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Shopware

E-commerce · Germany
Founded 2000 · shopware.com

German mid-market commerce platform (Schöppingen, est. 2000); Cloud entry €600/mo. PayPal owns ~41% as of Oct 2025.

Shopware offers EU hosting in Germany, but a US parent or sub-processor leaves material CLOUD Act exposure. It is listed under E-commerce.

Assessment notes

shopware AG (Schöppingen DE, HRB 11471 Coesfeld) is German-incorporated and EU-hosted with ISO 27001 + SOC 2 Type II + PCI DSS, but PayPal (Nasdaq: PYPL) acquired Carlyle's stake in October 2025 and now holds ~41%, flipping the ownership signal to eu_hq_us_funded and creating material CLOUD Act exposure via the US-public-company parent stake; founders Hamann still majority-own.

Findings

CLOUD Act
Ownership
Sub-processors
— not disclosed

Verified signals

Jurisdiction
  • EU / adequacy hosting: Yes
  • EU / adequacy operator: Yes
  • No US CLOUD Act exposure: No
Transparency
  • Public DPA: Yes
  • Sub-processors disclosed: Yes
  • Open-source clients: Yes
  • Third-party certification: Yes
CLOUD Act by deployment

Exposure depends on how you run this product.

Hosted SaaS (default)

Vendor-operated: the sub-processors below apply.

Self-hosted (open-source)

Deploy on your own EU infrastructure and you control hosting and every sub-processor.

Jump to

About Shopware

Shopware (Schöppingen, DE, founded 2000) is the most visible German Shopify alternative but is structurally NOT in Shopify's SMB price range: Cloud Rise plan starts at €600/month excl. VAT, with pricing scaling on GMV. The free open-source Community Edition is self-hosted and is the realistic indie / SMB path, not the SaaS Cloud. Ownership changed materially in October 2025: PayPal took over Carlyle's stake from the 2022 $100M Carlyle + PayPal round, bringing PayPal's stake to ~41%. PayPal is a US-public company on Nasdaq, which is a substantive CLOUD Act-relevant ownership flip from the 2024 "eu_owned" perception. Certifications: ISO 27001 + SOC 2 Type II + PCI DSS + GDPR. The AVV names the infrastructure: Shopware SaaS runs on AWS EMEA SARL with eu-central-1 Frankfurt as the primary region and eu-west-1 Dublin for disaster recovery. Best fit for mid-market DACH merchants who need a full-control B2B+B2C platform with on-prem option, not for solo merchants comparing Shopify Basic ($39/mo) prices.

Sub-processor map · not disclosed

Vendor does not publish a sub-processors list. Schrems II compliance and CLOUD Act exposure cannot be independently verified without it.

Frameworks & certifications

ISO/IEC 27001
Active
SOC 2
Active
Informational · US framework

Capability matrix

Table 1Capabilities of Shopware

Self-hostable Yes
Recurring / subscriptions Yes
Multi-currency Yes
Multilingual Yes
Product variants Yes
Multi-vendor marketplace No

Integration & access

REST API Yes
SSO (SAML / OIDC) Yes

Compliance & governance

Audit log Yes
Self-host / on-prem option Yes

Pricing & tiers

from €600/mo
Paid
View pricing page

Public documents

  • Data Processing Addendum (DPA)
    www.shopware.com/de…
    Open
  • Sub-processors list
    www.shopware.com/de…
    Open
  • Terms of Service
    www.shopware.com/en…
    Open

Alternatives in this category

  • France · €24/mo
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    Public DPA: Yes Sub-processors: Yes Open source: Yes
  • Poland
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    Public DPA: No Sub-processors: No Open source: Yes
  • Finland · €49/mo
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    Public DPA: Yes Sub-processors: No Open source: No