JTL-Shop vs Shopware

JTL-Shop

Unlimited articles and integrations to all popular payment providers are the only merchandising facts on the evidence; the checkout itself is never evidenced. Nothing on variants, bundles, tiered or customer-group pricing — as a trade seller I see no net-price or customer-specific price list story at all, which tells me this page has not met a trade customer.

Shopware

The captured developer pages show a real variant model with parent-child inheritance and a configurator, hierarchical categories, multi-sales-channel availability, and a payment system built on extensible synchronous and asynchronous handlers — but customer-specific prices appear only in the top Beyond tier. I found no public information on bundles, tiered pricing, guest checkout, or invoice and direct debit as payment methods, which is the first thing a German trade buyer checks.

JTL-Shop

The tax evidence is accounting adjacency — GoBD-conform processes, a DATEV booking service and a 'Tax powered by' module name. No VAT-ID validation, no reverse charge, no OSS, no gross/net display per customer group: the checkout tax engine this criterion needs is simply absent from the evidence, and I cannot put a B2B shop on that silence.

Shopware

The only tax mechanism on the captured pages is an app-based tax provider invoked during checkout with a five-second timeout — a hook a merchant must build or buy, not determination the vendor maintains. I found no public information on VAT-ID validation, reverse charge, gross and net display per customer group, OSS, e-invoicing, or the checkout legal texts German law imposes.

JTL-Shop

Schnittstellen, partner apps and extensions are confirmed, but the REST API ships as a paid beta add-on at 99–199 €/month — an API you rent, still in beta. No webhooks, no headless storefront API, no theme language or staging story appears anywhere in the evidence.

Shopware

This is a platform a development team can work with: plugins are Composer packages extending Symfony bundles that declare dependencies, the Store API is documented down to naming conventions and decorator patterns, the headless payment flow returns the redirect URL inside the API response, and the core is open source with self-hosting. I found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits, and plugins cannot run on cloud stores where only apps are allowed.

JTL-Shop

Clearly the strongest area: 30+ marketplaces with oversell protection, WMS with mobile devices and shipment tracking, a returns module and the JTL2DATEV accounting interface, plus an AI BI dashboard driving reorder and discount decisions. Held below 8 because shipping labels are only 'coming soon' and no named carriers, partial shipments or supplier/dropshipping flows are evidenced.

Shopware

The order model is workflow-oriented with three state machines covering delivery states such as shipped partially and returned partially and transaction states through refunded partially, plus order management, notifications and history extendable via plugins, and Multi-Inventory in the Beyond tier. I found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing, dropshipping, or maintained interfaces to named ERP and accounting systems — the integration claim covers CRM, payments and shipping only in general terms.

JTL-Shop

A genuine 'Lokal – auf eigenem Server' option plus stepwise migration give structural rather than promised control. But the evidence is silent on export completeness, documented deletion and any data-return commitment — local hosting only counts as ownership if the catalogue, customers and order history can leave intact.

Shopware

Ownership is structural here: an open-source core with self-hosting as the stated default, and a documented, extensible Migration Assistant with connections, media processing, logging, error resolution and delta handling. That tooling migrates data into Shopware 6; I found no public information on export-out completeness including order documents, or on a contractual data-return commitment.

JTL-Shop

The imprint is unambiguous — JTL-Software-GmbH, Hückelhoven, Amtsgericht Mönchengladbach, DE VAT ID — so despite the pipeline marking jurisdiction unknown, the contracting entity is plainly German. But data residency is unstated and no subprocessor list exists anywhere in the evidence, so I cannot verify who sits in the checkout path even though a local hosting option exists.

Shopware

The captured imprint evidences shopware AG with a German register court, executive board and VAT ID, and self-hosting is the default posture, which is the strongest form of control. European datacentres are named only for the Intelligence Copilot product line, and the independently sourced attributes came back unknown; I found no public information on subprocessors, on data residency for the shop platform itself, or on ownership.

JTL-Shop

The metering is unusually public: per-order prices tiered at 0.22/0.16/0.11 €, order packages, and priced add-ons like the REST API, Workbench and production modules. But the Start and Pro tier prices are missing from the captured evidence, Enterprise is 'Auf Anfrage', payment-gateway rates are unpriced, and neither VAT treatment nor minimum term is stated — the invoice is close to computable, not computable.

Shopware

Tier prices are public with VAT treatment stated — "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Community Edition at €0 — and the Intelligence+ add-on carries plan-specific monthly figures. But both commercial tiers are quoted as floors, Beyond is "Individuell", and I found no public information on transaction fees, minimum terms, or order and revenue limits, so a real annual invoice cannot be computed from the page.