Why TYPO3 Still Dominates in Germany and Austria - Despite Everything

TYPO3 in 2025: Why Is It Still a Thing?

Every once in a while, a project comes along with a brief that sounds suspiciously bureaucratic. The client insists on TYPO3, perhaps because it is already in use, or because it was recommended by their longstanding agency. Most developers flinch at the idea. Most modern growth hackers and marketers raise an eyebrow. TYPO3? Still? But it is still here. Especially in Austria and Germany, TYPO3 continues to power government websites, university portals, public-sector information platforms, and yes, even eCommerce shops. And while there are a few reasons that make sense, most are based on structural habits rather than technical merit. Let’s break it down.

Why TYPO3 Still Gets Used

1. National loyalty and open source ideals

TYPO3 is European. Originally developed by Danish programmer Kasper Skårhøj, it has been nurtured primarily by German-speaking contributors. In countries like Austria and Germany, where data privacy, sovereignty, and scepticism towards American cloud giants run deep, TYPO3 has become a symbol of independence. Public institutions, government departments, and traditional corporations often prefer software that is open source, not-for-profit, and not reliant on a US-based cloud stack. TYPO3 ticks those boxes. There’s also a cultural factor. Many decision-makers have grown up with TYPO3. It feels familiar, even trustworthy. The decision is often less about agility or time-to-market, and more about control and conformity.

2. Bureaucratic inertia and slow procurement

TYPO3 thrives in environments where nothing moves fast. (Sorry DACH) Think government procurement cycles, academic institutions, and legacy enterprises. The procurement process itself can take a year or more. Software contracts often run for a decade. The teams involved have seen the same stack for 15 years. And nobody wants to be responsible for switching something that is already “working”, even if it is suboptimal. Once TYPO3 is in, it stays. The switching cost is more political than technical. This means TYPO3 sites can continue to exist well past their expiry date, with more features layered on like duct tape rather than a fundamental rethink of the stack.

The TYPO3 agency ecosystem

There is a robust network of certified TYPO3 agencies, especially in Germany and Austria. These agencies are deeply invested in TYPO3. It is not just their technical preference, it is their business model. For them, pushing TYPO3 means defending their specialisation, their retainers, and their market position. Many of their clients are non-technical, so the agency’s recommendation becomes the de facto decision. This creates an echo chamber where TYPO3 is seen as the default enterprise CMS, not because it outperforms alternatives, but because it has always been “the safe choice.”

TYPO3 eCommerce: a painful compromise

While TYPO3 was never designed for eCommerce, various extensions have tried to bridge that gap. Aimeos, Cart, tt_products, these add-ons enable product catalogues, shopping carts, and checkout flows. But they are awkward. The documentation is sparse. The developer experience is frustrating. Updates are brittle. And compared to platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Solidus, TYPO3 eCommerce solutions feel stuck in 2009. Still, some organisations choose TYPO3 for eCommerce simply to consolidate everything under one roof. They prefer having content, catalogue, and transactions in a single system, even if it means accepting technical debt.

TYPO3’s strengths lie in its backend structure. It handles:

  • Multilingual content with full granularity — TYPO3 supports nested language trees and per-element language fallback, making it easier to publish compliant, properly structured multilingual content, particularly important in regions like Switzerland or Belgium.
  • Permissions and workflow approvals — Fine-grained backend user groups and configurable content approval processes allow TYPO3 to manage who can create, edit, approve or publish content at a highly detailed level. This makes it suitable for institutions that require audit trails and editorial oversight.
  • Accessibility (barrierefreiheit) requirements — TYPO3 has long-supported templates and extensions that help implement accessible websites, including semantic structuring, ARIA support, and screen reader compatibility. This is crucial for public institutions legally required to meet WCAG or EN 301 549 standards.
  • GDPR-related data workflows — TYPO3 can store and structure consent logs, anonymisation triggers, and user data access flows via extensions or core capabilities. This includes the ability to redact or delete data on request and store data locally under strict data sovereignty rules.
  • Transparency standards required by public institutions — TYPO3 makes it easy to create structured publication formats such as FOIA portals, funding disclosures, and document archives with categorisation, version control and scheduled publishing.

Other systems can do these things, but TYPO3 has them integrated into long-used extensions or its core system. For some IT departments, that makes it a simpler argument, even if the frontend experience or marketing integration suffers.

Why developers hate it

Ask any modern developer who has touched TYPO3 in the last five years, and you will likely get a sigh. The problems are consistent:

  • TYPO3 uses its own templating language (Fluid), its own config language (TypoScript), and its own structure, all bolted onto PHP.
  • You often end up with a mix of PHP, Fluid, TypoScript, and YAML, with unclear documentation and fragile compatibility.
  • Compared to Rails, Laravel, or even WordPress, TYPO3 feels slow, brittle, and overengineered.
  • Frontend integration is poor. Want to use React or Vue? Prepare for a fight.
  • Want to deploy with Git and CI/CD best practices? That is not the typical workflow.

In short: TYPO3 makes easy things hard. And hard things even harder.

The missing culture of TDD and BDD

One of the most glaring issues with TYPO3 projects is the lack of test-driven or behaviour-driven development. TYPO3's ecosystem never truly embraced TDD or BDD practices, which means that automated tests, code confidence, and release stability are often lacking. This results in brittle deployments where bugs creep in unexpectedly, and where updates are often feared rather than embraced. In environments where reliability is essential — especially for commerce or integration-heavy platforms — this becomes a real business risk. By contrast, modern frameworks like Rails or Node-based stacks include testing as a default, with rich tooling for behaviour specification, unit testing, and continuous integration. This leads to better engineered software, faster debugging, and cleaner handovers. TYPO3 does not prevent TDD or BDD, but it certainly does not encourage it — and in practice, it is rarely done. That means more reliance on manual QA, more project risk, and less trust in every release.

So why write all this?

Because I have worked on projects where TYPO3 was the default, and I saw what it cost. Teams spent weeks building things that would take hours elsewhere. Basic eCommerce flows needed hacks. Tracking scripts broke every other month. Nobody was quite sure how permissions worked. And marketers were locked out of making meaningful changes because “the agency needs to do that.” If you are building an eCommerce business, or trying to scale a SaaS platform, or simply want to test ideas and iterate fast, TYPO3 is the wrong choice. Unless you are a municipality with a five-year roadmap and no commercial pressure, you can do better. And I do not say that as a blanket dismissal. I say it as someone who builds systems that grow companies, not just tick compliance boxes.

The better way

What do I recommend instead?

  • Solidus, Shopify or even Magento (anything but TYPO3 really) for commerce
  • Next.js or Rails for content-driven or hybrid apps
  • A backend where logic can be documented, tested, and deployed cleanly
  • A frontend where performance and experience are measurable
  • A growth loop, not a page management system

If you still need GDPR, localisation, workflow approvals, we can build that. And we will document it, test it, and make sure it scales. TYPO3 may still be around for a while, especially in German-speaking institutions, but you do not have to be stuck with it. If you are planning a rebuild or trying to scale something old and clunky, I am happy to show you what your options look like.