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The 20 Best Shopify Apps for Every Job Your Store Needs

SHOPIFY E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
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Ayo is the founder of Why Matters, a Shopify agency based in Brighton. With over 20 years of experience in ecommerce, digital marketing, and ROI-driven growth, he has helped hundreds of Shopify brands build, launch, and scale their online stores. Why Matters is a certified Shopify, Klaviyo, and Recharge partner.

September 17, 2026

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Checked 19 September 2026. Every price below carries that checked date, and this article is reviewed every six months, because app pricing and features move quickly.

Key Takeaways

  • Do not install an app until you know Shopify cannot already do the job. Bundles, forms, chat, search and translation are all free first party apps now.
  • Shopify B2B changed the wholesale question. Companies, catalogues, payment terms and self service ordering are available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, so "Shopify does not do B2B" is out of date.
  • Store Leads detected Judge.me on 48,898 UK stores, Klaviyo on 38,846, Shopify Inbox on 32,494, Shopify Forms on 18,514 and PageFly on 13,416 in September 2026 (Store Leads).
  • There is no correct number of apps. Eight chosen carefully can be cleaner than four that overlap.
  • Monthly pricing hides the decision. A $99 app is roughly $1,188 a year before usage charges, integration work or staff time.
  • Free does not automatically mean better. A paid app that creates revenue or removes manual work can be excellent value.
  • We use no affiliate links in this article, which matters because the right answer in several categories is to install nothing.
  • Our rule: every app needs one job, one owner, a known cost and a reason it still deserves its place.

Quick Answer

The best Shopify apps depend on the job. Our current shortlist is Recharge for subscriptions, Judge.me for reviews, Klaviyo for email and SMS, Smile for loyalty, PageFly for landing pages, STOQ for back in stock, SparkLayer where Shopify B2B runs out, Octane AI for product quizzes, ReConvert for upsells, Loop for returns, ShipStation for shipping, Triple Whale for analytics, Gorgias for support, Katana for complex inventory, Accessibly alongside real accessibility work and Matrixify for bulk data. Five of the twenty are free Shopify apps, and for many stores those are the right answer.

Table of Contents

There are tens of thousands of Shopify apps. That does not mean a good store needs dozens of them. One of the first things we look for when auditing an established store is whether each app solves a genuine business problem, duplicates another app or quietly survives because nobody has questioned it. So this list is organised by job rather than rank, because best subscription app is a useful decision and seventh best app is not. There are no affiliate links here either: nothing moves up the list because somebody pays us when you install it.

One pick per job The job Where we would start Subscriptions Recharge Reviews Judge.me Email and SMS Klaviyo Loyalty Smile Bundles Shopify Bundles, free Search Search & Discovery, free Wholesale Shopify B2B, included Chat Shopify Inbox, then Gorgias Highlighted rows cost nothing. Start there before paying for the job.
A summary of where we would start for eight common jobs.

How We Chose These Apps

This is not a ranking of whoever has the most reviews. Five criteria decided it.

  1. The app must solve a clear job, answerable in a sentence such as "I need to manage subscriptions" or "I need wholesale buyers to place their own orders".
  2. We prefer apps we have implemented, audited or evaluated against real requirements, because an app can have excellent reviews and still be wrong for a particular store.
  3. We check current pricing, and every price below was checked on 19 September 2026. Many apps charge by contacts, orders, subscribers or revenue, so the entry price is rarely the real cost.
  4. We use no affiliate links. There is no commission attached to any recommendation here, which matters because the honest answer in several categories is not to install another paid app.
  5. We are biased towards fewer apps. Each one has to justify its subscription, its code, its data access, training, integrations, maintenance and the risk of migrating away later. Our Shopify app statistics article covers the wider ecosystem data.

Start With What Shopify Already Does

Before searching the App Store, open your admin. A surprising amount of functionality that once needed a subscription now comes from Shopify.

Before you install anything Can you name the one job Does Shopify already do it, Does the free version fall this app would do? natively or with a free app? short in a way you can name? No: you are not Yes: try that No: keep the free ready to choose first, for free one and move on Yes No Yes Now buy the paid app, for that named gap, with one owner and a review date.
The order we work in when a merchant asks for a new app.
  • Shopify Bundles, free. First party bundles and multipacks across plans, updating component inventory in real time to help prevent overselling (Shopify). Enough for a shampoo and conditioner pair, a coffee multipack or a three product starter kit.
  • Shopify Forms, free. Inline forms and popups, wholesale lead collection, discounts, customer tagging, segmentation and analytics. Detected on 18,514 UK stores. If you need an email signup popup, do not automatically add a separate popup platform.
  • Shopify Inbox, free. Storefront chat with an AI sales assistant that can draw on your catalogue, inventory, policies and store content. Detected on 32,494 UK stores. A larger support team may still need a helpdesk. A small merchant often does not.
  • Shopify Search and Discovery, free. Custom filters, synonym groups, product boosts, related and complementary products and search analytics. Try it before paying for a search platform.
  • Shopify B2B, included on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Companies, catalogues, net payment terms and self service ordering come with the plan. Basic, Grow and Advanced support up to three active B2B market catalogues, while Plus adds unlimited catalogues, direct assignment to companies and locations, deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfilment.

