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Most comparisons of these two apps are about the widgets: which carousel looks better on a product page, whose review emails convert, whether photo reviews beat text. That part you can settle in an afternoon, on either free plan, with your own products in front of you.
The part you cannot settle in an afternoon is what each app counts. Judge.me and Loox do not bill for the same unit, and on the Shopify App Store both listings can be read as "about fifty dollars a month or less."
The short version
Judge.me has no volume denominator. Two plans: Free and Awesome at $15/month. Its pricing page states the ceiling in its own words: "$15 per month is the most you can ever pay us," and "Whether you're just starting out or processing thousands of orders, you get the same powerful features without worrying about rising costs."
Loox's denominator is your Shopify order count. The Convert plan is $49.99/month for the first 300 monthly orders, plus $50 for every additional block of 300. Loox's help center says the count "is based on your Shopify orders" — not on review requests sent, not on reviews collected.
Loox's pricing page contradicts Loox's help center. In the plan comparison table on loox.app/pricing, the row "Total orders" reads 500 for Beginner and Unlimited for Convert. The help center article for the same plan reads "300 per usage cycle. Each additional block of 300 orders will trigger a $50 usage fee."
Convert passes the Unlimited plan at 1,800 orders a month. At 1,501–1,800 monthly orders, Convert costs $299.99 — exactly the flat price of Loox's Unlimited plan. Above that, Convert costs more than the plan that has no meter at all.
The free plans are not the same kind of free. Judge.me's Free plan has no order allowance to run out. Loox's Beginner plan "supports up to 500 total orders" from the end of the trial — a lifetime counter, after which, in Loox's words, "the Beginner Plan will no longer be available."
Merchants are finding this on invoices, not on listings. Among the ten one-star reviews the Shopify App Store surfaces first on the Loox listing, four are about usage charges and a fifth is about billing after uninstall. One names the arithmetic exactly.
The counterweight is real. Judge.me spent 2025 and early 2026 shutting down every non-Shopify version of itself. If you may ever sell somewhere other than Shopify, that is the cost that does not appear on the $15.
What Loox counts, and why it surprises people
Source: Shopify App Store (Loox ‑ Product Reviews App), retrieved September 15, 2026
Loox ‑ Product Reviews App is Built for Shopify, rated 4.9 across 9,607 reviews, and was launched on October 16, 2015 by a developer based in Ramat Gan, Israel. Its App Store listing states the Convert plan's terms accurately, in one line under the price: "300 orders included in base price + $50 per additional 300 orders."
What the listing does not say is what an order is. The help center does, and the distinction matters more than it sounds: "Your monthly order count is based on your Shopify orders."
That is every order your store records, regardless of whether Loox does anything with it. A merchant in Mexico, five years into using the app, wrote on August 18, 2026:
Charged $399.99 on a $49.99 plan — and support couldn't explain why. We were on the $49.99/mo plan and got billed $399.99 for July in "order" charges. Their pricing says "300 orders included + $50 per additional 300 orders", but nowhere does it explain what counts as an "order". Our store had ~2,327 Shopify orders last month, but most come from marketplace integrations (Amazon / Mercado Libre)
Run the formula against that order count and it lands on the invoice exactly. 2,327 orders means 2,027 above the included 300, which is seven blocks of 300, which is $350 in usage on top of the $49.99 base: $399.99. The billing is doing precisely what Loox documents. The merchant's objection is not that the math was wrong — it is that orders routed in from Amazon and Mercado Libre, which will never receive a Loox review request, moved the meter anyway.
If a meaningful share of your orders arrive through a marketplace channel, a POS, a subscription app's recurring charges, or wholesale draft orders, those are still Shopify orders. Price Loox against your total order count, not against the number of customers you actually intend to email.
The row that says "Unlimited"
Loox publishes its Convert terms in three places. Two agree with each other.
The Shopify App Store listing: "300 orders included in base price + $50 per additional 300 orders."
The help center article on the Convert plan: "$49.99/month for your first 300 monthly orders" and "$50 for every additional 300 orders, so you only pay more as you grow." The same article adds a ceiling that is worth knowing: "Usage charges are capped at $999.99/month (6,000 orders)."
And then the plan comparison table on Loox's own pricing page:
Source: loox.app/pricing, retrieved September 15, 2026
A merchant in the United Kingdom, three years into the app, wrote on August 2, 2026:
The Convert plan is advertised as unlimited orders for $49.99/month. Based on that, I reasonably expected my monthly cost to remain around $50. Instead, I was suddenly charged an additional $500 in usage fees. The pricing page prominently states unlimited orders
Loox's replies to these reviews are consistent. To one merchant charged $160 in usage: "We do our best to keep our pricing clear and transparent, with all details available on our website, Shopify listing, and within the app." That is true of the listing and of the app. It is the website that says Unlimited.
