Is Shopware's own search enough?
For plenty of shops: yes. Shopware ships with a search, and with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch behind it, it gets noticeably better. The question is not whether it works but what it costs you when it misses a product — and you can measure that before buying anything.
Short version: below roughly a thousand well-named items a second search product rarely pays for itself. Above that, how often your search comes back empty decides it, not our marketing.
What Shopware does well
It is already there
No extra contractual party, no second invoice, no additional service that can fail. For anyone keeping their number of vendors small, that is a serious argument.
No data leaves your shop
The built-in search needs no data processor and no extra entry in your record of processing activities. We host in Germany and supply the DPA, but “no third-party processing at all” is still cleaner than any agreement.
For small catalogues it is often enough
A few hundred items with clean names will be found even by a search that only matches letters. If nobody complains about your search and it rarely comes back empty, save the money.
Where Antares differs
- Typos stop costing you money
- The built-in search matches letters. If your customer mistypes, the product is gone. Antares also finds what is not written word for word in the product text: same typo, right products at the top. Try it yourself at the top of the home page.
- You change it yourself
- Synonyms, curated hits, ranking by margin and the list of searches that found nothing all sit in an interface built for merchants. You change them yourself, without raising a ticket with your agency.
- Nobody has to run it
- A fast built-in search needs an extra search server that somebody sets up, keeps current and watches — hours your agency either bills you for or your developer does not spend on the shop. With us, running it is part of the monthly amount.
Side by side
| Question | Antares | Shopware |
|---|---|---|
| What does it cost? | From €49 a month, running it included. AI search and margin ranking start at Pro, €99 a month. | No licence cost, but hours: the extra search server has to be set up, maintained and watched. Ask your agency what it bills for that in a year. |
| Does it handle typos? | Yes, from Pro. Antares does not only match the word that was typed, it matches what was meant — with a “did you mean” line above the results. | Only to a point. The built-in search matches letters; how much of a typo it forgives depends on how it was set up. |
| Can I have results ordered by contribution margin? | Yes, from Pro. Six sliders, and a before/after list shows which products move before you publish. | Ask the vendor. We know of no second product in this price class that lets margin decide the order of the results. |
| Can I see what search earns? | Yes: revenue from search, conversion and rescued searches per sales channel, up to 25 months of history, CSV export. | Not built in. You can see search terms; attributing revenue would be something you assemble in your web analytics. |
| Who carries the load when a lot of searching happens? | We do. Your shop never even sees the search requests. | Your shop, or the extra search server you run for it. |
| What happens during an outage? | If Antares does not answer for three seconds, this very built-in search takes over again. It stays where it is; we do not replace it. | If the shop is down, so is the search — same machine. |
Statements about Shopware's built-in search refer to 6.6 and 6.7, with and without an extra search server (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch), as of August 2026. What applies to you depends on how your search was set up.
When you should not switch
Check it against your own numbers before you switch. If your searches rarely end in zero results, if your catalogue is small and cleanly named, or if your product data carries no margin, Antares will do little for you. We are not selling search because it looks nicer, but because it adds up — and if there is nothing to add up in your shop, leave it.
How a switch works
There is nothing to migrate. The plugin sits on top of your existing search form without changing it: Antares reads your catalogue in behind the scenes, and only when you publish in the panel does a customer see a different result. If you do not like it, switch it off and the built-in search is exactly where it was.
See the numbers before you pay.
30 days on the full Pro package, no credit card. After a month you get an email with your real figures: searches, conversion, revenue from search. Then you decide.
Start 30-day trial