PIM Gate is not a new PIM and not another export script. It is the layer that opens the data you already maintain to customers, suppliers, sales teams, shops and markets — under rules you control. Here are twelve reasons, argued one by one, and an honest look at the alternatives.
Claims are cheap. For each reason we say how it works, and where something ships later, we say when.
FITS YOUR LANDSCAPE
01LIVE
No rip-and-replace.
Keep the PIM you have invested in. PIM Gate reads from it.
Replacing a PIM to get better portals is a multi-year project with real risk to the business. PIM Gate avoids that trade-off. It connects to your PIM read-only, maps the data into its own canonical schema and opens it from there. Nothing is written back unless you configure it — for example, reviewed translations returned as drafts. Your data owners keep working where they work today.
READ VIA XML · REST PULL · SCHEDULED SFTP · WRITE-BACK OPT-IN
Portals built into a PIM live and die with that PIM. When you consolidate two PIMs after an acquisition, or move to a new one, the portals, dealer logins and shop integrations have to be rebuilt. PIM Gate sits in between: connectors for Viamedici, Akeneo, Pimcore, Stibo and Censhare, plus generic XML, REST and SFTP for anything else. The migration bridge runs old and new PIM in parallel and lets you switch attribute groups from one source to the other — with rollback — while every portal and channel keeps running.
Customers, suppliers and field sales never count as seats.
Per-user pricing punishes success: the more dealers you onboard, the more you pay, so portals end up restricted to a few key accounts. PIM Gate is priced by internal seats — the people on your team who configure and maintain. Portal users are unlimited in every version, so you can give every installer, every supplier and every rep their own login instead of a shared one.
PRICED BY INTERNAL SEATS · PORTAL END USERS UNLIMITED IN S · M · L · XL
Connect, scope, deliver — without a migration to finish first.
Because PIM Gate runs next to your PIM, the first portal does not depend on a data migration or a new data model. We connect a source, map its attributes, define who sees what, and open the portal under your domain. Depending on your sources and the rules you want enforced, a first portal goes live in days to weeks. Further portals reuse the same connected, governed data.
052026relationship scoping and RBAC admin console 2026
Entitlements that mirror the business.
Who sees what follows your organisation, not the software's.
Real access rules are rarely "customers see everything". A Swiss dealer sees Swiss prices and the ranges they carry; a supplier sees only their own articles; a rep sees the customers in their territory and what each agreement covers. PIM Gate layers entitlements per tenant, portal, role, market and category, down to the single asset, and enforces them on the server for every page, export and API call. For sales, scope can follow the commercial relationship: rep → customer → agreement.
Consumers receive only what changed — about 95% smaller payloads.
Nightly full exports are how most integrations start and why most of them become slow and fragile. PIM Gate calculates changes on field level per consumer. A shop that needs three new prices receives three prices, not 20,000 products. Webhooks carry the delta when something changes; pull consumers ask /v1/sync/diff?since= and get the same. Smaller payloads mean faster syncs, fewer timeouts and less load on everything downstream.
GET /v1/sync/diff?since= · SIGNED WEBHOOKS · ~95% SMALLER THAN FULL EXPORTS
When a partner says "your data was wrong last Tuesday", you need to know what they actually received. PIM Gate stores every export as a version. You can compare any two versions side by side, field by field, and roll a channel back to a known good state. Combined with the append-only audit log, you can answer who received which data, and when, without reconstructing it from emails.
082026CMS connectors for Ibexa DXP and Drupal coming soon
Translation that respects your terminology.
Only what changed, in your words, reviewed by your people.
Translation budgets are mostly spent on text that was already translated. PIM Gate sends only new or changed segments, reuses your translation memory (TMX), enforces your termbase (TBX) and routes the rest to the engine you choose per language — DeepL, OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI or EU and local models. A reviewer approves before anything is published. Translators who prefer their own tools get a small XLIFF or XLSX delta package instead of a full file.
DELTA · TMX · TBX · ENGINE PER LANGUAGE · REVIEW QUEUE · XLIFF / XLSX PACKAGES
Open Data, Digital Product Passport and ETIM on the same data.
New obligations usually arrive as new tools: a DPP platform here, an ETIM mapping tool there, each with its own copy of your product data. PIM Gate adds them as modules on the catalog you already govern. The Open Data module publishes what you decide is public as schema.org JSON-LD, versioned feeds and a public read-only API. The DPP module creates passport records with access levels behind a QR code. The ETIM module maps your attributes to ETIM classes and features and delivers BMEcat.
OPEN DATA · DIGITAL PRODUCT PASSPORT · ETIM & BMEcat · ALL THREE −20%
Product data includes prices, customer agreements and unreleased products. PIM Gate is operated by a Swiss company and hosted in Germany (Hetzner, Falkenstein) by default. Swiss hosting is available on request; dedicated or on-prem deployments for regulated industries likewise. Tenants are isolated at data level, backups are taken daily and stored off-host, and a DPA is available. For AI, you choose the model and provider — including EU-hosted and local models.
