Willhaben vs Kleinanzeigen — Austria’s and Germany’s Classifieds Giants Compared

On This Page

• At a glance
• Two separate businesses — and since 2025, not even the same owner
• The border is at the payment rail, not the sign-up form
• What each one costs a seller
• Buyer protection: PayLivery vs Sicher bezahlen
• Listing: expiry, photos and condition
• Shipping
• What sellers actually say
• Going commercial on each
• How to choose
• Why not both?

Willhaben vs Kleinanzeigen at a Glance

Both platforms occupy the same slot in their own country: the default place to sell a used sofa, a pram, a bike or a coat to somebody nearby. Both are free to start with, both run on classified ads rather than auctions, and both have added a protected payment-and-shipping layer on top of the old collect-in-person model. The differences that matter to a seller are in the fee cliffs, the ad expiry, the photo allowance, and the fact that each one’s protected-payment product stops dead at the national border.

Two Separate Businesses — And Since 2025, Not Even the Same Owner

A surprising amount of writing about these two platforms assumes a family relationship. There was one, briefly, and it ended.

Willhaben was founded in 2006 as a joint venture between Styria Media Group and Schibsted. When Schibsted spun out its classifieds business as Adevinta in 2019, that half-share passed to Adevinta — which also owned Kleinanzeigen. For a few years the two platforms genuinely did share a shareholder.

That ended in 2025. On 2 March 2025, Sprints Capital and Styria Media Group agreed to acquire Adevinta’s entire stake in Willhaben, and the deal closed that year. Willhaben’s own Impressum today lists the holding structure as 49.7928% Styria Digital Marketplaces, 49.7927% Sprints Blossom S.à r.l and 0.4145% SDM MEP. Neither Adevinta nor Schibsted appears anywhere on the page.

Kleinanzeigen, meanwhile, remains in the Adevinta group, which was itself taken private by a Permira and Blackstone-led consortium in June 2024. Its Impressum names kleinanzeigen.de GmbH of Berlin as the operator.

So as of 2026 the two share no owner, no infrastructure, no account system and no seller base. The only thing they have in common is the job they do.

And Kleinanzeigen is not eBay, either

Since a lot of German sellers still think of it as “eBay Kleinanzeigen”, it is worth settling this too. The platform dropped the eBay name on 16 May 2023, keeping accounts, chats, ratings and ads intact. Today the connection is functionally nil: Kleinanzeigen’s terms of use do not mention eBay once; its help centre has no article about linking an eBay account, sharing a login, or crossposting between the two; payments run through Adyen rather than eBay’s payments stack; and, as Kleinanzeigen puts it in its own about page, “Auktionen gibt es auf Kleinanzeigen nicht” — there are no auctions on Kleinanzeigen. Kleinanzeigen states it plainly: for many people it still sounds like eBay, but that has not been true for years.

The Border Is at the Payment Rail, Not the Sign-Up Form

This is the most misunderstood thing about the pair, and getting it right saves a lot of wasted effort.

Neither platform’s terms forbid a foreign user. Willhaben’s Nutzungsbedingungen restrict use by age and legal capacity — you must be a natural person with legal capacity, at least 18 — and say nothing about residence. Kleinanzeigen’s terms require a natural or legal person and a successful SMS phone verification, again with no country clause.

The transaction layer is where the border bites, and both platforms state it explicitly. Willhaben: “Ein Versand über die österreichischen Landesgrenzen per PayLivery ist daher leider grundsätzlich nicht möglich” — shipping across Austrian borders via PayLivery is generally not possible. Kleinanzeigen: “Der Versand mit „Sicher bezahlen” (inkl. Käuferschutz) gilt nur innerhalb von Deutschland” — shipping with Sicher bezahlen applies only within Germany.

What that means in practice is documented by the people who have tried it. An Austrian buying on Kleinanzeigen found that Germany is preselected as the user’s location for bank and PayPal payment, and that the delivery-address form requires a five-digit postcode — Austrian postcodes have four digits, so he prefixed a zero to get through. Another Austrian, on a thread directly comparing the two platforms, described the workable version of the same trick: “Wenn man so wie ich an der deutschen Grenze wohnt und sich das Zeug dort hinschicken kann, macht man schon den einen oder anderen Schnapper” — if you live on the German border, as I do, and can have things shipped there, you do land the odd bargain.

What Each One Costs a Seller

Willhaben: free, with a timer

A private Willhaben marketplace ad costs nothing, runs for 45 days, and takes an unlimited number of photos. Commercial ads run 60 days. A commercial ad costs €23.99 including VAT, and — a quirk worth knowing — is available to anyone, licence or not.

