Omniterra vs Shopware: which one fits your store?

Short answer

Shopware gives you two very different routes. The Community Edition is the free, open-source core that you install on your own server. The paid plans, Rise, Evolve and Beyond, start at €600 a month and are priced on your sales volume and other individual factors. Shopware is a strong fit for businesses with a development team, complex catalogues or serious B2B needs.

Omniterra is a hosted platform for stores that want to sell without running servers or negotiating a plan. There is a free plan with no time limit, paid plans from €29/month, and 0% commission on sales on every plan.

At a glance

Shopware's options in detail

Community Edition: free, open source, self-hosted

Shopware's pricing page describes the Community Edition as the open-source, MIT-licensed core. It is free, and the page is clear that setup and maintenance are your responsibility. It is not available in the Shopware Cloud, so you choose and pay for hosting yourself.

That is a good deal for a technical team: you get the full code and can customise anything. The costs sit around the software: a server sized for your traffic, installing and updating the shop and its extensions, backups and security. Shopware doesn't publish those costs because they depend on your setup. An optional AI add-on, Shopware Intelligence+, is listed at €29 a month for the Community Edition.

Rise, Evolve and Beyond: paid plans for growing businesses

The paid plans are listed as:

• Rise, from €600/month excl. VAT, for growing businesses. It includes Shopware Intelligence, 3D capabilities and unlimited sales channels.
• Evolve, from €2,400/month excl. VAT, adding B2B components, advanced search and more.
• Beyond, custom pricing, adding features such as digital sales rooms, multi-inventory, customer-specific pricing and subscriptions, with 24/7 priority support.

Shopware says pricing for these plans is "based on your gross merchandise value (GMV) and further individual factors", explained in a consultation with its sales team. So "from €600" is a starting point, and the final figure depends on your sales. The page also says you can cancel at any time, with access until the end of the billing cycle.

Hosting: SaaS, PaaS or self-hosted

Shopware lets you choose how the paid plans run. Shopware Cloud comes as SaaS, with automatic software updates and hosting handled for you, or PaaS, with hosting maintenance handled but more room for customisation. You can also self-host. According to the pricing page, SaaS comes at the same price as self-hosted, while PaaS is priced individually.

Worked example

Assumptions: a store with €20,000 a month in online sales, a small team, no in-house developer. Card processing fees are left out: they depend on the payment provider you choose, not on the platform.

Over a year, Rise costs at least €7,200 excl. VAT (12 × €600) before any GMV-based adjustment. The Community Edition licence costs nothing, but hosting and a developer's time are real monthly costs you would need to price for your own store. On Omniterra, the plan price is fixed and doesn't rise with your sales; you move up only if you need more of a plan's limits. See our plans and limits.

For many small and mid-sized stores, the question is less about the licence and more about who runs the shop. If you don't have a developer, a hosted platform takes that job off your hands.

What Omniterra includes

• Payments: your own Stripe account connected in one click, with card fields in the checkout and Apple Pay / Google Pay, plus PayPal, Revolut, local processors and bank transfer. See payments.
• Cash on delivery with rules, a "Refused on delivery" status and COD Guard risk scoring. See cash on delivery.
• A storefront in 19 languages with hreflang, and multi-currency markets. See multi-currency and multi-language.
• B2B with company accounts, price lists and net terms. See B2B and wholesale.
• Subscriptions, dropshipping supplier sync, and sales channels for Meta, Google, TikTok and Pinterest.
• Themes with a visual editor, a custom domain with automatic SSL, and an AI assistant via MCP.

When Shopware is the better choice

• You want open source. The Community Edition is MIT-licensed, and you control the code and the servers.
• You have a development team. Shopware is built for deep customisation, and self-hosting or PaaS gives developers a lot of room.
• You run a complex or large B2B business. Evolve adds B2B components, and Beyond lists customer-specific pricing, multi-inventory and digital sales rooms.
• You want a choice of hosting model. SaaS, PaaS and self-hosted are all on the table for the paid plans.

Moving to Omniterra

We don't have a direct Shopware import today. Our automatic imports cover Shopify and WooCommerce. To move from Shopware, start with a free account, build your catalogue, map your old URLs to the new ones and set up redirects before you point your domain. The checklist in how to migrate without losing SEO applies here too. You can also read Omniterra vs WooCommerce for another open-source option, or our guide to Shopify alternatives.

Shopware is a trademark of its owner. Omniterra is not affiliated with it.