DE HOSTING · CH ON REQUEST · DEDICATED / ON-PREM ON REQUEST · GDPR · revDSG · DPA
Seats, versions and modules — no per-SKU surprises.
You can calculate the cost of PIM Gate before you sign. Four versions (S, M, L, XL) priced by internal seats, with fair-use guardrails for SKUs, API calls, storage and AI credits. Portal modules and data modules are added à la carte at list price. The entry version starts at €450 per month, billed annually.
S €450 · M €850 · L €1,700 · XL €3,400 PER MONTH · BILLED ANNUALLY
Made by people who have connected PIMs, shops and DXPs for a decade.
PIM Gate comes from Netgen Switzerland, which has spent more than ten years on PIM, commerce and DXP integration projects in the DACH region. The problems it solves are the ones we kept solving by hand: the dealer asking for data sheets, the supplier Excel, the shop import that broke. It is built on the avidia.ai application framework and is in daily production use at a DACH manufacturer with more than 20,000 products.
NETGEN SWITZERLAND AG · ZÜRICH · TEAMS CH + HR · avidia.ai FRAMEWORK
Every company that shares product data uses one of these approaches, often several at once. This is a comparison of categories, not of vendors — individual products differ, so verify specifics with each supplier.
Comparison of approaches to sharing product data, by category
Criterion
PIM-native portals
Syndication tools
In-house build
PIM Gate
What it is
Portal modules offered by a PIM vendor for its own PIM
SaaS focused on mapping and sending product data to retail and marketplace channels
Portals, exports and APIs your team or an agency builds and maintains
A portal and integration layer next to any PIM or ERP
Delta, TMX/TBX, engine per language, review (2026)
How portal users are priced
Often tied to the PIM licence or per user
Usually by channel, connector or volume
Your infrastructure and development cost
Unlimited portal users; priced by internal seats
Hosting
Depends on vendor and contract
Depends on vendor
Wherever you run it
Germany by default; Swiss and dedicated on request
Who operates it
The PIM vendor or your IT
The vendor
Your team, permanently
Netgen Switzerland, as SaaS
When another approach is enough
A PIM-native portal is a sound choice if you are committed to one PIM for the long term, its portal modules cover all your audiences and the licence is already in place.
A syndication tool is a sound choice if your main problem is sending product data to many retailer and marketplace templates, and you do not need portals for customers, suppliers or sales.
An in-house build is a sound choice if you have one narrow use case, a team that will maintain it for years, and no need for multi-tenant branding, entitlements or audit.
PIM Gate is built for the case in between: several audiences, several channels, possibly several PIMs — and a need for rules, versions and an audit trail across all of them.
04 · By role
What changes for each team.
The gate is one platform, but every team feels it differently. Find yours.
PRODUCT DATA & PIM TEAMS
Stop being the help desk for your own catalog.
Product data teams spend a surprising share of their week answering requests for data they have already maintained: a data sheet for a dealer, an export for a shop, a spreadsheet for a wholesaler. Every request is a small manual job, and every manual job is a chance to send the wrong version.
With PIM Gate, the PIM stays your workplace. Consumers help themselves through portals and APIs, validation rules catch gaps before a channel does, and versioned exports show exactly what went where. You configure the rules once instead of repeating the work every week.
Requests become self-service portal access
Rules hold incomplete records with field-level reasons
Completeness visible per product before publication
Show each customer their catalog — current, not last quarter's.
Reps prepare for meetings with PDFs that were outdated before they were printed, and customer-specific catalogs go through marketing with a turnaround of days. After the meeting, nobody knows whether the customer opened what was sent.
The Sales Portal scopes the catalog to the commercial relationship: a rep sees their customers, and each customer view shows what that agreement covers. Reps export a customer-specific PDF or XLSX from a selection and share a scoped link instead of an attachment.
Supplier data that arrives clean — or tells the supplier why not.
Wholesalers and retailers receive supplier data in as many formats as they have suppliers. Someone cleans each file, re-types what does not fit and discovers the errors only after the products are live.
The Supplier Portal moves the check to the moment of submission. Suppliers upload XLSX, BMEcat or use the API; rules validate every field live; partial submissions are held for review; rejected SKUs come back with field-level errors, and the supplier re-submits only those.
Marketing and localization teams pay to re-translate whole files for a few changed sentences, struggle to keep terminology consistent across product data and web content, and hand translators exports from systems they do not know.
PIM Gate translates only new or changed segments, with your translation memory and termbase, using the engine you choose per language, and always with a review step. For web content in Ibexa DXP or Drupal, connectors bring the same workflow to CMS content and write reviewed translations back as drafts.
Every new channel adds another export from every source, and every change in a source risks breaking exports nobody documented. Portals built into the PIM tie the architecture to one vendor, and point-to-point integrations make PIM replacement a project nobody wants to start.
