Shopify Review Apps Compared: Cost, Exports and Publishing Rules

If you want to pay $0 for as long as possible, Judge.me's free plan is the only one of the five apps compared here with no stated order cap. Loox, Okendo and Yotpo are free until you hit an order limit, and Stamped starts at $23. Which is the best reviews app for your Shopify store comes down to three things: cost at three times your current orders, what the CSV export keeps if you leave, and how the app publishes one- and two-star reviews. Prices below are from each app's Shopify App Store listing on 2026-09-27.

The shortlist: five apps that sync with Shop

The Shopify App Store's product reviews category listed 456 apps on 2026-09-27. We narrowed it to the five that Shopify names as two-way sync partners for Shop product reviews: Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped and Yotpo. Shop product reviews itself is free, but the reviews only show inside the Shop app, so you still need one of these to put reviews on your product pages.

Prices are per 30 days in USD, from each app's listing on 2026-09-27: Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Yotpo, Stamped. Yotpo's listing adds that "External charges may be billed by Yotpo separately from your Shopify invoice." For the photo and video column: Judge.me's Forever Free lists "Unlimited visual reviews (photos/videos)"; Loox's free plan lists "Offer discounts for photo reviews", and its help center puts video reviews on Convert; Yotpo's listing puts "Collect photos/video" under Starter, and its pricing page says "Starter adds photo and video reviews"; Okendo's Free plan bullets mention neither.

What each app costs at 30, 150, 400 and 1,000 orders a month

This is a worked calculation, not a quote: the cheapest plan that covers a steady monthly order volume, at list price, before tax and without annual discounts.

Three details in that table change the answer:

• Loox's free cap is a lifetime count. Its help center says the free plan allows "up to 500 total orders from the end of your Loox trial," after which you move to a paid plan. At 150 orders a month, you pass 500 in month 4 and go from $0 to $49.99. Okendo and Yotpo cap at 50 orders a month instead, so a slow month keeps you free.
• Loox Convert grows in $50 steps. It includes 300 orders, then adds $50 per extra 300. At 400 orders that is one extra block ($99.99); at 1,000 it is three ($199.99). Convert reaches $299.99, the price of Unlimited, at 1,800 orders, so above that Unlimited is cheaper.
• Yotpo's in-between prices aren't on the listing. The listing says Starter is "from $15" and "Pricing changes based on order volume." Yotpo's pricing page showed $89 for up to 500 orders and said Starter goes "up to $129/month at 1,000 orders." For other volumes, the quote is inside the app.

Decision rule: price the plan at three times your current monthly orders. If an app's price at 3x would push you to switch, rule it out now: a switch loses whatever the old app's export drops, and every migrated review loses its place in the Shop app (see the export section).

Why comparison articles disagree on prices

We checked 16 price claims about these five apps in four "best Shopify review app" articles, dated between May and September 2026, against the live listings on 2026-09-27. Six of the 16 didn't match. All six were about Loox, Yotpo or Stamped; every Judge.me claim matched. Five no longer matched the listing at all: plan names, free-plan limits or starting prices. One was a Yotpo price that is correct at 500 orders a month but was presented without the order volume. The most recent article with a wrong price was 13 days old. The articles are anonymised in the audit file, because the point isn't who got it wrong: apps reprice often.

You are billed from the App Store listing and the plan screen inside the app, so read both on install day and screenshot the plan you pick.

Leaving later: what the CSV export keeps

Per each vendor's help center on 2026-09-27:

The fields that hurt most when they're missing are verified-buyer status and video: without them, your new app shows those reviews as unverified or without video. Okendo's export carries both. Judge.me's needs the two workarounds above, done before you uninstall.

Day-one round trip (10 minutes): submit 5 test reviews on a test product through the app's own review form, including one with a photo and one with 2 stars. Export them, open the CSV and check that rating, body, name, date, product ID or handle, photo URLs and a verified flag are all there. Whatever is missing is what you lose if you switch. The import side of a migration is covered in how to add reviews to Shopify.

