Pack Declare vs. EPR Insights: Which Shopify App Is Right for You?

If you've been looking for a Shopify app to handle your EU packaging compliance (PPWR / EPR), you've probably come across two names: EPR Insights and Pack Declare. Both launched within the past year. Both promise to automate what used to require a compliance consultant.

But the two products are built on different assumptions, for different kinds of merchants. Picking the wrong one wastes months of setup and, worse, risks inaccurate declarations when August 12, 2026 comes around.

This article walks through both side-by-side: features, pricing, country coverage, and — importantly — who shouldn't use either of them. We're the team behind Pack Declare, so this is not a "neutral" article in the strict sense. But we've tried to be fair about where EPR Insights genuinely wins, because pretending otherwise is a waste of your time.

At a glance

If you only read the table and skip the rest: EPR Insights is simpler and cheaper for single-country, Shopify-only merchants with light volumes. Pack Declare is built for multi-country, multi-platform merchants who need declarations accepted by specific national PROs, not generic reports.

Now the details.

What each product actually does

EPR Insights

EPR Insights is a Shopify-native app that reads your orders and calculates packaging weight data for EPR reporting. The product is organised around a real-time dashboard: you configure custom rules for your packaging, and as orders come in, EPR Insights tallies the weight per material per country.

Its stated scope covers four EPR categories at once:

• Packaging (primary focus).
• Electronics (WEEE).
• Single-use plastics.
• Batteries.

That breadth is interesting — most competitors are packaging-only. If you sell electronics with batteries and packaging, EPR Insights gives you a single tool to track all three.

The pricing is order-based:

• Basic ($15/month) — up to 400 orders/month, $0.05 per order over that.
• Advanced ($29/month) — up to 1,500 orders/month, live support.
• Pro ($59/month) — up to 4,500 orders/month, live support.
• Custom (contact sales) for enterprise.

Seven-day free trial. Billing in USD, every 30 days.

Pack Declare

Pack Declare takes a different architectural approach. Instead of asking you to configure rules and then calculating tallies, it reads your actual sales from Shopify, WooCommerce, and Amazon (natively — one-click OAuth), auto-generates packaging Bills of Materials (BOMs) for each SKU, and produces country-specific declaration packs in the exact format each national PRO portal accepts.

"PRO-specific" is the critical word. In EU EPR, each country has its own Producer Responsibility Organisation, each with its own declaration format:

• Spain: ECOEMBES requires a CSV with NIF, producer ID, weight in kg with 3 decimals.
• France: CITEO wants tonnes with 6 decimals, materials coded in French, eco-modulation applied.
• Germany: LUCID requires a registrierungsnummer and quarterly declarations.
• Italy: CONAI MOD 6.6 format.
• Netherlands: Afvalfonds CSV with 50,000 kg/year threshold.

Pack Declare computes each of these declarations for you — the exact figures in each portal's own categories, with a guided submission checklist and an audit trail behind every number.

Pricing:

• Free (€0) — 1 country, 100 orders/month, 1 declaration pack per year.
• Lite ($29/month on Shopify App Store) — 1 country, 500 orders/month, unlimited declaration packs.
• Growth (€199/month) — 8 countries, unlimited orders, WooCommerce + Amazon connectors, 10 team members.
• Enterprise (custom) — SSO, SLA, onboarding.

No order-based overage fees.

The three dimensions that actually matter

Once you get past feature lists, EPR compliance products differ on three real-world dimensions. Here's how the two compare on each.

1. Country coverage (and format depth)

EPR Insights describes its scope as "Europe" and supports "country-specific compliance requirements." This works if your country's PRO accepts a generic summary CSV with material totals. Some do — at least for simplified reporting. But ECOEMBES, CITEO, LUCID, and CONAI have specific formats that are not interchangeable. A "Europe generic" report rarely drops directly into those portals without manual reformatting.

Pack Declare writes its adapter per country. Each one generates the exact columns, units, character encoding, and field names each portal expects. We test declaration packs against real portals. When ECOEMBES updated its format in January 2026, we updated our adapter before the next user's submission deadline.

Who this matters for: merchants selling to 2+ specific EU countries. If you're Shopify-only and sell only to Germany, EPR Insights plus Germany's LUCID portal might be enough. If you ship to Spain, France, and Germany — three different portals, three different formats — Pack Declare is built for that.

2. Multi-platform connectors

EPR Insights is Shopify-native. Pack Declare is Shopify + WooCommerce + Amazon native.

That matters if you actually only sell on Shopify — in which case you don't need WooCommerce or Amazon connectors, and EPR Insights is simpler. But a surprising number of "Shopify merchants" also sell on Amazon (marketplace expansion, brand-building, or wholesale). If any of those orders also ship to EU customers, they count toward your EPR obligation the same way Shopify orders do.

Pack Declare pulls orders from all three. One dashboard, one BOM catalog, one declaration pack. You're not maintaining parallel records.

Who this matters for: merchants selling on more than one platform. If you're strictly Shopify, the Pack Declare connector is the same as EPR Insights — you don't get much from paying for more.

3. Data model: sales-first vs. rules-first

This is the most abstract but most important difference.

EPR Insights asks you to set up rules: "If the order contains product A, add 50g of cardboard; if it contains B, add 200g of PET." You configure this rules engine once, then it runs forever.