Two more of the ten one-star reviews the App Store surfaces first are about the same charge. A Canadian store of over two years: "THEY CHARGED ME NEARLY 1K IN USAGE FEES LAST MONTH." A US store of about two years: "they charged us $160 without warning and we don't even know what it was for. And they charged this money SEPARATELY from the subscription fee." What these merchants share is tenure — two, three, four, five years each. They are not people who misread a listing last week. The remaining six in that set are about unrelated things: support response times, a referral bug, font customization, review auto-publishing, and one billing complaint after uninstall.
Where the ladder crosses the flat plan
Loox sells a third plan, Unlimited, at $299.99/month with no email or order quota. Its feature set is Convert plus unlimited review requests, unlimited referrals and priority support — a superset. That makes the crossover arithmetic straightforward, and Loox does not publish it.
| Monthly Shopify orders | Loox Convert | Loox Unlimited | Judge.me Awesome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 300 | $49.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
| 600 | $99.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
| 900 | $149.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
| 1,200 | $199.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
| 1,500 | $249.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
| 1,800 | $299.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
| 2,100 | $349.99 | $299.99 | $15 |
Derived from Loox's published formula: $49.99 base for 300 orders, $50 per additional block of 300.
At 1,800 monthly orders the two Loox plans cost the same. Above 1,800, a store on Convert is paying more than Loox charges for the plan with no meter, and receiving less. Nothing in the app or the listing flags the crossing; the plan page simply shows Convert at "$49.99" and Unlimited at "$299.99," and $49.99 looks like the cheaper number.
If your order count sits anywhere near 1,500 a month, the useful comparison is not Convert against Judge.me. It is Convert against Unlimited.
What Judge.me's $15 actually covers
Source: Shopify App Store (Judge.me Product Reviews App), retrieved September 15, 2026
Judge.me Product Reviews is Built for Shopify, a 2025 Build Award winner, rated 5.0 across 46,904 reviews, launched June 25, 2015, and developed from London. Its Free plan carries unlimited product and store reviews, unlimited photo and video reviews, the review widget and star rating badge, Google rich snippets, and CSV import. The Awesome plan at $15/month adds AI replies and summaries, 130+ integrations, Google Shopping, Meta and TikTok Shop syndication, coupons and referrals, and full widget and email customization.
There is no order tier, no usage fee and no enterprise ladder above it. There is also no annual plan and, per its help center, no discount: "Currently, we don't have a yearly plan. Judge.me is available as a monthly subscription at $15/month only."
Two features worth comparing directly, because they sit on opposite sides of the price line:
Video reviews. Judge.me includes unlimited photo and video reviews on the Free plan. Loox's Beginner plan does not include video reviews at all — its own Beginner-versus-Convert table marks video reviews as Convert-only. For a store whose case for a review app is customer video, that is the difference between $0 and $49.99 plus usage.
Branding removal. "Remove Loox branding" is a Convert feature. Judge.me's equivalent sits on the Awesome plan at $15 — its help center describes a Settings > Branding screen where Awesome subscribers uncheck "Show Powered by Judge.me in emails" and "Show 'Verified Checkmark' in widgets," with the caveat that the checkmark inside Store Medals and the Verified Reviews Counter cannot be removed that way.
What the $15 costs you instead
A flat fee is not the same as no trade-off, and Judge.me's trade-offs are concentrated in two places.
It is a Shopify-only company now. Judge.me sunset its WooCommerce, Square and Squarespace apps on October 31, 2025, Duda on December 31, 2025, BigCommerce on January 12, 2026 and PrestaShop on January 31, 2026. Its help center is unambiguous about what followed: "After the sunset date, access to all Judge.me functionalities and data will be permanently removed." The company's stated reason is focus — "we chose to focus all our technical and support resources on a single platform, Shopify." If replatforming is anywhere in your five-year plan, that history is the risk you are buying with the low price. Loox sells on Shopify only and has no comparable shutdown on record, but it offers no escape route either.
The trial does not warn you. Judge.me's help center: "If you don't want to continue with the Awesome plan after the trial, make sure to downgrade to the Free plan before the trial ends. Otherwise, the $15/month charge will automatically begin." And immediately after: "We currently do not send a reminder when the trial is about to end." The trial is 15 days, once per store. Loox's Convert trial is 14 days.
Downgrading resets configuration, not reviews. Within 48 hours of dropping from Awesome to Free, Judge.me removes product groups, disconnects cross-store syndication, removes per-product email templates, disables custom forms and schedules, and uninstalls the All Reviews Widget. Reviews and review request history are preserved. If you upgrade again later, Judge.me says, "you'll need to set up Awesome features from scratch."
Refunds are app credits, once. Judge.me will consider a one-month $15 refund if you downgrade or uninstall within five days of a charge, limited to one per store, and issued only as Shopify app credits — "We can't refund the app charge to the original payment method."
Loox's downgrade behavior is gentler on the storefront side. Its Beginner plan article states that when you change plans, "all front-facing widgets and reviews remain unchanged, and Loox makes no modifications to your live store."
