Best Shopify Review Apps, Ranked by What Stores Actually Install

Three apps carry the review job on most Shopify stores. In Koala's own store intelligence on 24 August 2026, Judge.me Product Reviews App is installed on 2,520 of the stores Koala tracks, Shopify's retired Product Reviews app still sits on 804, and Loox runs on 768. No other reviews tool is close. For a merchant choosing one, that concentration is the useful signal: the market has already converged, and the safe pick is the one that thousands of stores keep renewing rather than the one with the best-designed pricing page.

The numbers below come from what Koala observes across the Shopify stores it currently tracks, not from every store on Shopify. Read them as a strong directional ranking of what merchants actually run.

The review apps stores actually install

Judge.me is installed on more than three times as many tracked stores as its nearest live competitor. That gap is not a marketing artifact. Judge.me gives away the part everyone needs, which is unlimited product and store reviews including photo and video reviews, on a permanently free plan, and charges for the layer most stores only want later.

Second place is the interesting one. Product Reviews was Shopify's own first-party reviews app, and it no longer exists. Shopify staff confirmed on the Shopify Community that the Product Reviews app would be discontinued on 6 May 2024, with existing reviews no longer visible on merchants' sites after that date, and told merchants to export their reviews as CSV first. Its App Store listing now reads "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store." Those 804 tracked stores are carrying a dead dependency. If you inherit or buy a store, that is one of the first things worth checking.

Shopify review apps compared

Every figure in this table was read from the app's live Shopify App Store listing on 24 August 2026. App pricing moves, so check the listing before you subscribe.

App	Rating (reviews)	Free plan	Paid entry	Best at
Judge.me Product Reviews App	5.0 (43,978)	Yes, unlimited reviews including photo and video	Awesome, $15/mo	The default first install. Unlimited reviews, rich snippets and a star badge cost nothing
Loox	4.9 (9,083)	Yes, Beginner plan	Convert, $49.99/mo	Photo-first review walls. Discounts in exchange for photo reviews are built into the free tier
Yotpo: Product Reviews App	4.8 (4,391)	Yes, up to 50 orders a month	Starter, $15/mo	Stores that want reviews inside a wider marketing suite with SMS and loyalty beside them
Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty	4.9 (1,323)	Yes, up to 50 orders a month	Essential, $19/mo	Brands running reviews, loyalty, surveys, quizzes and referrals off one platform
Stamped Reviews & Loyalty	4.7 (3,401)	No	Reviews, $23/mo for 200 orders	Established stores that have outgrown a free tier and want reviews and loyalty together
Vitals: Reviews, Bundles & 40+	4.9 (2,813)	No, 7-day trial	All-in-One, $29.99/mo	Newer stores replacing five or six separate apps with one subscription

Two patterns are worth acting on. The free tiers are genuinely usable, so there is no reason for a store with traffic to be running no reviews at all. And the paid steps are not evenly spaced: Judge.me and Yotpo both open at $15 a month while Loox jumps to $49.99, which matters a lot if your order volume is climbing.

Read a competitor's review stack in one click

A ranking tells you what the market runs. It does not tell you what the store beating you in your own niche runs, and that is the question that actually changes your decision. A brand selling $400 fitness equipment and a brand selling $19 phone cases need different review widgets, and the fastest way to find out which is which is to look at the stores already winning those buyers.

Koala Inspector is a free Chrome extension with a Shopify app detector built in. Open any public Shopify store, click the icon, and the Apps tab lists every app the store runs, grouped by type, with a link through to each one in the Shopify App Store. App detection, theme detection and catalogue browsing are free and cost no tokens.

A worked example. Yesoul Fitness sells indoor cycling bikes at several hundred dollars a unit, so trust does most of the selling. Open one of its product pages, such as the Yesoul G1 Plus bike, and the review widget carries a shop rating "Based on 2736 reviews" from Judge.me. That is a competitor telling you three things at once: which app they chose, how much review volume they consider worth displaying, and where on the page they put it. Big Island Coffee Roasters, selling a repeat-purchase consumable instead, runs Stamped on its storefront because the reviews-plus-loyalty combination fits a product people reorder.

Do that across five or six stores in your niche and the choice makes itself. Koala Inspector's Chrome Web Store reviews name competitor research as the most common reason people install it, which is the same job as this one.

Why a review widget moves the number that matters

The complaint underneath this whole category shows up constantly in merchant communities: the traffic arrives and nothing converts. One seller asked r/ecommerce how to build trust with cold ad traffic without many reviews yet, describing traffic that engages and then fails to buy. Another ran the same problem on a new store with no social proof at all. The pattern repeats: ad metrics look healthy, the store looks fine, and the add-to-cart rate stays flat.

Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center measured the size of that gap. Its analysis of online reviews and sales found that purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews runs 270% above the same product with no reviews, and that displaying reviews lifted conversion by 190% for lower-priced items and 380% for higher-priced ones. Two further findings are worth designing around: purchase likelihood peaks between 4.0 and 4.7 stars and falls as ratings approach a perfect 5.0, because shoppers read flawless scores as fake; and adding a verified-buyer badge improves purchase odds by about 15%.

That reframes the buying decision. The first five reviews on a product are worth more than the next fifty, so the app that collects fastest on a free plan beats the app with the prettiest widget. And the review app is only half the job: the display placement matters too, which is what you are really reading when you open a competitor's product page.