There is no fee cliff, no monthly allowance and no per-ad charge for a private seller. The cost is time. Ads expire, and Willhaben explicitly forbids deleting and re-posting an active ad — “Das Löschen und Neu-Einstellen von aktiven Inseraten ist nicht gestattet” — so the sanctioned path is to let the ad run out and use the “neu veröffentlichen” function. For a seller with fifty items, that is a recurring administrative chore every six weeks rather than a one-off.

Kleinanzeigen: free until the hundredth ad

Kleinanzeigen’s opening line on its fee page is that using it as a private seller is fundamentally free, and that charges appear only when you cross certain limits. In the general consumer-goods, services and jobs categories, that limit is 100 new ads per rolling 30 days. Beyond it, each further ad costs €1.99 including VAT and runs 60 days. Free ads in those categories can be renewed an unlimited number of times at no cost — which is the direct opposite of Willhaben’s model.

Vehicles are treated separately and more strictly. Cars get two free ads per 30 days if priced under €30,000, then €9.99 each, with €9.99 charged from the first ad if the price is €30,000 or more; renewals cost €9.99 regardless. Commercial vehicles, boats, caravans and motorbikes get five free, then €9.99. And a dated change: from 21 May 2026, any vehicle ad priced at €45,000 or more carries a mandatory €9.99 listing fee from the first ad, regardless of user type. Property has its own ladder at €19.99 or €21.99 per ad.

Two details catch people out. The 30-day window is rolling, and deleting and re-posting still burns the allowance. And a fee once paid is not refunded if you delete the ad during its run.

Which is cheaper depends entirely on volume

So Willhaben is unambiguously cheaper for a high-volume private seller — free is free at any quantity — while Kleinanzeigen is cheaper in effort, because its free ads renew without cost and without a re-posting prohibition hanging over them.

Buyer Protection: PayLivery vs Sicher bezahlen

Both platforms now run an escrowed payment-plus-shipping product, and — a point that surprises sellers coming from percentage-fee marketplaces — both are free for the seller. The buyer carries the cost on both sides of the border.

Willhaben states it directly: “Für die:den Verkäufer:in: ist PayLivery völlig kostenlos”. The buyer pays shipping plus a protection fee of “ab 1,99 € bzw. ab 4,5 % vom Artikelpreis” — from €1.99 or from 4.5% of the item price, varying by category. PayLivery caps the item price at €1,999.99, and the seller must dispatch within seven days or the buyer is refunded.

Kleinanzeigen’s Sicher bezahlen charges the buyer a service fee of €0.50 plus 4.5% of the purchase price, and Kleinanzeigen puts the split plainly: “Für Verkäufer ist dieser Service kostenlos, die geringe Gebühr tragen die Käufer.” Payments are held by Adyen, which is licensed by the Dutch central bank. The seller is paid out once the buyer confirms receipt, or automatically ten days after dispatch, with the money typically landing in one to three working days.

The 4.5% coincidence is worth reading carefully, because the fixed component differs by a factor of four. On a €10 item, a German buyer pays €0.95 and an Austrian buyer pays at least €1.99 — proportionally a much heavier load at the low end. On a €200 item the difference is negligible.

One live grievance to be aware of on the Austrian side: PayLivery cannot be deselected, and sellers have begun pointing at court rulings requiring optional buyer-protection fees elsewhere and asking why the same does not apply. Kleinanzeigen’s equivalent is also default-on and cannot be fully disabled, though setting an ad to “Nur Abholung” — collection only — publishes it without the feature.

Listing: Expiry, Photos and Condition

The mechanical differences here are what make manual copying between the two genuinely annoying rather than merely tedious.

Photos

Willhaben accepts an unlimited number of images on a free private ad — a genuinely unusual allowance, and more generous than eBay’s 24 or any of the fashion marketplaces. It accepts files up to 6 MB and up to 8000 × 8000 pixels, but converts everything to JPEG at a maximum 1200-pixel long edge. Kleinanzeigen accepts jpg, gif, heic and png at up to 12 MB per image, and does not document a maximum count.

That downscaling matters if you copy in the wrong direction. Images pulled from a live Willhaben ad are already 1200 pixels; re-uploading them to Kleinanzeigen, which would happily take much larger files, bakes in a quality loss you did not need to take. Copying from your own originals avoids it — which is what an integration does and what a human copying between two browser tabs usually does not.

Condition

The two condition vocabularies do not line up, and there is no clean mapping between them.

Willhaben publishes its four values and defines each one. Kleinanzeigen’s condition wording varies by category rather than coming from a single published list, which is why an integration has to read what the category actually offers instead of assuming a fixed vocabulary.

The consequence is the same either way: Willhaben collapses everything between “as new” and “broken” into a single GEBRAUCHT, where Kleinanzeigen distinguishes several used grades. Anything you grade in one system has to be re-decided in the other, and a careless copy either overstates the condition or throws away a distinction you had made deliberately.