How the two compare on the axes that decide it
| Judge.me Product Reviews | Loox ‑ Product Reviews App | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for Shopify | Yes (2025 Build Award winner) | Yes |
| Rating / reviews | 5.0 (46,904) | 4.9 (9,607) |
| Billing denominator | None | Shopify orders per cycle |
| Paid entry price | $15/month | $49.99/month (300 orders) |
| Usage fee | None | $50 per additional 300 orders, capped at $999.99/month |
| Flat top plan | — | Unlimited, $299.99/month |
| Free plan limit | No order allowance | 500 total orders after trial, then plan ends |
| Free plan email limit | Unlimited review requests | 2,000 review request emails/month |
| Video reviews | Free plan | Convert plan |
| Free trial | 15 days, no expiry reminder | 14 days |
| Annual billing | No | Not published |
| Admin languages on listing | 15 | English |
| Non-Shopify platforms | All sunset by January 2026 | Shopify only |
One note on the languages row: Loox's App Store listing lists English alone under Languages, which describes the app's own interface. That is a separate question from what shoppers see — Loox's own Beginner-versus-Convert table marks multi-language review collection and display as available on both plans, with AI translations on Convert only. A store selling into several Shopify Markets should check both.
Which one to install
You are under roughly 300 orders a month and want visual reviews with AI merchandising: Loox Convert at $49.99 is a defensible price for AI Smart Sorting, Review Stories, Summaries and video reviews, and your usage fee will be zero. This is the case Loox is built for.
You are over roughly 1,500 orders a month: compare Loox Unlimited at $299.99 against Loox Convert before you compare either against Judge.me. Convert reaches $299.99 at 1,800 orders and keeps climbing.
A large share of your orders never gets a review request — marketplace channels, POS, subscription renewals, wholesale draft orders: Judge.me, or Loox Unlimited. On Convert, every one of those orders is billable and none of them can produce a review.
You want the monthly number to be knowable in advance: Judge.me. $15 is the ceiling, stated by the vendor as a ceiling.
Your product sells on customer video and you are not ready to spend: Judge.me Free. Video reviews are included; on Loox they start at $49.99 plus usage.
You may replatform off Shopify: neither is a safe bet, but Judge.me has demonstrated what it does when it decides a platform is not worth supporting. Export your reviews on a schedule regardless of which you pick.
You already have thousands of reviews in one of them: both import from the other. Judge.me's listing names Loox among its import sources; Loox's pricing FAQ says "You can import reviews from other popular review apps within a couple of clicks," with CSV upload as the fallback. Neither vendor publishes what fraction of media, replies or verified-buyer flags survives a transfer, so run a test import on a development store before committing.
What we could not verify
Neither vendor publishes how partially fulfilled, cancelled or test orders are treated in Loox's order count, or whether an order cancelled after billing is credited back. Loox's stated $999.99 usage cap "(6,000 orders)" does not reconcile cleanly with its own per-300 formula, which produces $950 at 6,000 orders; we report the cap as Loox states it rather than deriving a different figure. We did not install either app, so all plan behavior here is from published documentation, not from an admin. The review quotations are individual merchant accounts, verifiable on the listings but not independently audited.
Researched September 15, 2026. Review-app pricing and plan names in this category changed twice in 2026 on the Loox side alone — the 100-review-request monthly cap came off the Beginner plan on July 15, 2026, and the Scale plan at $39.99 is now closed to new subscriptions. Open both listings and both pricing pages before you install.
Sources
- Judge.me Product Reviews App — Shopify App Store, retrieved September 15, 2026
- Loox ‑ Product Reviews App — Shopify App Store, retrieved September 15, 2026
- Judge.me Pricing — Judge.me, retrieved September 15, 2026
- Judge.me Reviews plans and pricing — Judge.me Help Center
- Judge.me sunsetting on WooCommerce, Square, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Duda and PrestaShop — Judge.me Help Center
- Managing Judge.me branding — Judge.me Help Center
- Pricing — Loox, retrieved September 15, 2026
- Understanding the Loox Monthly Quota — Loox Help Center
- The Convert Plan — Loox Help Center
- The Loox Beginner Plan — Loox Help Center
Shopify added a Bin name column to the inventory CSV on August 25, 2025. It holds one bin per variant per location, it is created only by CSV import, and it prints on Order Printer pick lists. What it does not do is leave Shopify. Shopify staff confirmed on the developer forum in October 2025 and again in January 2026 that there is no public API access to the field, and the developer forum was still reporting the gap in June 2026. That single fact shapes the whole category: EasyScan and iPacky store bins in metafields, Bins-USA and ShelfPilot store them in their own databases, and a free app called Simple Bin Locations copies metafield bins into order notes so packing slips can show them. Shopify's own multi-bin model, with per-bin quantities and an unbinnedQuantity field, exists today only as a feature preview on development stores. Pricing, plan gates, and where each app keeps the bin data, verified on the Shopify App Store, the Shopify Help Center, shopify.dev, and the Shopify community forums on September 18, 2026.