How we compare EPR software

Gramta publishes comparisons of EPR and PPWR software, including comparisons that involve Gramta itself. This page explains how those comparisons are made, so you can judge the pages against a stated method rather than take them on trust.

What we compare on

We rank on what a seller actually ends up holding, not on feature checkboxes. Seven questions do most of the work:

1. Does the tool produce the per-material kilograms a scheme invoices from, in the shape that scheme's portal expects, split between household and business waste?
2. Where do the quantities come from — derived from the sales you have already made, or typed and estimated by hand?
3. How much manual setup stands between your own data and a finished report.
4. Does it guide the registration and reporting, telling you whether you are an obligated producer, where and how to register, and what to report by when, or does it stop at the numbers?
5. Does it produce the PPWR paperwork — the declaration of conformity and the technical file behind it, or only explain them?
6. What is the real cost at your volume, including add-ons, and separately from the scheme's own fees.
7. Can you get your data out — packaging specifications are laborious to build and should not be locked to one subscription.

At least one of these is a criterion no single tool wins, including ours. We leave those in rather than quietly drop them, because a comparison that only a vendor could win is not a comparison.

How we source competitor facts

Every claim about another company comes from that company's own public pages. We quote it and date it, so the sentence carries its source. We re-check those pages each quarter and move the date forward when we do, because pricing and features in this market change often.

Claims about the law cite the regulation, the authority or the scheme directly. Every comparison links to primary sources such as EUR-Lex, national registers and PROs, so a reader can verify the regulatory ground without taking our word for it.

What we deliberately do not do

We publish no star ratings and no scores out of five. There is no defensible way to produce a rating like that from public information, so we describe what each tool does and let you weigh it against your own situation.

We do not rank on published price. The pricing models are not comparable on one axis: some vendors charge per country, some per order, some per kilogram of packaging, and some publish no price at all. Ranking them by a single "from" figure would mislead more than it helped, so we show worked cost examples at realistic volumes instead, computed from each vendor's own published rates.

How we recommend

The method above is objective. The recommendation is not neutral, and we do not pretend it is: where a tool honestly fits a reader best we say so, including when that tool is not Gramta, and where Gramta is the better choice for an EU online seller we say that too, and show why on the criteria above. No vendor pays to appear here or to rank higher, and there are no affiliate arrangements behind any recommendation.

If you want to skip the comparison and see your own numbers, our EPR and PPWR checker is free and asks a handful of questions.