Shopware is the German e-commerce platform for custom work and B2B. The software is free as open source, or from 600 euros a month as a subscription; the real price tag sits in the build and upkeep around it. Below are the true costs, where it is genuinely strong, where it strains, and when moving to Shopify is wiser.
What exactly is Shopware?
Shopware comes from Schöppingen, just across the Dutch border near Enschede, where brothers Sebastian and Stefan Hamann started the company in 2000. Today's Shopware 6 is a fully rebuilt, API-driven suite on Symfony and Vue.js: open source at the core, with paid editions around it. You run it on your own hosting or as a cloud service, and that freedom of choice is the character of the platform in one sentence. Everything is possible, little is finished.
This is no small project anymore. In February 2022 Shopware raised 100 million dollars in growth capital from investment firm Carlyle and payments giant PayPal, with the founders keeping the majority. That money went into product development and international growth, and you see it in the pace at which the B2B features in particular are maturing.
The scale, according to platform tracker Storeleads: just over 30,000 active stores as of mid 2026. But watch the distribution, because it decides what the ecosystem is worth to you: 67 percent of all Shopware stores are in Germany, against not even 3 percent in the Netherlands, roughly 800 stores. In Germany, Shopware is the trusted standard. In the Netherlands it is a specialist choice, and you notice that the moment you go looking for an agency, a theme or a plugin.
What does Shopware cost?
The prices below come from the Shopware pricing page and were checked in August 2026. They are from-prices excluding VAT; the actual rate of the paid editions depends in part on your revenue:
| Edition | Per month | Key difference |
|---|---|---|
| Community | € 0 | Open source core, self-hosted, self-managed, community support |
| Rise | From € 600 | Commercial features, unlimited sales channels, support within 8 hours |
| Evolve | From € 2,400 | The B2B components, advanced search, support within 4 hours |
| Beyond | On request | Digital Sales Rooms, multi-inventory, customer-specific pricing, 24/7 support |
Two things stand out. First the jump: between Rise and Evolve sits a factor of four, and the B2B features Shopware is known for live in that more expensive edition. Anyone who wants B2B on a subscription is therefore not budgeting 600 but 2,400 euros a month as the starting point. Second, the word "from": the subscriptions grow with your revenue, so the amount on the pricing page is the floor, not the ceiling.
And Community, the free edition? It is genuinely free, and it brings the same bill as every self-hosted open source platform: hosting that can take the traffic, updates someone has to test and apply, security that is your responsibility, and a developer or agency for everything you want to change. With Shopware there is the nature of the system on top. It is built as a toolbox for professionals, so the agency hours are not a side item but the main one. For a serious Community store, expect hundreds to thousands of euros a month in management and development, depending on your ambitions.
What Shopware is good at
An honest review starts with what is right, and at Shopware a lot is right, as long as you fit the target group:
B2B as the core product, not an afterthought
Customer-specific pricing, quote flows, budgets and order lists live in the platform itself, and the top edition adds digital sales rooms and multiple warehouses. For complex wholesale, Shopware is one of the few platforms that can genuinely take on Shopify Plus.
Custom work without a ceiling
The core is open source and the architecture is built to be changed: your own entities, your own flows, your own checkout logic. If your process differs from the standard, you build it exactly the way you want it, without waiting for a platform to allow it.
Rules and automation out of the box
The Rule Builder and Flow Builder let you steer prices, shipping and processes on almost any condition without code. That is tooling competitors need a stack of apps for, and it simply ships with the system.
You decide where your data lives
Self-hosting means full control: your servers, your database, your export options. For organisations with strict data sovereignty requirements that is not a detail but a condition, and Shopware delivers it without discussion.
A serious backbone
A hundred million dollars in growth capital from Carlyle and PayPal in 2022, the founders still at the wheel, and a clear product direction towards B2B and enterprise. This platform is not quietly disappearing; it is moving up-market.
Running a complex B2B operation on Shopware 6, with a regular agency or your own developers, and a centre of gravity towards the German market? Then you are on a strong platform and this article is mostly reassurance.
Where it starts to strain
The limits of Shopware are not hidden defects. They belong to a toolbox for professionals, and you feel them the moment your situation does not match the German ideal:
The entry price is the highest in this series
Six hundred euros a month as the floor for the paid editions, and a factor of four on top once you want the B2B components. For comparison: that is more per month than a Shopify Basic subscription costs per year. The investment can make sense, but you have to earn it back with processes a cheaper platform genuinely cannot handle.
No developer, no Shopware
Everything is possible, little is finished. Installing, integrating, updating and customising are developer tasks, and the question is not whether you need an agency but how many hours a month. Without a technical partner, Shopware is mostly an obligation you bought.