The export isn't the only switching cost. Per Shopify's sync page, a review reaches the Shop app only if it:

• has a customer ID,
• has an order ID,
• has a product ID,
• doesn't carry a non-English language code, and
• wasn't migrated between apps or uploaded by CSV.

So after a switch, your old reviews show on your theme but not in Shop.

Publishing settings and the FTC suppression rule

The FTC's rule on consumer reviews, in force since October 2024, includes a section on review suppression. 16 CFR 465.7(b) prohibits misrepresenting that the reviews you display are "most or all the reviews submitted" when some are being held back "based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment." A review isn't treated as suppressed when it is withheld under criteria "applied equally to all reviews submitted without regard to sentiment", for example because it contains personal information, is abusive or vulgar, is clearly false or misleading, is one you reasonably believe is fake, or is wholly unrelated to the product. This is a summary, not legal advice.

All five apps document a star-rating auto-publish threshold:

All five use a 14-day window. Judge.me attributes it to "Shopify's regulations" and Stamped says its rules are "aligned with Shopify's Governance & Compliance"; we couldn't find the rule in Shopify's public App Store requirements.

As these vendors document it, a threshold delays a low-star review by up to 14 days; it doesn't drop it. The risk is what you do in those 14 days. Decision rule: set auto-publish to all ratings on day one. On Okendo that means changing the documented 4-star default to 1. If you moderate, hide a review only for a reason on the rule's list, apply the same reason to every rating, and log why each time.

Stars on product cards and in Google search

Two checks decide whether ratings show outside the review widget. Shopify's Dawn theme reads the standard product rating metafields, reviews.rating and reviews.rating_count, for its product-card rating setting, so if your app doesn't write them, collection pages show no stars unless the app adds its own snippet. For Google, your theme and your review app can each print Product structured data; when both include a rating, one product page carries two aggregateRating values. Paste a product URL into Google's Rich Results Test: you want one Product item with one aggregate rating, and if there are two, turn off the rating output in the theme or in the app's rich-snippet setting, keeping the one that updates as reviews come in. Imported reviews stay out of that count: Google's review snippet guidelines say "Don't aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites."

Which reviews app fits your store stage

Costs are from the 2026-09-27 listings. "Fits" means the plan covers the volume at the lowest listed price. It is not a ranking.

If you're pre-launch and sell a sourced product: set up collection now. Until your own reviews arrive, you can show a labelled import of reviews from the supplier listing of the identical product; how to add reviews to Shopify covers the rules. Judge.me's Forever Free plan lists "Reviews importer & AliExpress sync", so if you already use Judge.me, check how it labels imported reviews on the storefront. We make Gather Reviews for this one job. It has been submitted to the Shopify App Store and isn't listed yet. It imports all ratings by default, publishes each review's text unedited with an "Imported from AliExpress" or "Imported from Amazon" label, and doesn't write Shopify's standard rating metafields, so imported ratings don't feed your theme's stars. It doesn't collect reviews from your customers, so you'd still install one of the five apps above.

The trial checklist

Download the review app trial checklist (plain text, 8 parts). Run it during the free plan or trial, before you send a single review request. It covers:

1. Price at your volume and at 3x, and whether the cap is monthly or in total.
2. The 5-review export round trip, using reviews submitted through the app's form.
3. The auto-publish default and any rating threshold.
4. Request timing, reminders and incentive wording.
5. Shop sync eligibility.
6. Storefront weight: the median of three PageSpeed Insights mobile runs before and after install. If the score drops by more than 5 points, remove optional widgets and test again.
7. Star metafields and a single aggregate rating in the Rich Results Test.
8. Labelling, if you show any imported reviews.

For what to do once the app is installed, see how to get customer reviews on Shopify: when to send requests, what to ask and how to follow up.