the Beyond tier, and shipping appears as an integration category without named carriers, label printing, or any named ERP or accounting system. We found no public information on fulfilment routing, dropshipping or operational reporting.

Gambio

Import/export is on the feature list with no stated scope, the pitch is cloud-only ('Erstelle deinen Shop in der Cloud'), and there is not a word on deletion, export fidelity or a migration path. As the person who has to prove deletion executed against order history, a one-line feature mention is worth roughly the 3 anchor and nothing above it.

Shopware

Ownership is partly structural: the Community Edition is open source and self-hosted, orders are denormalised and persisted independently of the catalogue, and numerous data-portability and management tools are claimed. The Migration Assistant is documented in depth — connections, profiles, gateways, dedicated media handling, checksum-based deltas — but the captured pages describe migrating into Shopware; we found no public information on a documented export or exit path out, on deletion executing against order history, or on a data-return commitment.

Gambio

Gambio GmbH of Bremen is an EU contracting entity, but the sovereignty pipeline recorded nothing: hosting location unstated, no subprocessor list published, and the only named processor in the checkout path is PayPal. A German vendor with an unnamed chain lands between the 3 anchor's absent list and the 5 anchor's unexplained non-EU parts.

Shopware

The contracting entity is solidly European — shopware AG, registered at the Amtsgericht Coesfeld, seat in Schöppingen, German VAT ID — and European data centres are claimed alongside self-hosting, PaaS and SaaS, with a data processing agreement on the EU Commission's standard contractual clauses plus ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II stated. We found no public information on a subprocessor list, on where the CDN, analytics or payment routing sit, or on confirmed data residence for the hosted offerings beyond a data-centre claim made in the context of the Copilot. A German entity with an unnamed processing chain — and a compliance statement that privacy standards in the USA and further markets are also met — leaves the checkout path unaccounted for.

Gambio

All four tiers are public with monthly price, 12-month term, an 11% annual discount, a worked 348€ example, and hosting declared included — that's honest. But transaction fees, volume limits behind the 'higher volume' tier names, and VAT treatment are all absent, so the real invoice for a shop of any size is not computable from the page.

Shopware

Tier prices are public with VAT treatment stated — Community Edition at € 0, Rise "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Evolve "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt." — and the Intelligence+ add-on is priced per tier, with Nexus in a free introductory phase carrying a non-binding review limit of 10,000 requests per customer and calendar month. From-pricing and an individually quoted Beyond tier mean the annual invoice is not computable from the page, and we found no public information on transaction or revenue-share fees, order or revenue limits, minimum terms, or the cost of the extensions most shops need beyond that one add-on.