The ecosystem lives in Germany
Two thirds of all Shopware stores are in Germany; the Netherlands counts about 800. That means fewer Dutch agencies, less Dutch-language knowledge, and plugins and themes aimed at the German market. You will find specialists here, but not quickly, and you notice it in rates and lead times.
Shopware 5 is over
On 31 July 2024 support for Shopware 5 ended for good: no more updates, including security patches. Anyone still running it does so at their own risk, with a checkout that gets more vulnerable every month. And the step to Shopware 6 is not an update but a rebuild: new theme, new plugins, newly configured integrations.
Hosting and performance are your trade
Self-hosting means self-scaling: caching, database tuning and the Black Friday peak are your problem, or your agency's at your expense. The cloud edition takes that over, but trims exactly the custom freedom you chose Shopware for.
Updates demand direction
Every Shopware update has to pass your plugins, your theme and your custom code, and every combination is unique. Manageable with discipline and a staging environment, but it is recurring work that is never done, and it shows up on the agency invoice every month.
For the ordinary store it is too much machine
A store without complex processes pays Shopware for muscle it never uses. The honest question is not whether Shopware can do it, because it can do almost anything. The question is whether your store needs it.
How is the platform doing?
Two things are true at once, and you deserve to know both. Shopware is developing at pace, with the money and investors to sustain it, and the direction is unmistakable: more B2B, more enterprise, more subscription. For the top of the market the platform gets more serious every year.
At the same time the base is shrinking. Storeleads counts just over 30,000 active stores as of mid 2026, six percent fewer than a year earlier and a fifth below the mid-2023 peak. That is not a collapse, but it fits the movement the prices show too: Shopware is choosing fewer, larger customers. For a Dutch SME store that is a double effect. The platform moves up while the ecosystem here was already thin, and the smaller Shopware stores that agencies made their living on disappear first. Anyone squarely in the target group notices little. Anyone outside it pays the bill for a platform moving the other way.
Shopware or Shopify?
The question is not which platform can do more, but who does the work and what it costs on balance. Side by side:
| Shopware | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Free (open source) or from € 600 p/m | € 21 to € 289 p/m, Plus from € 2,100 |
| Hosting and security | Arrange yourself, or cloud with less freedom | Included, scales automatically |
| B2B | Core product, but from € 2,400 p/m or custom work | Built in on Plus, with custom work below it too |
| Custom work | Unlimited, everything is code | Within theme and apps; checkout customisation on Plus |
| Maintenance and updates | Your direction, with agency or own team | Handled by the platform |
| Apps and integrations | Own store, centred on Germany | Thousands of apps, worldwide |
| Specialists in the Netherlands | Thin on the ground | Widely available |
| International | Multi-language and multi-currency, set up yourself | Markets, currencies and languages built in |
| Data ownership | Full, own servers possible | Platform managed, export always possible |
Where Shopware wins: unlimited custom work, B2B processes adjustable down to the fibres, and full control over where your data lives. Where Shopify wins: all upkeep off your plate, predictable costs, an ecosystem that is simply in stock in the Netherlands too, and B2B that comes included on Plus instead of in a separate price class.
And total cost? With Shopware you pay the subscription or the freedom, and on top of either, always the hours. A serious Shopware store carries a structural agency relationship with it, and that is the item that decides the comparison. Not because those hours are wasted, but because you have to want them: if you see your platform as a competitive advantage, you invest in it gladly. If you simply want a good store, Shopware charges you for direction that Shopify takes off your hands by default.
Stay or switch: how to decide
Stay on Shopware if you run Shopware 6 with processes that genuinely need the platform: deep custom work, complex B2B flows, strict requirements on where your data lives. Especially with a regular agency or your own developers and a centre of gravity towards Germany, you are in a good place. A migration costs 8,000 to 20,000 euros with us and rises for complex stores; that investment has to solve a problem you actually have. Without that problem, switching is a waste of money, however much we would like you as a client.
Switching becomes logical as soon as one of these situations sounds familiar:
- You still run Shopware 5. The rebuild is coming either way, because support and security patches ended in July 2024. If you have to build again anyway, this is the moment to put the platforms side by side.
- The agency invoices mostly go to maintenance rather than improvement: applying updates, resolving conflicts, keeping what was already there running.
- You use a fraction of the machine. The complex features Shopware was built for are switched off in your store, but you carry the management load that comes with them.
- You have B2B ambitions, but the jump to the edition that covers them is too steep, and custom work on the free edition makes you even more dependent on your agency.
- Your centre of gravity is the Netherlands, and you notice that knowledge, plugins and specialists keep having to come from Germany.
What moves with you, and what does not?
The question behind every migration is what you lose. The honest answer: less than you fear, but not nothing.
Products and variants move
Including prices, stock levels, images and copy. Categories become collections, and multilingual content comes along per language.