Pack Declare works from Bill of Materials (BOM) versioned to your actual product catalog. Each SKU has a BOM. When your supplier sends you a new carton weight, you update the BOM. The update is effective from a date forward; older orders continue to calculate against the old BOM. This is "versioning" in the strict sense: there's a historical record of what packaging was in effect when.

Both approaches produce correct numbers when nothing changes. The difference appears when:

• You change packaging midyear (e.g., switch to lighter bubble wrap). With a rules engine, you update the rule — but your January orders now calculate against the new rule, which is wrong. With BOM versioning, Jan–May orders use the old BOM, June onward uses the new.
• You have many SKU variants with slightly different packaging. Rules engines struggle with 500+ SKUs because the rules become unmaintainable. BOMs scale because each SKU has its own BOM; no rule explosion.
• An auditor asks "how did you calculate 450 kg of plastic for Germany in Q2?" With BOM versioning, you can drill down to the specific orders and their specific BOMs on those dates. With rules, you can only show the current rule — and the auditor has to trust that the rule was the same in Q2.

Neither approach is "right" — they're optimised for different scales. Rules work well up to about 200 SKUs and stable packaging. BOM versioning pays off above that, especially when packaging changes over time.

Who this matters for: merchants with more than 300 SKUs, frequent packaging changes, or concerns about audit trails.

Pricing at the same scale

Let's run some actual numbers. Suppose you're a cosmetics brand selling 1,200 orders/month to France, Spain, and Germany, using Shopify.

On EPR Insights

• You need Advanced ($29/month) because 1,200 orders exceeds Basic's 400 limit.
• Annual cost: $348 (€322 at current rates).
• What you get: dashboard, data, "Europe-generic" reports. You'll need to reformat for CITEO, ECOEMBES, and LUCID yourself or hire a consultant to do it.

On Pack Declare

• You need Growth (€199/month) because Lite only supports 1 country.
• Annual cost: €2,388 (or €1,990 with annual billing).
• What you get: complete declaration packs for all three countries in each PRO's exact categories, plus eco-modulation fee estimates.

At that scale, EPR Insights is 7-8× cheaper. Why would you pay the difference?

Three reasons:

1. Consultant cost savings. If you were paying €2,000–3,000/year per country for a consultant to prepare CITEO or ECOEMBES declarations from Excel or generic CSVs, Pack Declare replaces that work entirely. Three countries × €2,500/year = €7,500 saved. You pay €2,388 and save €5,100 — a 2.1× net savings per year.
2. Time-to-compliance. Pack Declare hands you the portal's numbers ready to enter. EPR Insights produces data you need to reformat. For a one-person compliance team, that's 1–2 days/country/declaration, or 12–24 days/year for three quarterly declarations across three countries.
3. Audit readiness. When a French inspector asks "how did you arrive at 340 kg of PS in Q2?", Pack Declare has a drill-down to the specific orders. EPR Insights has a dashboard number. Both answer the question, but one is faster and more defensible.

If none of those three matter to you — if you're happy reformatting reports manually and you're not concerned about audits — EPR Insights' cost advantage is real.

When EPR Insights wins

To keep this article honest:

Choose EPR Insights if:

• You sell on Shopify only (not Amazon, not WooCommerce).
• You sell to 1–2 EU countries.
• You're OK doing the last-mile reformatting to PRO portals yourself.
• You want a $15–59/month budget envelope.
• You also need batteries or WEEE tracking (EPR Insights covers multiple EPR categories; Pack Declare is packaging-focused).

Choose Pack Declare if:

• You sell to 2+ EU countries and want PRO-specific declaration packs.
• You sell on Shopify + Amazon, or Shopify + WooCommerce, or all three.
• You have 300+ SKUs with occasional packaging changes.
• You want BOM versioning for audit defensibility.
• You want supplier portal functionality for collecting packaging data from suppliers.
• You want to estimate EPR fees (not just weight) including eco-modulation.
• Your cost per year of compliance consultants is >€3,000.

When neither works

Here's a third category, because there's no point pretending otherwise.

If you're a Fortune 500 or multi-subsidiary enterprise: both tools are probably too small for you. Consider Coolset (mid-market ESG platform), Recyda (FMCG enterprise), or Osapiens (compliance platform with 26-language supplier portal).

If you ship to more than 10 EU countries: Pack Declare covers 8 today (adding Poland, Sweden, Denmark in Q3 2026). If you need all 27 EU countries now, consider PCX Markets (49 global markets) or a consultancy that handles the long tail.

If you want "done-for-you" compliance service: both tools expect you to do the work (albeit automated). If you want a service that handles paperwork and submits on your behalf, look at Eldris AI (Amazon sellers, fixed-price done-for-you) or Valpak (UK + EU advisory service).

The takeaway

EPR Insights is a good fit for single-country, single-platform merchants with moderate volumes and a tolerance for last-mile manual work.

Pack Declare is the better fit for multi-country merchants who want declaration packs accepted directly by national PROs without intermediate formatting, especially if they're also on Amazon or WooCommerce alongside Shopify.

Both are legitimate choices. Pick based on your specific situation — not on marketing.

If you're still unsure, try the free tiers of both. EPR Insights gives you 7 days to evaluate. Pack Declare's Free tier never expires, and includes one declaration pack per year so you can actually experience the full cycle. Start free with Pack Declare →