JTL-Shop vs Shopware

JTL-Shop

Payment integrations 'zu allen beliebigen Payment-Anbietern' plus unlimited articles, multiple Profi-Shops and rule-based repricing get it past a flat form, but the evidence is silent on variants, bundles, customer-group pricing, guest checkout, vouchers-with-rules and the German must-haves — invoice and direct debit are never named. Nothing says I could change the checkout without a rebuild, and that silence caps it.

Shopware

The variant machinery is real — parent-child inheritance, a configurator object, unlimited property groups for filtering — and the payment architecture with synchronous and asynchronous handlers and the redirect URL returned in the API response means checkout can be reshaped without a rebuild. But we found no public information on invoice or direct debit as payment methods, on promotions or voucher rules, on guest checkout or bundles, and customer-specific prices appear only in the top Beyond tier.

JTL-Shop

GoBD- and DSGVO-conformant finance processes, a 'Tax' module and the JTL2DATEV bridge evidence German accounting correctness, but there is not one fact about VAT by destination, OSS, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or the mandatory checkout elements German law imposes. From a German vendor selling to German merchants, that silence in the evidence is loud — a lawyer could review nothing here.

Shopware

What the pages document is a pluggable tax-provider framework: apps registered via manifest are called during checkout in priority order with signed requests, adjusting tax at item, delivery or cart level while Shopware trusts the returned sums. We found no public information on destination-based VAT determination, VAT-ID validation with reverse charge, OSS reporting or e-invoicing handled by the platform itself — the automatic tax path runs through third-party apps rather than the shop system.

JTL-Shop

Partner apps, extensions, interfaces and stepwise migration exist, and there is a REST API — but it is a Beta sold as a paid add-on at 199/99 EUR a month, which tells me how they feel about me building on the platform. No themes, no webhooks, no headless storefront API, no local development story in evidence.

Shopware

This is where my investment feels safe: plugins are Composer packages that can declare dependencies and behave as Symfony bundles with their own controllers, services and tests, and the Store API with service-based, decoratable routes gives headless builds a first-class surface, including the headless payment flow. The open-source Community Edition at "Kostenlos € 0" means the code is not hostage, though we found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits.

JTL-Shop

JTL is the ERP and WMS itself: mobile warehouse devices, sendungsverfolgung im ERP, 30+ marketplaces without extra licences, multi-channel sync that reduces overselling, a Returns module, bank reconciliation from Advanced and DATEV export. Shipping labels are only 'coming soon' and dropshipping/supplier flows are unevidenced, so it sits at 8, not higher — but this is the strongest part of the evidence.

Shopware

Three configurable state machines model the after-checkout reality properly — partial shipment, returns, partial refunds, chargebacks — and orders persist their own line items and calculated prices independent of the catalogue, with notifications and order history documented. But we found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing or maintained interfaces to ERP and accounting systems, and the multi-inventory capability sits in the top Beyond tier only.

JTL-Shop

'Lokal – Auf eigenem Server' is real ownership — running the stack on my own server beats any export promise. But the evidence says nothing about export completeness, documented deletion or a migration path out; 'schrittweise Migration möglich' reads as getting data IN. Self-hosting evidenced, exit unevidenced.

Shopware

Ownership here is structural rather than promised: an open-source Community Edition and the option to deploy the shop on my own cloud infrastructure mean the data sits where I put it. The Migration Assistant is well documented with dedicated media processing, delta migration and error resolution, but it documents the way in — we found no public information on a comparable documented exit migration or a stated data-return commitment beyond GDPR portability tools.

JTL-Shop

The imprint shows a German GmbH, Amtsgericht Mönchengladbach, a German VAT ID and a named DPO via Proliance GmbH — vendor and contracting entity are clearly European. But the sovereignty pipeline could not confirm data residency or ownership, no subprocessor list appears anywhere, and the privacy policy discloses group-wide data sharing across the JTL-Group; the chain is German at the front and undocumented behind it.

Shopware

The independent sovereignty review returned no confirmation for jurisdiction, ownership, data residency or subprocessors, and we found no published subprocessor list. The imprint does name a German stock corporation registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld, and the homepage claims European data centres, but only as the basis for the AI Copilot architecture, which is no guarantee for the checkout path.

JTL-Shop

Real, computable numbers: Advanced at 99 EUR/month, orders from your own shop and POS free, extra-order packages at 0.11–0.22 EUR, and the API, Workbench, production modules and Wawi Cloud all priced. But Enterprise is 'Auf Anfrage', the Start and Pro headline prices are absent from the evidence, payment gateway rates are unstated and neither VAT treatment nor minimum term is stated — most of the invoice is computable, with a sales conversation hiding at the top.

Shopware

Every named tier is public with period and VAT treatment stated — Community Edition "Kostenlos € 0", Rise "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Evolve "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt." — and the AI add-on carries a per-plan price. But the Beyond tier is "Individuell", and we found no public information on transaction or revenue-share fees, order or revenue limits, or minimum terms, so the true annual cost for a shop of my size cannot be worked out from the pages alone.