Customers and order history move
Your customers find their details and past orders in the new store.
Passwords do not move
They are stored encrypted and cannot be transferred in any platform migration. Customers set a new password at their first login; we prepare that message together.
From Shopware 5 as well
For the data migration it makes little difference whether you run 5 or 6: we extract products, customers and orders from both. So you do not have to do the rebuild to Shopware 6 first, only to switch afterwards anyway.
Your rankings move, provided you arrange it
Every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new address, category and content pages included. This is where migrations without a plan take the most damage, and with us it is a fixed part of the job.
Rules and Flows are translated up front
For every rule and automated process we determine the Shopify equivalent: standard feature, app or custom work. Usually less remains than you expect, and what remains is documented before we build.
ERP and back-office integrations are rebuilt
With Shopware stores, the ERP or bookkeeping integration is often the heart of the system. We do not port it one to one but set it up fresh on the Shopify APIs, with queueing and error handling.
Your theme deliberately does not move
A Shopware theme cannot be ported. That is not a loss but the moment to build a store that is yours, without the old system's management load attached.
Our complete approach per platform, from data export to launch, is on the page about migrating your store to Shopify.
What a switch costs and how it works
A migration is not a matter of an export button, and with Shopware least of all: the value often sits in custom work and integrations, and exactly those deserve a well-considered Shopify equivalent rather than a copy. We first map your processes, plugins and URL structure and determine per part what works out of the box, what becomes an app and where custom work remains. Then we build the store, migrate the data and give every old URL its 301 redirect. Your Shopware store keeps selling until launch day; you do not miss a day of revenue.
Expect 8,000 to 20,000 euros for a regular store. Shopware stores sit at the top of that band or above it more often, up to 60,000 euros, because B2B functionality or an ERP integration comes along. In return your structural management load drops; we make that calculation explicit in the audit, and after it you get one fixed price. Our platform-by-platform approach is on the page about migrating your store to Shopify, and if your operation runs on customer-specific pricing and quotes, read how we set up a B2B store on Shopify.
Not sure your current store is the problem? Have it checked first, free of charge. Our free store analysis scans your store live for speed, SEO, accessibility, security and checkout, and works on any store, Shopware included. Within two minutes you have a report with concrete improvements.
Frequently asked questions about Shopware
The open source Community edition is free; on top you pay hosting, management and developer hours. The paid editions start at 600 euros a month for Rise and 2,400 for Evolve, with Beyond on request. Those are from-prices excluding VAT that grow with your revenue, and the B2B components only arrive in Evolve.
The core is: Shopware 6 is open source and the Community edition installs at no cost. A working store is not free, because hosting, updates, security and every customisation are your responsibility, and Shopware is emphatically built to be set up by professionals. The developer or agency hours are the main cost of this edition.
Shopware 6 is a complete rebuild on Symfony and Vue.js, not a continuation of 5. The step therefore means a new theme, new plugins and newly configured integrations. More importantly: support for Shopware 5 ended for good on 31 July 2024, security patches included. Anyone still running it does so at their own risk.
No. We extract products, customers and orders from Shopware 5 just as well as from 6, so you can skip the rebuild to 6 and migrate directly. In fact: anyone still on 5 is facing a rebuild project anyway, and that is exactly the moment to put both routes side by side instead of staying inside Shopware by default.
According to platform tracker Storeleads, just over 30,000 active stores as of mid 2026, six percent fewer than a year earlier and about twenty percent below the 2023 peak. Two thirds of them are in Germany; the Netherlands counts roughly 800. The platform is moving towards fewer but larger customers.
Yes, and honestly: this is the platform's strongest side. Customer-specific pricing, quote flows, budgets and order lists live in the product itself. The caveat is the price: those B2B components sit in the Evolve edition from 2,400 euros a month, or require custom work on the free edition. Shopify offers comparable B2B features on Plus, and with custom work below it too.
Shopware is a toolbox: open source, endlessly adjustable, self-hostable, with B2B as the core product, and you organise the upkeep. Shopify is a service: the platform handles hosting, security and updates, you build within theme and apps, and the costs are predictable. The choice is rarely about what is possible, but about who does the work and what that costs on balance.
Yes. We extract products with variants, customers, orders and multilingual content from Shopware through the API or an export, from version 5 as well as 6, and transfer them in a structured way. Every old URL gets a 301 redirect so your rankings move with you, and for every rule, flow and integration we determine the Shopify equivalent up front.
With us, 8,000 to 20,000 euros for a regular store, including data migration and 301 redirects. Shopware stores sit at the top of that band or above it more often, up to 60,000 euros, because B2B functionality or an ERP integration comes along. After the audit you get one fixed price, no surprises afterwards.
