Side-by-side comparison

Pricing: the gap is bigger than it looks

Sendcloud's Lite plan starts around €45/month and bundles a fixed allotment of labels. Once you cross that allotment, per-label fees kick in. Service-point usage, customer-portal customisation, and multi-warehouse routing live behind their higher tiers (Plus, Premium), which can push the bill into the hundreds of euros per month for a single store. Some integrations also carry a setup fee.

ShipLab uses a single, predictable model: a $5/month base subscription plus $7/month for every active carrier (UPS, DHL Express). Storage above the included quota is billed at $0.55/GB. There is a $100/month cap on overage charges, so your worst-case monthly bill is bounded. Carrier shipping costs (the actual postage) never flow through ShipLab — you pay UPS or DHL directly, with your own negotiated discount.

For a typical DTC store running both DHL Express and UPS — whether based in the US, UK, EU, or anywhere else with carrier coverage — ShipLab lands at $5 + $7 + $7 = $19/month all-in. The same workload on Sendcloud usually starts at €45 and scales up with label volume.

The carrier-account model is the big strategic difference

Sendcloud is an aggregator. You ship under Sendcloud's negotiated rates with the carriers, and Sendcloud is the contracted party with the carrier. That is convenient for new merchants who don't have direct contracts, but it means:

• Your rates are whatever Sendcloud agreed with each carrier, plus the markup they bake in.
• You can't fully leverage volume discounts you negotiate yourself with DHL or UPS.
• Carrier disputes, billing audits, and special services route through Sendcloud, not directly to the carrier.

ShipLab is a direct-contract app. You connect your own UPS or DHL Express API credentials, your own contract numbers, your own pickup accounts. Rates returned at checkout are your rates — including any negotiated discounts you have on file with the carrier. ShipLab does not charge, mark up, or take a percentage of shipping costs.

For a store doing serious volume (say, 1,000+ DHL Express shipments per month), the math swings heavily in favour of direct contracts. The carrier discount you negotiate yourself is usually larger than the implicit Sendcloud markup, and it grows with volume.

Condition builder: ShipLab's main feature win

Most Shopify shipping apps let you set basic if/then rules ("if cart total > €50, show free shipping"). Sendcloud falls into that category. ShipLab ships with a Magento-style nested condition builder — the same engine merchants know from years of Magento 2 shipping experience:

• Nested groups with AND / OR logic at any depth.
• Conditions on weight, cart total, destination country, EU/non-EU, product SKU, product ID, variant ID, custom attributes synced from Shopify.
• Product subselection: rule fires only if at least one cart item matches a sub-rule (e.g., contains a fragile category SKU).
• Schedule conditions: enable a rule only on certain days of the week or time of day.
• Price actions: surcharge, discount, fixed override, percentage of carrier rate, free shipping threshold.

If you ran a Magento store before migrating to Shopify, this is the rule engine you already know how to wield. It moves logic that previously lived in Magento's Cart Price Rules and Shipping Method Conditions straight into ShipLab.

EU customs: built-in vs add-on

Both apps support paperless commercial invoices and the basic VAT/EORI fields international shipping needs. The difference is in how much you can customise per market.

Sendcloud stores a single VAT and EORI number per account. ShipLab uses a three-level cascading scope: default → direction (export / import / domestic) → destination country. You can set one VAT/EORI globally and override it only for the specific countries that need a local one (e.g., a separate Spanish or Italian VAT for fiscal representation).

DHL Paperless Trade and UPS Paperless are first-class features in ShipLab — international shipments automatically generate the commercial invoice as a digital document with a signature image, not as a printed paper attached to the package.

Where Sendcloud is still the better pick

Sendcloud has been around since 2012 and has invested heavily in two areas where ShipLab is intentionally lighter:

• Service-point and locker network. If your customers expect to pick up parcels at PostNL, Bpost, GLS, or DHL parcel shops, Sendcloud's UI for showing nearby service points at checkout is more polished out of the box.
• Customer-facing returns portal. Sendcloud offers a hosted, brandable returns flow where shoppers self-serve. ShipLab handles return labels through a Shopify customer-account extension, which is solid but less customisable than a dedicated portal.
• Carrier breadth out of the box. If you ship with PostNL, Bpost, Colissimo, or GLS today and don't want to manage individual carrier contracts, Sendcloud's managed network is faster to start with.

ShipLab's roadmap covers more carriers, but as of today it is laser-focused on DHL Express and UPS — the two carriers where margin actually matters for cross-border DTC.

Migration: moving from Sendcloud to ShipLab

Switching is straightforward because ShipLab works on your own carrier accounts:

1. Pull your UPS Client ID + Client Secret from the UPS Developer Portal, or your DHL Express API credentials from the DHL MyAPI portal.
2. Install ShipLab on Shopify, add a Shipper Account, paste the credentials, run the connection test.
3. Recreate your price rules in the ShipLab condition builder — for many stores this is a single afternoon's work, because the rules map almost one-to-one to Magento Cart Price Rule logic.
4. Add ShipLab as a rate provider in Shopify Settings → Shipping and delivery.
5. Disable Sendcloud, monitor labels for 48 hours, then cancel.

Historical orders, tracking numbers, and labels stay in Shopify; nothing about the order data is locked into either app.

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