If you have not set any of this up yet, our guide to adding reviews to Shopify walks through the mechanics, and what shop reviews are covers how Shopify's own store-level ratings differ from product reviews.

What researchers say about Koala Inspector

Verified reviews from the Chrome Web Store.

★★★★★

“Application that helps with dropshipping.”

★★★★★

“this has saved me quite a bit of time, great app”

Both quotes come from the Koala Inspector reviews on the Chrome Web Store.

How to pick one this week

Start free. Judge.me on its free plan gives you unlimited reviews, photo and video reviews, the star badge and Google rich snippets at no cost, which covers what a store under a few hundred orders a month needs. Move to Loox if your product photographs well and customer photos are the thing that sells it. Take Okendo or Yotpo when reviews stop being a standalone job and start being one input to loyalty and email. Reach for Vitals when you are paying for six apps that Vitals replaces for $29.99 a month.

Before you install anything, spend ten minutes reading the stacks of the stores already selling to your buyers. That check is free, it takes one click per store, and it turns a shortlist into a decision.

Shopify review app questions

The questions merchants ask most around reviews, answered directly.

Can Koala Inspector inspect Shopify shops?+

Yes. Koala Inspector is a free Chrome extension built for exactly that. Open any public Shopify store, click the icon, and it loads a dashboard for that store: every installed app grouped by function, the active theme with a link to it, the full product catalogue with likely best-sellers, product count, store category and localisation. App detection, theme detection and catalogue browsing cost no tokens on the Free plan. On a site that is not built on Shopify it tells you so instead of guessing.

Which Shopify preorder app do you use for partial payments & deposits?+

PreOrder Globo by Globo.io is the usual answer when a deposit is the requirement. Its listing advertises partial payment alongside pre-order, presale and back-order handling, it carries a 4.9 rating across 1,841 reviews, and it has a free plan with paid tiers from $9.90 a month, as of August 2026. Before you commit, open two or three stores in your niche that already sell on deposit and check which pre-order app they run, then read our guide to the best Shopify pre-order apps.

Can I use my own domain name with Shopify?+

Yes. Shopify gives every store a myshopify.com URL at signup, and you can point your own domain at it either by buying the domain through Shopify or by connecting one you already own from any third-party registrar. Shopify's own guidance is that a domain matching your brand helps build trust in your store, which is the same reason review widgets earn their place: a shopper deciding whether you are real reads both signals in the first few seconds.

Can you actually make money using Shopify?+

Yes, and the constraint is almost never the platform. Margin per order, repeat purchase rate and the cost of the traffic decide it. Reviews sit directly on that path: Northwestern's Spiegel Research Center found purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews runs 270% above the same product with none, and displaying reviews lifted conversion 190% on lower-priced items and 380% on higher-priced ones. A store with the same traffic and a credible review wall earns more per visitor than one without.

Can you make 10k a month on Shopify?+

It is reachable and the arithmetic is unforgiving. At a $50 average order value you need 200 orders a month, and every one of them has to clear its own acquisition cost. Most stores that stall short of that number have traffic and no trust: visitors land, read nothing that confirms other people bought, and leave. Fixing the conversion side is cheaper than buying more traffic, which is why a free review app is usually the first install on a store trying to break through.

Are Shopify point of sale payments secure?+

Yes. Shopify states that all stores powered by Shopify are PCI compliant by default and that Shopify is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, covering the six PCI standard categories from secure networks and cardholder-data protection through to access control, monitoring and security policy. That covers card payments taken in person through Shopify POS as well as online checkout. Your own responsibilities are staff permissions, device security and keeping card readers accounted for.

Is Judge.me really free?+

Its free plan is a real plan rather than a trial. As of 24 August 2026 the Shopify App Store listing gives the free tier unlimited product and store reviews, unlimited photo and video reviews, the review widget and star badge, carousels, Google rich snippets, a trust badge and the reviews importer. The paid Awesome plan at $15 a month adds AI replies and summaries, 130+ integrations, 16 widgets, coupons and referrals, and Google Shopping.

What happened to the Shopify Product Reviews app?+

Shopify discontinued it. Shopify staff confirmed on the Shopify Community that the app would be discontinued on 6 May 2024 and that existing reviews would stop being visible on merchants' sites, advising merchants to export their reviews to CSV first. Its App Store listing now says the app is not currently available. It still shows up on 804 of the stores Koala tracks as of 24 August 2026, so a store you are buying or inheriting may be carrying it.

How do I see which review app a competitor uses?+

Install the free Koala Inspector Chrome extension, open the competitor's store, click the icon and read the Apps tab. It lists every Shopify app the store runs, grouped by type, so the review app shows up beside the rest of their stack. That takes one click per store and is free on Koala Inspector's Free plan.

Sources

• Install counts across the stores Koala tracks, 24 August 2026 (Koala's own store intelligence). See also the most popular Shopify apps overall.
• Judge.me Product Reviews App on the Shopify App Store
• Loox on the Shopify App Store
• Yotpo: Product Reviews App on the Shopify App Store
• Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty on the Shopify App Store
• Stamped Reviews & Loyalty on the Shopify App Store
• Vitals: Reviews, Bundles & 40+ on the Shopify App Store
• Shopify Community: Shopify Product Reviews app discontinued
• Spiegel Research Center: How online reviews influence sales
• Shopify: PCI compliance
• Shopify Help Center: Domains