That last one matters most, because a third party wholesale app should no longer be installed simply because Shopify does not do B2B. Check what your plan already provides first.

The 20 Best Shopify Apps by Job

1. Subscriptions: Recharge

From $25 a month for smaller subscriber counts, with Starter at $99 a month plus 1.49% and $0.19 per transaction, and Plus at $499 a month (Shopify App Store). Recharge goes beyond creating a recurring order, with customer portals, upselling, cancellation prevention, failed payment recovery and analytics, which is where subscription businesses actually win or lose. What to watch: subscription platforms embed deeply into customer, payment and retention workflows, so weigh transaction fees and migration difficulty before committing. Our subscriptions guide and our Recharge against Shopify Subscriptions comparison cover the choice.

2. Reviews: Judge.me

Free plan with unlimited product and store reviews and unlimited visual reviews, Awesome at $15 a month (Shopify App Store). Detected on 48,898 UK Shopify stores in September 2026, which makes it one of the most widely used apps in the country, and the free tier is genuinely usable rather than a trial. What to watch: reviews are valuable, but do not load every carousel, badge and widget the app offers simply because it offers them.

3. Email and SMS: Klaviyo

Free up to 250 contacts, email from $20 a month at 251 to 500 contacts, SMS from $15 a month (Shopify). Detected on 38,846 UK stores. Its strength is not sending newsletters but pulling Shopify customer, order and product data into segmentation, automated flows, recommendations and testing. What to watch: cost scales with audience and channels, so poor list hygiene means paying to store contacts who never open anything. Our email marketing guide covers the programme itself.

4. Loyalty: Smile

Free up to 200 monthly orders, then Essential at $15, Standard at $79 and Growth at $199 a month (Shopify). A mature option for points, referrals, rewards and VIP tiers. We would consider loyalty for categories with natural repeat purchase rather than installing it because every store seems to have one. What to watch: loyalty software cannot create loyalty. If the proposition does not generate repeat demand, points will not rescue it.

5. Bundles: Shopify Bundles

Free. It handles a surprisingly large share of common bundle requirements without another subscription, and keeps component inventory connected so you are less likely to oversell. What to watch: build a box, subscription bundles and highly customised promotional logic may still need a specialist app.

Free. Filters, synonym groups, product boosts, complementary products and search analytics, which is enough for most small and medium catalogues. What to watch: large catalogues needing sophisticated ranking, merchandising or personalised search will outgrow it.

7. Page building: PageFly

Free plan with one published page or section, Builder at $24 a month, Accelerate at $99 a month with analytics, testing, heatmaps and AI tools on the paid tiers. Detected on 13,416 UK stores. What to watch: do not let a page builder become a second theme. The more critical pages depend on builder specific structures, the harder your store is to maintain or migrate.

8. Back in stock: STOQ

Free plan, Lite at $10, Pro at $29 and Unlimited at $69 a month. Back in stock email and SMS alerts plus preorders, backorders, deposits and partial payments, which suits stores losing demand when popular variants sell out. What to watch: check whether your email platform already sends these notifications before adding another tool to do it.

9. Wholesale beyond native B2B: SparkLayer

Free Basic plan, Starter at $49, Growth at $149 and Pro at $299 a month, as listed in the Shopify App Store on 19 September 2026. It adds wholesale portals, customer specific pricing, sales representatives, quotes, registration forms and order management. What to watch: map the requirement against Shopify B2B first, because native functionality now covers far more than it did.

10. Product quizzes: Octane AI

Basic from $50 a month, Plus from $200 a month (Shopify App Store). Quizzes, zero party data collection, customer profiles and personalised recommendations, which make sense in beauty, supplements and gifting, where the customer knows the problem but not the product. What to watch: a quiz adds friction if three filters would answer the same question.

11. Upsells: ReConvert

Free plan, Growth from $9.99 a month, with cost rising by orders or upsell revenue. Product page, cart, checkout and post purchase offers with recommendations, testing and analytics. What to watch: upselling can lift order value while making the journey worse, so measure conversion and margin rather than incremental upsell revenue alone.

