Gambio vs Shopware

Gambio

Variants, tiered pricing (Staffelpreise), vouchers and B2B are on the all-inclusive list, which clears rubric level 3 — but bundles, guest checkout, invoice and direct debit appear nowhere, and 'Zahlungsabwicklung mit PayPal & Co.' is the entire payment story. Nothing on promotion rules, per-channel pricing or conversion features like abandoned cart or one-page checkout.

Shopware

The variant model is the real thing — self-referencing parent-child products with a configurator that assembles property groups and variants, hierarchical categories, unlimited property groups for filtering, and products addressable across multiple sales channels. Payment breadth is thin in the captures: PayPal is the only provider named, and I found no public information on bundles, promotions and vouchers with rules, guest checkout, or invoice and direct debit as payment methods. The checkout itself is documented as customisable without a rebuild via the Store API, payment handlers and the state machine, which is what lifts it above the standard tier.

Gambio

'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit' plus individual legal texts with liability assumption available in all cloud plans is genuine vendor-maintained legal correctness — the direction the top anchor describes. But the evidence is completely silent on VAT determination by destination, OSS, reverse charge and e-invoicing, so I cannot credit the tax mechanics at all.

Shopware

What the developer pages evidence is a tax framework, not maintained correctness: settings under Settings > Tax, and since version 6.5 an app interface where external tax providers are called by priority during checkout, with signed requests, a five-second timeout, and tax sums taken as given by the provider. That delegates German VAT correctness to whoever builds or buys the provider — I found no public information on automatic VAT by destination and customer type, VAT-ID validation with reverse charge, OSS tracking and reporting, e-invoicing, or the mandatory checkout elements on the captured pages.

Gambio

StyleEdit is a closed design tool, the pitch is 'no programming knowledge required', the shop lives only in Gambio's cloud, and 'API-Zugang' is one cell in a plan matrix with no documentation behind it — no local development, no version control for themes, no plugin dependency model. The 200 interfaces and Gambio Store keep this a hair above rubric level 3; I read a closed template editor as exactly the future migration I fear.

Shopware

This is where I could live for five years: plugins are Symfony bundles shipped as Composer packages that can declare dependencies — a real dependency model — the Store API is documented down to route decorators and service conventions, the core is open-source with a free Community Edition and self-hosting on my own infrastructure, and even the Migration Assistant is extensible. Two reservations keep it short of the top: the plugin documentation states plugins are not compatible with cloud stores, so moving to cloud means rewriting that customisation path as apps, and I found no public information on version control for themes, CI support, or upgrade paths that carry existing plugins forward.

Gambio

Invoices and delivery notes ship with the product, multichannel selling is claimed, and there are partner credits for Afterbuy (fulfilment/after-sales tooling) and Baygraph (analytics), which hints at a real back office. Returns, stock accuracy, carrier labels and any vendor-maintained ERP interface are entirely unevidenced.

Shopware

The order model is workflow-oriented and denormalised so line items and calculated prices persist independently of the catalogue, with state machines that natively cover partial shipments, partial returns and partial refunds across three machines started per order. Multi-inventory appears only in the top Beyond tier, and beyond a generic integration surface for CRM, payments and shipping I found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing, automated fulfilment routing, dropshipping flows, or maintained interfaces to ERP and accounting systems.

Gambio

'Import / Export' is a single feature bullet with no scope, the shop is created in Gambio's cloud with no self-hosting option, and the evidence says nothing about export completeness, documented deletion or any migration path out. That is rubric level 3 exactly: export of unknown fidelity, no self-hosting, no documented exit.

Shopware

Ownership here is structural rather than promised: the open-source Community Edition at € 0 with self-hosting on my own infrastructure means the shop and its data sit where I control them, and GDPR data-portability tools are claimed. The Migration Assistant is documented in one direction only — into Shopware 6 — and I found no public information on outbound export completeness including media and order documents, database-level export tooling, or a contractual data-return commitment.

Gambio

The vendor is a German GmbH in Bremen and hosting is bundled rather than optional, but the sovereignty pipeline has no attributes on record: hosting location, subprocessor list and certification are all unstated, and payment routing is just 'PayPal & Co.' with the chain unnamed. EU contracting entity yes; evidenced chain no.

Shopware

The imprint is unambiguous about the contracting entity: shopware AG at Ebbinghoff 10 in Schöppingen, registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld under HRB 11471, VAT ID DE261679493 — a German stock corporation — alongside a data processing agreement on the EU Standard Contract basis, published ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, European datacenters named for the Copilot architecture, and a self-hosted option that puts the shop entirely under my control. For sovereign end to end, I found no public information on a published subprocessor list or named hosting infrastructure for shop data, and the captured pages leave data residency for the platform itself unconfirmed.

Gambio

All four tiers are public with the 12-month minimum term stated, hosting is included rather than a hidden extra, and there is even a worked annual example (12 x 29 EUR = 348 EUR) plus a 30-day trial — better than most SaaS pages. But transaction fees, the volume limits the tier names imply ('geringes Volumen' to 'hohem Volumen'), VAT treatment and extension prices beyond the partner credits are unstated, so the real annual invoice is only partly computable.

Shopware

More is public than with most: Community Edition at € 0, Rise ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt., Evolve ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt., add-on prices such as Shopware Intelligence+ at € 19 /Monat exkl. MwSt., and the VAT treatment stated outright. But Rise and Evolve are starting-from prices, Beyond is priced Individuell, the Nexus add-on sits in a free introductory phase running to 1 October 2026 with a non-binding review limit of 10,000 requests per customer month — and I found no public information on transaction or revenue-share fees, hosting costs, order or revenue limits, or minimum terms, so the real annual invoice is not computable from the page.