EV charging in Germany — which networks, which app

Germany has Europe's largest public charging network by total chargers, and one of the most fragmented operator landscapes. A typical drive between two cities will take you past a dozen different brands, each with its own app, RFID card, and tariff. Picking the right primary charging app — and knowing which roaming partners cover the rest — is the single biggest cost lever on a German EV.

This page summarises the operators you'll meet most often, where high-power chargers (HPC, ≥ 150 kW) are concentrated, and how the roaming markup works in practice. The data feeding Plugsquare's map comes from Germany's Mobilithek (the federal mobility data hub), so it covers every operator that publishes into the national access point — which today means nearly every public network of any size.

Main charging networks in Germany

The big public DC-fast names you'll see on the map are EnBW mobility+ (one of the largest CPOs by station count, particularly strong along the A-Autobahn corridors), Ionity (the carmaker joint venture, almost exclusively 350 kW HPC at motorway services), Aral pulse (BP's German retail brand, expanding aggressively at petrol-station forecourts), Allego, Fastned, and Tesla Supercharger (now open to non-Tesla cars at many sites, with the V4 stations carrying both NACS and CCS handles).

On the AC side you'll see ladenetz.de (a cooperative of municipal utilities — Stadtwerke), E.ON Drive Infrastructure, EWE Go, Maingau Auto-Strom, Vattenfall InCharge, and dozens of city-utility brands. Lidl, Aldi Süd and Aldi Nord all run their own networks at supermarket car parks. The ladenetz.de feed in particular bundles a long tail of regional Stadtwerke; on Plugsquare those collapse into one ladenetz.de operator card on the legend so the comparison stays readable.

Where the fast chargers are

HPC density follows the Autobahn network. Every Tank & Rast service area on the A-roads now has at least one of EnBW, Ionity, Aral pulse, or Tesla; many have two or three. The cross-country corridors A2 (Ruhr → Berlin), A3 (Frankfurt → Munich), A7 (Hamburg → Würzburg), A8 (Karlsruhe → Munich) and A9 (Munich → Berlin) are effectively saturated — you should never be more than 30–40 km from an HPC site.

Urban HPC is sparser. City fast-charging is mostly 50 kW Tritium / ABB units in supermarket and shopping-centre car parks, plus an increasing number of EnBW Hyperhubs near commuter belts. For overnight charging on-street, Berlin and Hamburg both have meaningful AC kerbside coverage; smaller cities lean on home charging plus destination AC at hotels and retail.

Apps, RFID cards, and the roaming markup

Almost every German operator runs its own customer-facing app with its own tariff. EnBW mobility+ is widely used as a primary card because the network is large and the roaming partners list is unusually broad (you can charge at Allego, Aral pulse, Ionity and many others on the EnBW tariff — at a small markup over the operator's direct price). Maingau Auto-Strom is a popular EMSP-only option that charges via roaming across hundreds of networks at a single flat tariff.

Tesla owners use the Tesla app for Supercharger, and increasingly third-party Plugsurfing or Chargemap as backups. As of 2024 Tesla's V4 Supercharger stalls accept any CCS car directly, with non-Tesla pricing visible in the Tesla app before you plug in. The general rule still holds: charging directly via the operator's own app is cheaper than via a roaming card, often by 5–15 ¢/kWh.

What's on the Plugsquare map

Plugsquare pulls Germany's public-charging feed daily from the Mobilithek federal data hub. Every operator that publishes a DATEX II feed into the national NAP appears on the map: that's ladenetz.de, EnBW, Aral pulse, Audi Charging, EWE Go, Ionity, Tesla, Allego, Shell Recharge, Vattenfall, Lidl, Aldi Süd, Aldi Nord, ChargePoint, plus the BAG-API aggregation feed and several Stadtwerke. Recently commissioned chargers may take a few days to a few weeks to appear depending on how quickly each operator pushes updates upstream.