In short: For most brands with up to a few thousand products, Shopify is the better choice: live faster, less maintenance, lots of ready-made apps. Shopware pays off if you need complex B2B with customer-specific prices and approvals, or have to run the store on your own servers.
The biggest difference: who carries the tech
Shopify is a hosted platform. Servers, security updates and checkout run at Shopify, you take care of products and sales. Shopware is software from Germany that you run yourself or rent as a cloud version. If you host Shopware yourself, you need an agency or developers who install updates and keep an eye on the server.
When Shopify fits
- You mostly sell to consumers.
- The store should be live within a few weeks.
- Someone on your team updates copy and images without a developer.
- You sell to several countries. Shopify Markets handles languages and currencies.
When Shopware fits
- You have many business customers with their own price lists, approvals and orders on invoice.
- You need deep connections to an ERP that doesn’t exist as a Shopify app.
- Data protection or group policy requires your own servers.
Where stores actually fail
Rarely because of the platform. Usually it’s slow pages, weak product photos and a checkout with too many steps. You can fix that on both. Shopify just takes more of the work off your hands.
Frequently asked questions
Can Shopify be used in a GDPR-compliant way?
Yes, if you set up your privacy policy, cookie consent and data processing agreement properly. Shopify offers a data processing agreement for this.
Can you migrate from Shopware to Shopify?
Yes. Products, customers and orders can be transferred. What matters most are redirects for every old URL so you don’t lose your Google rankings.
Does Shopify charge transaction fees?
Not if you use Shopify Payments. With another payment provider, a fee per order is added depending on your plan.