Coolset and Pack Declare both help companies comply with the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). But they were built for different kinds of companies, and picking the one that doesn't match your profile means paying 25× too much or trying to use a tool that isn't designed for your workflow.
This article is written by the team behind Pack Declare. We've tried to be fair about where Coolset wins — because when a prospect lands on Pack Declare but isn't our ideal customer, we actively point them to Coolset. You'll save time if we're honest about who fits where.
The 30-second answer
- Coolset is a mid-market sustainability & ESG platform. PPWR is one of nine regulations it covers (alongside EUDR, CSRD, GHG emissions, CBAM, EcoVadis and more). It's designed for companies that already have an ESG officer or a formal sustainability function. Pricing starts around €5,000/year.
- Pack Declare is a vertical packaging / EPR tool built for e-commerce brands using Shopify, WooCommerce or Amazon. It reads your real sales and generates country-specific declaration packs. Pricing starts at €0 (Free tier) or €199/month (Growth).
If you have an ESG team, multiple regulatory obligations, and a mid-market budget, choose Coolset. If you're an e-commerce brand with 1–20 people where compliance is a part-time responsibility, choose Pack Declare.
Feature-by-feature comparison
| Coolset | Pack Declare | |
|---|---|---|
| Target customer | Mid-market importers & distributors | E-commerce SMBs (Shopify/Woo/Amazon) |
| Scope | 9 regulations (PPWR, EUDR, CSRD, GHG…) | Packaging EPR / PPWR only |
| E-commerce connectors | None | Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon (native) |
| Primary data model | Packaging portfolio + DoCs | Sales orders + versioned BOMs |
| DoC collection from suppliers | Yes (core feature) | Yes (supplier portal, T-44) |
| Country-specific declaration packs | Limited | 8 PROs with exact format |
| Free tier | Checker only (no platform access) | Free forever (1 country, 1 pack/year) |
| Paid tier starting price | ~€5,000/year | €199/month (~€2,388/year) |
| Onboarding | Customer Success Manager, 4-week programme | Self-serve (30 min) + optional €499 done-with-you |
| Multi-regulation dashboard | Yes (flagship) | No (packaging focus) |
| Implementation time | Weeks | Under an hour to first report |
Where Coolset wins
Be clear about this: Coolset is a better product than Pack Declare for a specific kind of company. Use it if:
- You have ESG obligations beyond packaging — especially CSRD reporting, carbon accounting (GHG Scopes 1/2/3), EUDR for deforestation, or EcoVadis. Coolset handles all of these in one platform; Pack Declare covers only PPWR.
- You're mid-market with an ESG team — typically 50+ employees, with a sustainability officer. Coolset's user interface, onboarding workflow, and Customer Success Manager model are designed for teams with dedicated compliance staff, not founders doing compliance on Friday afternoons.
- Packaging is one of many obligations you report on — a unified dashboard where PPWR lives alongside your carbon report and EUDR timber records is more valuable than a specialized packaging tool.
- You're an importer or distributor handling a few thousand SKUs across many suppliers, where the dominant workflow is collecting Declarations of Conformity rather than tracking live sales. Coolset's DoC workflow is excellent for this.
- Your budget is €5,000–20,000/year for compliance tooling. Coolset's pricing is built for mid-market finance approval, not for SMB credit cards.
Where Pack Declare wins
Pack Declare is built for the specific customer Coolset isn't:
- You sell through Shopify, WooCommerce, or Amazon. Pack Declare has native OAuth connectors for all three; Coolset has none. For e-commerce, this is the difference between real-time data and a monthly CSV export.
- You're a small team where compliance is part-time. Most Pack Declare customers go from signup to first declaration in under an hour, without a Customer Success Manager. Coolset onboarding takes weeks.
- You only need packaging EPR / PPWR. Paying for Coolset's nine-regulation breadth when you'll only use one is expensive overhead.
- You need PRO-specific declaration packs for ECOEMBES, CITEO, LUCID, CONAI, and five others. Pack Declare generates the exact format each portal accepts, down to decimals and character encoding. Coolset produces more generic reports.
- Your revenue is under €10M. At that scale, €199/month is a credit-card purchase; €5,000/year is a finance-committee discussion.
What the data model says about each tool's origin
Every compliance tool's data model reveals who it was originally built for.
Coolset's primary entity is the Packaging Portfolio: a structured catalog of every packaging component tied to its SKU, material, weight, and supplier, paired with Declarations of Conformity. This is the right abstraction for an importer with a supplier portfolio — someone whose packaging is specified upstream rather than produced in-house.
Pack Declare's primary entity is the Versioned Bill of Materials tied to a live stream of sales orders. When your supplier changes the bubble-wrap spec in March, the BOM effective date moves forward; older orders keep calculating against the old BOM. This is the right abstraction for a brand whose packaging changes over time and whose volume is driven by e-commerce orders.
Both models produce correct compliance numbers when nothing changes. Where they differ is in how easy they make the "my packaging changed mid-year" audit trail, and how much manual work it takes to bridge your e-commerce platform to the declaration output.
What about Coolset's free PPWR checker?
Coolset's free PPWR Documentation Checker is a marketing tool. You upload a DoC and it identifies gaps against mandatory PPWR data requirements. It's well-built and a reasonable way to evaluate whether you need a DoC-focused platform at all.
Pack Declare has an equivalent: our 2-minute Readiness Check. Different angle — ours scores your overall PPWR exposure (not just documentation completeness), and gives you an indicative annual EPR fee range. Both are free, both are useful, and you can run both in an afternoon to triangulate where you stand.
When to use both (yes, really)
A small number of companies genuinely benefit from running both:
- Brands that are also importers. Use Coolset for DoC collection from upstream suppliers, and Pack Declare for the sales-side calculation of what you've actually placed on each national market.
- Mid-market brands crossing into e-commerce. If you're already on Coolset for ESG reporting and you launch a Shopify DTC channel, plugging Pack Declare into Shopify is cheaper and faster than waiting for Coolset to build e-commerce connectors.
Neither tool is built to replace the other in these cases. They solve different halves of the same problem.
The honest bottom line
If Coolset is the right tool for you, its price is fair. An ESG Officer who saves a week of manual work across CSRD, EUDR, and PPWR comes out ahead on a €5,000/year bill.
But for a 5-person Shopify fashion brand selling to 3 EU countries? That €5,000 is the wrong tier. That's the gap Pack Declare was built for.
Pick the tool that matches your company shape, not the one that has more features.