Shopify vs Shopware: a flat plan, or priced on your growth.

Shopify is a flat plan: Basic €32, Grow €92, Advanced €384 a month, about a quarter less paid annually. Shopware’s Community Edition costs nothing to licence, but a live store pays for hosting, development and upkeep; its cloud tiers start at €600 a month for Rise and €2,400 for Evolve, priced on your gross merchandise value. For a mid-sized store the totals can land close together – the difference is predictability and who does the work.

The licence is free and that’s genuinely worth something – you own the code and choose where it runs. But a live store still needs hosting, a developer or agency, security updates and, every few years, a major version upgrade. Those costs are real even when no invoice has Shopware’s name on it. If you have the team, that trade can be excellent value; if you don’t, it’s how a "free" platform becomes the expensive one.

Shopware states that its paid plans are priced on gross merchandise value and further individual factors, with Rise starting at €600 a month and Evolve at €2,400. In practice the published figures are a starting point and the real number comes from a sales conversation. It’s a different logic from Shopify, where the plan costs the same whatever you turn over – worth modelling for your own three-year revenue plan before choosing.

It’s the established one. Around 12% of Germany’s top 1,000 online shops run on Shopware according to the EHI ranking, and the agency and support ecosystem around it is German-speaking and dense. That’s a real advantage if your team works in German every day. It isn’t the same as being the better fit technically – that depends on who runs your platform and how you want the cost to behave.

It was a rebuild rather than an upgrade: a new framework, a new database structure and a new template engine, with plugins incompatible and licences not transferable. Shopware 5 lost support in July 2024 and agencies typically budgeted three to six months. Shopware 6 is a modern platform and that jump is behind it – but it’s a fair illustration of what owning a platform can cost when its architecture moves on.

Both do it properly now, which wasn’t true a few years ago. Shopware has deep B2B capability on its paid tiers and a long track record with German wholesalers. Shopify has had native B2B on every paid plan since April 2026 – company accounts, price lists, volume discounts and payment terms – with unlimited catalogues on Plus. If B2B is the core of your business I would want to see your specific model before recommending either.

Shopware gives you more control: SEO URL templates you define per sales channel, against Shopify’s fixed /products/ and /collections/ prefixes. That’s a genuine point for Shopware. Everything else – redirects, metadata, structured data, sitemaps and above all speed – is at least as strong on Shopify, and the speed part isn’t something you have to buy and tune.

Substantially. Shopify’s App Store has more than 16,000 apps with a large free tier, which usually means whatever you need already exists. Shopware’s store is smaller but concentrated on exactly what German stores need. The practical difference shows up on the unusual requirement: on Shopify it’s often an app, on Shopware more often a development ticket.

Cleanly. Shopware 6 has a documented Admin API covering products, orders, customers and media, plus an import and export module – and on a self-hosted install you also have the database itself. The work in a migration isn’t extracting the data but mapping URLs, deciding what extension logic gets rebuilt, and handling variants. I go through that on the migration page.

No. I build the new store alongside the running one – Shopware keeps selling the whole time. On launch day the domain switches and the redirects go live; downtime is measured in minutes, not days.

When you have the people to run it, when owning the code and choosing where the data lives is a requirement rather than a preference, when your team works in German and local support matters daily, or when the B2B and content depth of the paid tiers is precisely the point. If that’s you, I’ll say so rather than talk you onto Shopify.

Yes. WooCommerce and PrestaShop each have their own detailed comparison against Shopify, and the hub puts the platforms side by side on the criteria that actually decide it – who runs the platform, real cost, checkout, cross-border selling and ownership.