JTL-Shop vs Shopware

JTL-Shop

Payments via "allen beliebigen Payment-Anbietern" and 24/7 rule-based repricing are evidenced, plus unlimited articles per shop — but variants, bundles, tiered or customer-group pricing, guest checkout and per-channel pricing are all silent, and silence is not a variant matrix. Payment breadth puts it a notch above barebones, nothing else does.

Shopware

The variant machinery is real — parent-child inheritance, a configurator assembled for storefront requests, unlimited property groups and multi-category products — and the checkout is documented down to payment handlers with synchronous and asynchronous gateway flows. What the captured pages do not show is bundles, tiered pricing, guest checkout, or German payment methods beyond PayPal; customer-specific prices appear only in the top Beyond tier. Checkout customisation without a rebuild is well evidenced through the plugin and Store API documentation.

JTL-Shop

A "Tax powered by" module exists and the vendor claims GoBD-conformant finance processes with DATEV export, but GoBD is bookkeeping, not VAT determination — nothing on destination-based VAT, OSS, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or checkout legal texts. That is below even hand-configured per-country rates.

Shopware

Tax handling is documented as an app integration point: providers are registered in the administration under Settings > Tax, called by priority during checkout, and Shopware trusts the provider's calculated sums without recalculating them. That is plumbing for automatic VAT determination, not evidence the vendor maintains rates, OSS reporting, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or e-invoicing. We found no public information on the mandatory German checkout elements such as order button wording, withdrawal policy or price indications.

JTL-Shop

Modular build with interfaces, partner apps and extensions plus 500+ partners is a real ecosystem, but the REST API is in Beta and costs 99–199 €/month as an add-on — an API you rent in beta is not a developer surface. No evidence on themes, webhooks, staging or headless keeps it under the middle anchor.

Shopware

This is a developer platform: plugins are Symfony bundles shipped as Composer packages with a real dependency model, the Store API is documented with service-based decoratable routes and named routes, and headless payment flows return the redirect URL in the API response. An open-source core and a free Community Edition mean a team can shape and own the shop. We found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits, which keeps it off the top step.

JTL-Shop

This is the heart of the product: synced shops and 30+ marketplaces with overselling reduced, ERP-native operations with mobile warehouse devices, shipment tracking in the Wawi, DATEV bank reconciliation and BI reporting a merchant can steer by. But shipping labels via JTL-Shipping are explicitly "coming soon", no carrier is named, and partial shipments and partial refunds appear nowhere — a shop that cannot do a partial refund has never had December, so it stops short of the top anchors.

Shopware

The order model is built for people who actually ship: three state machines with configurable, API-modifiable transitions, delivery states including shipped-partially and returned-partially, and transaction states including refunded-partially — the partials I need for December are in the core state model, and orders are denormalized with line items and calculated prices persisted independently of the catalogue. We found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing, maintained ERP or accounting interfaces, dropshipping flows, or a returns workflow beyond the states; multi-inventory appears only in the top Beyond tier, and shipping is named only as an integration category.

JTL-Shop

"Lokal – Auf eigenem Server" is genuine structural control and better than any export promise, but that is the only ownership fact on the evidence — no export completeness, no documented deletion, no exit path (the only migration fact points inbound). Self-hosting earns it above the bottom anchors; silence on everything else holds it under the middle.

Shopware

Self-hosting is offered alongside PaaS and SaaS, the core is open source with a free Community Edition, and the Migration Assistant documents media processing, persistent mappings and delta detection by checksum. The documented migration path runs into Shopware rather than out of it; we found no public information on full-fidelity export of order documents or on a contractual data-return commitment when leaving.

JTL-Shop

The imprint shows a German GmbH with a German register court and VAT ID, and a local self-hosted option exists — so this is not a non-EU vendor despite the pipeline's unknowns. But the subprocessor list is absent, hosting infrastructure is unnamed, data residency is unstated and no certification is published, which lands it on the anchor where the missing subprocessor list sits.

Shopware

The captured pages establish a German contracting entity — shopware AG of Schöppingen, registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld — with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 claims, a data-processing agreement on the EU standard contractual basis, and self-hosting that puts the shop under the merchant's own control. The European data-centre claim is scoped to the Intelligence Copilot architecture rather than stated for the platform generally. We found no public information on a subprocessor list or on where customer and order data reside for the hosted shops, and the collected sovereignty attributes came back unconfirmed.

JTL-Shop

Order metering is unusually computable: per-order packages priced per tier (0,22 €/0,16 €/0,11 €), orders from your own shop and POS free, modules like Workbench and the REST API openly priced. But Enterprise is "Auf Anfrage", payment transaction rates are nowhere, and VAT treatment and minimum term are unstated — the top tier and the payment fee are both sales conversations.

Shopware

Tier prices are public with the billing period and VAT treatment stated exactly — "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Community Edition at € 0 — and the Intelligence+ add-on is priced per plan at € 29 or € 19 per month. But the tier prices are from-prices, the top Beyond tier is "Individuell", and we found no public information on transaction or revenue-share fees, order or GMV limits, minimum terms, or hosting costs, so the real annual invoice is not computable from the pages.