PIM Gate gives you one layer with one contract: connectors in, versioned REST API, signed webhooks and delta sync out, entitlements enforced on the server, every export versioned. It runs as SaaS in Germany, with Swiss and dedicated options on request, and decouples your channels from your PIM choice.
Connect each system once
Versioned API /v1 with per-tenant tokens and rate limits
The Digital Product Passport, ETIM requirements from wholesale and transparency obligations add mandatory data and formats. Buying a separate tool for each creates another copy of the product data and another place where it can diverge.
PIM Gate adds data modules on the same catalog: passport records with access levels and a data carrier, ETIM mapping with completeness per class, and Open Data publication under rules you define. The append-only audit log and versioned exports document what was published, and when.
PIM Gate is designed to sit beside your PIM, ERP and DXP. Here is what that means for the most common landscapes we see.
FOR VIAMEDICI EPIM USERS
Add a gate next to EPIM — or use it to move at your own pace.
Viamedici offers supplier, media and sales portals as part of its EPIM suite. They are mature and deeply integrated, and they are tied to EPIM. If EPIM will remain your PIM for the long term and its portals cover your audiences, that is a coherent setup.
PIM Gate is for Viamedici customers who want a portal and API layer that is independent of the PIM underneath: to serve audiences or channels with a separate, versioned API and field-level delta; to run portals for several brands or PIMs in one place; or to prepare a PIM change without rebuilding portals and channels. PIM Gate reads EPIM data via XML today, and the migration bridge can run EPIM and a new PIM in parallel while you switch attribute groups step by step.
Additivekeep EPIM and its portals; add PIM Gate for the API, delta delivery or audiences not covered today.
Bridgerun EPIM and a new PIM in parallel; channels and portals stay unchanged while you switch.
Consolidateseveral PIMs, one portal layer.
FOR AKENEO & PIMCORE USERS
Give your PIM the outward-facing layer it doesn't focus on.
Akeneo and Pimcore are strong where product data is created and enriched. Opening that data to hundreds of dealers, suppliers and reps — with branding per audience, entitlements down to the asset and an audit trail — is a different job, and it is the job PIM Gate does.
PIM Gate connects to both today, maps their attributes into its canonical schema and serves portals, APIs and feeds from there. Groups running Akeneo in one company and Pimcore in another can bring both into one gate and one set of portals, and consolidate later with the migration bridge.
In many manufacturers, SAP holds what customers ask for most: prices, customer-specific prices, availability and documents such as invoices and certificates. Product content sits in the PIM. Customers and shops need both together.
Today, PIM Gate connects to SAP through a custom connector built on the same framework as its standard connectors, and combines SAP data with PIM content under the same entitlements. Standard SAP connectors are on the roadmap. PIM Gate Commerce, coming soon, will bring SAP prices, availability and documents in real time to your shop and B2B customer account.
Nowcustom connector, SAP fields in portals and API.
NextCommerce layer for shops and customer accounts (waitlist).
FOR IBEXA DXP & DRUPAL
Product data and web content, one translation workflow.
Manufacturers running their websites on Ibexa DXP or Drupal often translate web content in one process and product data in another — with different terminology and different vendors. Agencies building these sites need governed product data and a translation workflow their clients can run themselves.
Ibexa DXP and Drupal sites can consume PIM Gate product data via the REST API today. The content translation connectors, coming soon, pull content items from the CMS, run them through the same delta, translation memory, terminology and review steps as product data, and write approved translations back as draft language versions for editors to publish. Netgen has worked with Ibexa and Symfony for many years; this connector comes from that practice.
Web contenttranslation connector with write-back as draft (early access).
Agenciespartner program for implementation.
06 · Objections
What we hear in every first call.
Good — PIM Gate needs one. It is the layer that opens your PIM to people and systems outside it.
PIM-native portals only work with that PIM and usually need its full licence. PIM Gate portals work with any source, keep running if you change PIM and add an open API for shops and apps.
It's SaaS: we operate, update and back it up. Your team configures portals, rights and rules — no servers.
Hosted in Germany (EU) by default; Swiss hosting on request; tenant isolation; DPA available.
Your choice. MT/LLM is a proposal; nothing is published without the review step you configure. You can also run translation fully with human translators via export/import packages.
They don't have to. PIM Gate exports small delta packages (XLIFF/XLSX/TMX) without duplicates and re-imports them.
Yes. Start with one portal or one module (for example translation), add modules later at list price.
OIDC/SAML is on the roadmap for higher versions (see roadmap).
A separate stage/test tenant on the same platform, bookable with a production subscription.
Syndication tools focus on sending data to retail and marketplace channels. PIM Gate also serves people — customers, suppliers, sales — through entitled portals, and systems through a versioned API with delta sync, all from one governed layer.
Nothing extra. Portal users are unlimited in every version; you pay for the internal seats that configure and maintain.
Every capability on this site shows its status. LIVE is in production today; 2026 is scheduled for this year; COMING SOON is in early access; ROADMAP is planned but not scheduled. We will tell you in the demo which parts of your use case run today.