12. Returns: Loop Returns

Free Checkout+ plan, Essential at $155, Advanced at $340 a month. Returns, exchanges, automated policies, carrier rate shopping, workflows and fraud prevention by plan, which removes a lot of manual work for a fashion brand with real return volume. What to watch: smaller merchants rarely process enough returns to justify this price.

13. Shipping: ShipStation

Starter at $14.99 a month, Standard at $29.99, varying by geography and order volume. Centralises orders, shipping, inventory, returns, warehouses and carrier workflows. What to watch: a single channel merchant with simple fulfilment may just be adding a layer.

14. Analytics: Triple Whale

Free plan, Foundation at $219, Automate at $749 a month. Multi touch attribution, product and creative analytics, subscription data, cohort analysis and custom dashboards. What to watch: more dashboards do not fix bad tracking. Get Shopify, analytics and ad platform fundamentals right first.

15. Customer service: Gorgias

Starter at $10 a month for 50 tickets, Basic at $60 for 300, Pro at $360 for 2,000 (Shopify App Store). Email, chat, social, SMS and automation built around Shopify customer and order data. What to watch: pricing is tied to ticket volume, so a small store should try free Shopify Inbox first.

16. Complex inventory: Katana

Free up to 30 SKUs, Core at $299 a month. Inventory, orders and fulfilment across locations and channels, including production and manufacturing workflows. What to watch: this is operational software rather than a convenience app, and native Shopify inventory covers a lot for simpler operations.

17. Accessibility: Accessibly

Standard at $5, Premium at $25, Enterprise at $75 a month. Text resizing, contrast controls, keyboard navigation, link highlighting, text to speech, alt text tools and monitoring. What to watch: no widget makes an inaccessible site compliant. Theme markup, forms, navigation, alt text and content all matter more, as our European Accessibility Act guide explains.

18. Bulk data: Matrixify

Free Demo plan, Basic at $20, Big at $50, Enterprise at $200 a month. Imports and exports products, collections, customers, companies, discounts, translations, orders, redirects, files, metaobjects and metafields, which makes migrations and large catalogue projects far less painful. What to watch: powerful bulk tools make powerful mistakes, so test on samples and work from backups.

19. Translation: Shopify Translate and Adapt

Free, with automatic translation into up to two languages plus manual translations and market specific content. What to watch: automatic translation still needs human review for commercial copy, technical terms and regulated product information, as our Shopify Markets guide covers.

20. Lead capture: Shopify Forms

Free. Inline and popup forms, wholesale lead collection, discounts, customer tagging and segmentation. What to watch: if Klaviyo already manages your forms and segmentation, adding a second capture system creates two sources of truth rather than one.

Apps by Sector

The best apps change with what you sell, which is why we would start from the sector rather than the App Store charts.

  • Pet. Subscriptions, reviews, feeding guidance, bundles and replenishment email (pet food guide).
  • Coffee and tea. Subscriptions with real frequency control, grind selectors, quizzes and bundles (coffee and tea guide).
  • Beauty. Reviews, quizzes, replenishment, loyalty and user generated content, watching the load each one adds (beauty guide).
  • Baby and parenting. Replenishment with easy size changes, reviews and delivery communication (baby and parenting guide).
  • Household and cleaning. Refills, subscriptions with swaps and reminders (household guide).
  • Eco. Refills, returns, resale and impact reporting, with care around any app that displays environmental claims (eco guide).
  • Health and supplements. Subscriptions, bundles and compliant product information (health and fitness guide).
  • Snacks and drinks. Multipacks, build a box, wholesale and delivery tools (snacks and drinks guide).

Where Most Stores Do Not Need an App

Eight categories where most merchants should not pay for anything: basic bundles, simple email capture, basic store chat, simple search and filtering, basic translation, basic B2B, currency conversion and trust badges. Shopify now covers the first six adequately for most stores, currency handling belongs with Shopify Markets rather than a separate widget, and trust badges are decoration that loads on every page. If you already pay for any of these, that is the first conversation to have.

What Every App Costs Beyond the Subscription

The subscription is the smallest part of what an app costs.

What a $99 app actually costs The monthly price $99 a month The annual decision $1,188 a year Usage charges Orders, contacts, tickets Integration work Set up and theme changes Staff time Training and ongoing use Performance Scripts on every page Switching cost Data you cannot take with you Judge an app on all seven lines, not the first one.
Judge an app on all of these, not the first line.

A $99 a month app is a $1,188 a year decision before usage charges, and usage pricing on contacts, orders, tickets or revenue means the entry price is rarely what you end up paying. Then add integration work, staff training, the code loading on every page and the switching cost of data you cannot easily take with you. On performance, across 265 Shopify stores audited by Why Matters, 196 were still on legacy themes, and stores we moved to Online Store 2.0 gained an average 23 points of mobile PageSpeed (our speed research), so apps are rarely the whole performance story but they are part of it.