Categories

Willhaben’s category suggestions are branched by gender, so a search for a pair of trainers will surface Damenmode, Herrenmode and Kindermode variants of the same category — take the first hit and you have mis-gendered the item. Kleinanzeigen’s category identifier sits one level above the leaf, so a single women’s-shoes category covers pumps, trainers and lace-ups alike, with the actual item type carried in a separate attribute. Neither behaviour is wrong, but they are different enough that a mapping built for one is useless for the other.

Expiry

Willhaben’s 45 days and Kleinanzeigen’s 60 days are the drumbeat both platforms impose. Kleinanzeigen emails a reminder a week before expiry and gives an eight-day window to renew; miss it and the ad cannot be restored. Willhaben’s ads simply run out. Between the two, a seller covering both markets is doing re-posting work on two different clocks.

Shipping

Both are domestic-only, and each uses its own national carriers.

The buyer pays in both cases. Willhaben insures Post parcels to €510 and DPD parcels to €520; extras include €4.90 for fragile handling and €9.90 for bulky goods. On the German side the seller pulls a prepaid label in the app or on the web, drops the parcel at a DHL or Hermes point, and the tracking number is passed to the buyer automatically.

What Sellers Actually Say

Both platforms attract heavy criticism in public review channels, and both scores should be read as complaint-channel sentiment rather than as satisfaction measures — people rarely visit Trustpilot to report that a transaction went fine. As at 20 August 2026, Willhaben sits at 1.4 out of 5 from 1,232 reviews and Kleinanzeigen at 1.1 from 2,251.

The complaints are distinct, which is more informative than the scores. Austrian sellers object to PayLivery’s cost and to its compulsory nature. German sellers object to ads being removed without explanation and to commercial listing fees. And on a thread comparing the two directly, a seller with a decade on both platforms made the observation that comes up most often: “Auf eBay Kleinanzeigen kann man immerhin die Nutzer bewerten. Das macht aus meiner Sicht einen unterschied. Willhaben bekommt das einfach nicht auf die Reihe.” — on Kleinanzeigen you can at least rate users; Willhaben just cannot get that sorted.

The same seller was blunt about buyer behaviour on the Austrian side: “auf Willhaben ist es am schlimmsten … Da bekommst dein Zeug teilweise nichtmal verkauft weil gefühlt jeder alles umsonst möchte” — on Willhaben it is the worst; sometimes you cannot even sell your things because it feels like everyone wants everything for free. Lowballing is a universal classifieds complaint, but it is the one Austrian sellers raise first.

Going Commercial on Each

If you sell regularly, both platforms will eventually require you to declare yourself a business, and they handle that transition very differently.

Willhaben applies its criteria regardless of your tax position: regular or high-volume selling, offering services, selling self-made goods, or clearing business stock all trigger a commercial classification, “unabhängig von Steuerpflicht und/oder einer Gewerbeausübung”. A commercial ad costs €23.99 including VAT and runs 60 days.

Kleinanzeigen has no numeric threshold either, applying the German courts’ four-part test — independent, sustained, profit-seeking, and not merely private — assessed as a whole. The platform detail that catches people is structural: an account type is fixed at registration and cannot be converted. A private user who becomes commercial must open a second, separate account with a different email address. Commercial sellers then carry the full German obligations: an Impressum under §5 DDG including a phone number, since platform messaging does not satisfy the requirement; the 14-day right of withdrawal; and statutory warranty that cannot be excluded against consumers. Kleinanzeigen PRO packages start at €39 per month excluding VAT.

Separately, and independently of business status, both platforms report sellers under DAC7. Kleinanzeigen’s threshold is 30 or more completed transactions and/or €2,000 in a calendar year, reported to the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern by 31 January. Kleinanzeigen is careful to note that the number of ads you post is irrelevant — only completed sales count.

How to Choose

Choose Willhaben if

• You are in Austria, or you have an Austrian delivery address to work with
• Your items need a lot of photographs — the unlimited allowance is genuinely better than anything comparable
• You list at volume as a private seller, where free-at-any-quantity beats a 100-ad cliff
• Your categories are the ones Willhaben’s marketplace is deepest in: fashion and accessories, baby and children’s goods, homeware, books, film and music, antiques and art

Choose Kleinanzeigen if

• You are in Germany, or you have a German delivery address
• You want reach above everything else — roughly six times Willhaben’s monthly audience and four times its live ad count
• You want ads that stay alive with free renewals rather than a 45-day re-posting cycle
• Buyer ratings matter to how you sell — Kleinanzeigen has them and Willhaben effectively does not

Be careful if

• You expect one account to cover both. It cannot. Separate companies, separate registrations, separate SMS verification, separate everything.
• You are listing more than 100 items a month on Kleinanzeigen. The €1.99 per extra ad adds up quickly and the 30-day window is rolling.
• You are relying on cross-border shipping. Neither protected-payment product crosses the frontier.
• You have gone commercial on Kleinanzeigen. You cannot convert an existing account — it means a second account and a full Impressum.

