App comparisons
Compare Shopify blog apps and choose the right tools for your publishing workflow.
Shopify Retired Linkpop, Then Closed the $5 Starter Plan. Its Own Blog Now Points You to Linktree — Whose Shopify App Is Rated 3.6
Shopify's free link-in-bio page, Linkpop, retired on July 7, 2025 — linkpop.com now redirects to shopify.com. On August 15, 2026 Shopify's Help Center began saying the $5 Starter plan, the plan built around sharing product links on social, isn't available to new stores. And Shopify's own July 21, 2026 blog post on link-in-bio tools links to exactly two Shopify App Store listings: LinkShop, and Linktree — an app in the Marketplaces category, billed outside your Shopify invoice, rated 3.6 across 18 reviews. We priced seven link-in-bio apps on September 18, 2026. The dimension that matters isn't the monthly fee, which runs from $0 to $15. It's where the page lives: four apps serve it from your own storefront through a Shopify app proxy, which means it sits behind your store password — and on the new $0 Agentic plan, that password never comes off. Verified against the Shopify Help Center, shopify.dev, the Shopify App Store, and live store pages.
Dawn and Horizon Can Hide Other Variants' Images — But Only the One Image Shopify Lets You Attach Per Variant. Five Apps Meter the Rest Three Different Ways
A shopper picks Blue and still scrolls past every Red and Green photo. Vendor blogs say there is no native setting for this. There is one — Dawn 16.0.0 ships 'Hide other variant media after one is selected' and Horizon 4.1.5 ships 'Hide unselected variant media', on by default. Both hide exactly one image per variant, because the Help Center's rule is that 'you can only add one image to each product variant', and the same page's workaround is to arrange the gallery so related images sit together. Shopify's own answer for a real per-option gallery is the Combined Listings app, Plus and enterprise only. Below that, five apps price the same job on three incompatible meters: your Shopify plan (SA Variant Image Automator, $14.90 to $99.90), a product count (Rubik, VIM, Nova), or whether your theme is a free Shopify theme (Variant Image Wizard, $4.99 vs $7.99). Verified on the Shopify Help Center, the Dawn and Horizon source repositories, and the Shopify App Store on September 18, 2026.
Shopify's Product Comparison Category Has 223 Apps and 149 of Them Are Size Charts
We counted every app in the Shopify App Store's Product comparison category: 223 apps, of which 149 are size charts, fit finders, or virtual try-on. Only 46 have compare, spec, versus, or table in the name, and those 46 hold 297 reviews between them — a quarter of what one size chart app has on its own. Then the naming problem: Liquid's `compare_at_price` is a price, Horizon's `comparison-slider` block is a before/after photo wipe, and `taxonomy_category` won't give you the category's attributes. Nine apps compared on six incompatible pricing meters, one 'free plan' that is only free on a development store, and a free tier that puts ads on your product page. Prices verified on the Shopify App Store September 8, 2026.
Shopify's 'Product Comparison' Category Is Mostly Size Charts — and the Real Comparison Apps Meter on Six Different Things
The Shopify App Store has a category called Product comparison with 223 apps in it. On the first page of 24, only four actually compare products — the other twenty are size charts, AI virtual try-on, and one Amazon Buy Button app. Below that surface, the apps that do compare products are two different products sold under one name, and their paid plans meter on six incompatible quantities: nothing at all, feature tier, products per comparison, catalogue size, table views, and table count. One app's `Free to install` plan turns out to read `Free for your development store`. Meanwhile Dawn 16.0.0 contains no comparison feature at all, Horizon 4.1.5 ships a block literally named Comparison slider that compares two images, and Shopify's own Liquid documentation demonstrates the data model these apps are built on using an example field called `similar_products`. All prices and listings verified on the Shopify App Store September 8, 2026.
Dawn Calls Its Block 'collapsible_tab' and It Isn't a Tab — What Product Tabs Apps Actually Sell You
We read both theme repos: Dawn 16.0.0 and Horizon 4.1.5 render `<details>` accordions and neither contains a horizontal tab layout — the string 'tab' does not appear anywhere in Horizon's accordion block files. But Dawn's block settings are `text`, `richtext`, and `page`, all of which accept dynamic sources, so per-product tab content is a metafield away with no app at all. Then four apps compared on four incompatible meters, one $2.99 tier that removes two features its own free plan includes, and the app every 'best product tabs apps 2026' list still recommends that you can no longer install. Prices verified on the Shopify App Store September 8, 2026.