How to Choose Between Two Similar Apps

When two apps look equivalent, four questions separate them. What exact job are we buying it for, stated in one sentence? What data does it own, and would we lose reviews, subscribers or history by leaving? What happens when we uninstall it, including theme code left behind? And who supports it, how quickly, and in which time zone? The last question decides more real world outcomes than feature lists do.

What We Would Remove First

The recurring candidates are duplicate popups, apps kept from a campaign that ended, functionality Shopify now provides natively, duplicate analytics creating double counted revenue, page builders nobody uses any more, decorative trust apps and anything nobody inside the business owns. That last one is the strongest signal: if no one can say what an app does or why it is there, it rarely survives the audit.

What the List Means

  1. Check Shopify before you check the App Store. Five of our twenty picks are free Shopify apps.
  2. The wholesale answer changed. Native B2B on Basic and above means fewer merchants need a wholesale app at all.
  3. Price is the least interesting part of an app. What it owns, what it loads and what breaks on removal matter more.
  4. Popularity is evidence, not instruction. Judge.me on 48,898 UK stores tells you the problem is common, not that you have it.
  5. The stack should get reviewed, not just extended. Our UK Shopify statistics and app statistics articles cover the wider picture.

Methodology and Update Schedule

This article was checked on 19 September 2026. Prices come from the Shopify App Store listings and Shopify help documentation on that date, stated in US dollars unless noted, and many apps charge by usage so the entry price is not the full cost. Detection figures come from Store Leads on 11 September 2026 and represent detected installs rather than a complete census. The 265 store audit findings are Why Matters data rather than platform statistics. We use no affiliate links. We review this article every six months, and sooner when Shopify releases functionality that changes an answer, as it did with B2B. Compare anything here against the current Shopify App Store listing before buying.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best Shopify apps?

It depends on the job. Our current picks are Recharge for subscriptions, Judge.me for reviews, Klaviyo for email and SMS, Smile for loyalty, SparkLayer where Shopify B2B falls short, Gorgias for busy support teams, and Shopify's own free apps for bundles, search, forms, chat and translation.

What are the best free Shopify apps?

Shopify Bundles, Shopify Forms, Shopify Inbox, Shopify Search and Discovery and Shopify Translate and Adapt are all free, and Judge.me, Smile, PageFly, STOQ and SparkLayer all offer free tiers worth trying before paying.

Do I need a Shopify app for bundles?

Often not. Shopify Bundles is free, available across plans, and keeps component inventory connected. A paid app becomes worthwhile for build a box, subscription bundles or complex discount logic.

Do I need an app for Shopify B2B?

Check your plan first. Shopify B2B features including companies, catalogues, payment terms and self service ordering are available on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, with some advanced capabilities reserved for Plus.

What is the best Shopify subscription app?

Recharge for established subscription businesses, because the portal, retention tools and failed payment recovery matter more than creating a recurring order. Smaller merchants should compare it against Shopify Subscriptions before committing.

What is the best Shopify reviews app?

Judge.me for most stores. It was detected on 48,898 UK Shopify stores in September 2026, has a genuinely usable free plan with unlimited reviews, and its paid plan starts at $15 a month.

How many Shopify apps should I install?

There is no correct number. Eight carefully chosen apps can be cleaner than four that overlap. The better test is whether every app has one job, one owner, a known cost and a reason it still deserves its place.

Do you use affiliate links in this guide?

No. Nothing here earns us a commission, which matters because in several categories the honest answer is to use a free Shopify app rather than install anything else.

Why Matters Perspective

The most useful thing an agency can say about Shopify apps is usually "you do not need that one". Most stores we audit are not missing functionality. They are carrying several apps doing overlapping jobs, at least one nobody can explain, and often two solving a problem Shopify started solving for free a year ago.

So we would judge a stack by what it does not contain. Every app with one job, one owner and a known annual cost, nothing duplicating Shopify, and a review date in the calendar. That is a less exciting answer than twenty recommendations, and it protects margin, performance and your ability to change platform decisions later. If you want the wider evidence, our app statistics article covers what merchants actually install and what it costs them.

Why Matters is a Shopify Select partner with Verified Skills across development and marketing. Our pricing is published, retainer clients are billed one month in arrears and never tied into long contracts, and every development project carries a 3 month guarantee. See our Shopify packages or email us to talk through your store.

Final Thoughts

The best Shopify apps are the ones you can justify. Start with what Shopify already gives you, add paid software only where the free version falls short in a way you can name, and give every app a job, an owner, a cost and a review date. Do that and a twenty app store can be clean while a six app store is a mess. The number was never the point.