Why Not Both?

For a German-speaking seller with stock that would sell in either country, this comparison has an obvious answer: run both. The audiences do not overlap at all, so the second listing cannibalises nothing. The only real cost has been the duplicated work — and the differences catalogued above are exactly what make that work irritating. Different condition vocabularies, different category structures, a 45-day clock against a 60-day clock, and an image pipeline that quietly downscales on one side.

It is also a route the crosslisting market has simply not served. Neither Vendoo, List Perfectly nor Crosslist supports either platform, and Crosslist states outright that it does not support users residing in the European Union at all. Nembol integrates Subito.it — Adevinta’s Italian classifieds site — but not Adevinta’s own German one. The tools that do exist for Kleinanzeigen are single-platform browser aids, not crosslisters, and no equivalent tool for Willhaben appears to exist at all.

FLUF Connect covers both, along with every other channel you sell on. One catalogue, both platforms, with condition and category mapped per platform rather than copied across. When an item sells on one, its ad comes down from the other automatically, so the same sofa is not promised to two people. Both channels also support FLUF’s auto-relisting, which is the practical answer to the two different expiry clocks: rather than remembering to re-publish a Willhaben ad every 45 days and renew a Kleinanzeigen one every 60, the schedule handles it.

Worth being precise about the legal ground, since automation on classifieds sites attracts nervousness. Willhaben’s robots.txt forbids spiders and automated access, and its terms prohibit copying displayed content by robot or crawler — both aimed at scraping other people’s listings. Its own AGB separately contemplates ads submitted through a data interface, and Willhaben sells exactly that as a dealer product. Automated submission of your own ads is not the thing being prohibited; access to a self-serve interface is simply not offered. Kleinanzeigen’s terms contain no anti-automation clause at all.

Pricing

Every new seller gets a 7-day trial for £1 with full access before choosing a plan. There is no free plan; automation is included in every paid plan rather than sold as an add-on. See the full pricing page. Willhaben’s and Kleinanzeigen’s own charges are separate and are paid to them.

Related Guides

• Sell on Willhaben — the complete Austrian seller guide
• Sell on Kleinanzeigen — the complete guide
• Crosslisting from Kleinanzeigen to Willhaben
• Crosslisting from Willhaben to Depop
• Crosslisting from Kleinanzeigen to eBay
• eBay vs Kleinanzeigen
• Full crosslisting hub — every channel pair
• How auto-relisting works
• FLUF Connect pricing

Sources & Verification

• Willhaben ownership after the 2025 sale — Sprints and Styria announcement, 2 March 2025, and the shareholding as listed today in Willhaben’s Impressum.
• Average monthly active users for both platforms, and the double-counting caveat each publishes, are from their own Digital Services Act disclosures — Willhaben Impressum and Kleinanzeigen Impressum.
• The Kleinanzeigen rebrand of 16 May 2023 and the continuity of accounts — Kleinanzeigen press release; the current absence of any eBay relationship, the Adyen payment stack and the absence of auctions — Kleinanzeigen’s about page and its terms of use.
• Willhaben ad duration, unlimited photos and image handling — Willhaben help centre; condition values — Willhaben condition guidance.
• PayLivery cost, seller-free status and the Austria-only restriction — PayLivery pricing and PayLivery cross-border article.
• Kleinanzeigen private-seller allowances, per-ad fees, the 21 May 2026 vehicle change and the rolling 30-day window — Kleinanzeigen fee page; ad duration and renewal window — Kleinanzeigen ad-duration article.
• Sicher bezahlen fee, who pays it, the Adyen escrow and the Germany-only restriction — Kleinanzeigen buyer-protection article and its Sicher bezahlen page.
• Shipping prices — Kleinanzeigen shipping costs and Willhaben parcel sizes.
• The account-type-fixed-at-registration rule and commercial obligations — Kleinanzeigen on private vs commercial accounts; Willhaben’s commercial-classification criteria — Willhaben help centre.
• DAC7 thresholds and reporting — Kleinanzeigen’s PStTG/DAC7 article.
• Seller sentiment — Trustpilot Willhaben, Trustpilot Kleinanzeigen and a direct comparison thread on r/willhaben, all as at 20 August 2026. The cross-border payment friction is documented in this r/Austria thread.
• Crosslisting-tool coverage — Crosslist’s own availability statement, plus the published marketplace lists of Vendoo, List Perfectly and Nembol, all checked 20 August 2026.
• Condition vocabularies, category-branching behaviour and the image-downscaling effect were verified against FLUF’s own channel modules (inc/flufconnect/willhaben/fcWillhaben.php, inc/flufconnect/kleinanzeigen/fcKleinanzeigen.php).