JTL-Shop vs Shopware

JTL-Shop

Everything the evidence offers on the selling side is 'unbegrenzte Artikel' and 'Integrationen zu allen beliebigen Payment-Anbietern' — not one word on variants, bundles, tiered pricing, guest checkout, vouchers or German payment habits like invoice and direct debit. For a shop product, checkout evidence this absent is information: I cannot credit conversion features nobody documented.

Shopware

The variant machinery is genuinely worked — parent-child inheritance, a configurator object over property groups, unlimited properties with filtering — and the payment architecture with synchronous and asynchronous handlers plus a redirect URL returned in the headless API response shows a checkout built to be extended. But I found no public information on bundles, guest checkout, promotions or vouchers, the only payment provider named anywhere is PayPal, and customer-specific prices surface only on the top Beyond plan — good machinery with the conversion features unproven on the captured pages.

JTL-Shop

A 'Tax powered by' module name and DSGVO-/GoBD-konforme Abläufe is bookkeeping hygiene, not tax determination; the evidence contains nothing on VAT by destination, OSS, B2B reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or the checkout texts German law demands. Being a German vendor with a DATEV booking service earns nothing on this criterion until the pages say what the shop itself computes.

Shopware

What the developer pages document is a seam, not a service: an app can expose a tax endpoint that is called during checkout by priority with signed requests, and rates are configured by hand under Settings > Tax in the administration. Automatic VAT by destination and customer type, VAT-ID validation with reverse charge, OSS, and e-invoicing are all left to a provider the merchant must build or buy; I found no public information showing the platform handles any German legal case itself.

JTL-Shop

Schnittstellen, Partner-Apps und Extensions exist, but the REST API is Beta and rented as an add-on at 99–199 €/month — a monthly fee to talk to your own shop is lock-in dressed up as a surface. No evidence of themes, webhooks, headless, staging or a local development story anywhere in the evidence.

Shopware

Plugins are Symfony bundles delivered as Composer packages that may declare dependencies, the Store API is a documented headless surface with decorator patterns and naming conventions, and the open-source core can be self-hosted, run on PaaS or SaaS — a real dependency model rather than a walled app store. The pages state plainly that plugins do not run on cloud stores, only apps do, and I found no public information on staging environments, documented rate limits, or upgrade paths for customisations.

JTL-Shop

This is where the money actually went: WMS with mobile warehouse devices and shipment tracking, 30+ marketplaces synchronised without extra licences to stop overselling, POS connections, production modules, and a named DATEV bank-reconciliation service. It stays off the 8 because shipping labels via JTL-Shipping are only 'coming soon' and supplier, dropshipping and partial-returns flows are entirely unevidenced.

Shopware

The order model is the strongest evidence here: orders are denormalized and persisted independent of the catalogue, three state machines cover delivery states like Shipped partially and transaction states like Refunded partially and Chargeback, and a Documents module sits in the checkout guides. But states are not operations — no carrier is named, no label printing, no returns process beyond state names, no ERP or accounting interface is evidenced, and multi-inventory appears only as a Beyond-plan feature.

JTL-Shop

'Lokal – Auf eigenem Server' is genuine hosting choice and the only exit-relevant fact in the evidence; export of catalogue, customers or order history, deletion and any data-return commitment are documented nowhere, and 'schrittweise Migration möglich' reads as a path in, never a path out. Ownership is hinted at, not evidenced.

Shopware

Self-hosting on an open-source core with a Community Edition at € 0 is structural ownership — the merchant can run the shop and its database themselves rather than trust a promise. But the documented Migration Assistant runs one way: connections, profiles, premapping, delta detection and media processing are all built to bring data into Shopware 6, and I found no public information on export completeness, documented deletion, or a migration path out.

JTL-Shop

The imprint pins a German GmbH to Amtsgericht Mönchengladbach with a German VAT-ID, but data residency is unstated, no subprocessor list exists in the evidence, and third parties like Dealavo, JERA and GREYHOUND are wired into pricing, finance and service functions with no word on where they process. Group-wide data sharing across the JTL-Group companies adds another unexamined hop — EU vendor, unknown chain.

Shopware

The imprint names shopware AG registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld with a Schöppingen address — a German contracting entity with published DPA terms based on the EU standard contractual clauses. But the European-datacenter claim is scoped to the Intelligence Copilot architecture rather than shop hosting generally, and I found no public information on a subprocessor list, named hosting infrastructure, or vendor ownership; SOC 2 Type II alongside ISO 27001 evidences audits, not where checkout data sits.

JTL-Shop

Credit where due: the order metering is published (ab 0,11–0,22 € je Auftrag in packages of 100 to 10,000), add-ons are priced (Wawi Cloud ab 49,99 €, Workbench 125 €/user, REST-API ab 99 €) and up to 17 % annual discount is stated. But the Start and Pro tier prices never appear, Enterprise is 'Auf Anfrage', and VAT treatment, minimum term and payment-gateway rates are silent — the invoice is half-computable, and the half missing is the expensive half.

Shopware

The ladder is public and honest about VAT — Community Edition at € 0, Rise "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Evolve "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Beyond "Individuell" — but every number that decides the invoice is missing: no transaction or revenue-share fees, no order or GMV limits, no hosting costs, no minimum term, and no stated basis for what pushes a "from" price upward. Nexus carries a "Kostenlose Einführungsphase" planned until 1 October 2026 with a non-binding review limit of 10,000 requests per customer and calendar month — a price signal with no price attached.