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Yotpo and Growave show up together on a lot of "best Shopify loyalty app" lists, but they solve the retention problem differently. One is a set of separate marketing products built for larger teams and bigger budgets. The other is a single platform built for growing Shopify brands that don't want to manage five different apps and five different bills.
The short version: Yotpo sells reviews and loyalty as separate products, each with its own pricing and its own install (it exited email and SMS marketing entirely in December 2025, and now depends on Attentive to cover that instead). Growave combines loyalty, referrals, reviews, wishlist, and Instagram UGC into one platform sharing a single customer profile, at one price, with native integrations into Klaviyo and Attentive for email and SMS. If you're processing a few thousand orders a month or fewer and want fewer apps to manage, Growave is usually the better fit. If you're an enterprise brand already deep in Yotpo's ecosystem, staying there may still make sense.
Below, we'll look at what each platform actually is, how their features and pricing compare, what their ratings look like, and who each one is really built for.
Yotpo was founded in 2011 in New York, originally as a product reviews platform built to fight fake reviews. It grew into a wider suite through acquisitions: Swell in 2018 added loyalty and referrals, and SMSBump in 2020 added SMS marketing. In August 2025, Yotpo announced it was exiting email and SMS entirely, sunsetting both products by the end of that year and directing customers to Attentive for messaging going forward. Today Yotpo's focus is back on Reviews, Loyalty, Referrals, and UGC, serving tens of thousands of commerce brands across Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
That acquisition history still shows up in how the product is sold. Reviews and Loyalty are listed as separate apps on the Shopify App Store, each with its own installation, its own pricing, and its own rating. Running both means managing two subscriptions rather than one.
Growave has been building retention tools for Shopify brands for over a decade. Rather than growing through acquisition, it was built from the ground up as one platform: loyalty and rewards, referrals, reviews, wishlist, and Instagram UGC, all sharing a single customer profile. A review can earn points, points can unlock a VIP tier, and a tier perk can trigger the next purchase, without separate apps needing to be stitched together.
Growave is used by 15,000+ Shopify brands and holds the Built for Shopify badge. It's also, by its own positioning, built for merchants rather than investors: there's no venture board between the product team and the people using it, which shows up in how quickly feature requests tend to ship.
Both platforms cover the fundamentals: points for purchases and actions, redemption at checkout, and VIP tiers on higher plans. The difference is architecture. Because Growave's five programs share one customer profile, loyalty data, review history, and wishlist activity all feed into the same record, so a points balance, a VIP tier, and a product review can all influence each other automatically.
Growave also offers Shopify POS Loyalty QR, which lets staff identify a loyalty member at the register in under two seconds by scanning a QR code, a feature Yotpo doesn't have an equivalent for. One merchant, outdoor apparel brand North Outdoor, saw a 44% increase in in-store redemptions after turning it on. Yotpo's loyalty program, by contrast, is built primarily for online storefronts.
Reviews is where Yotpo has the longest track record: it's literally how the company started, and the product reflects that depth. The catch is that it's billed and installed separately from Loyalty, so running both means paying for and managing two apps. Growave's reviews tool, including a Q&A widget and customer-submitted review attributes like size and fit, is included on every plan at no extra cost, and ties directly into the same customer profile as loyalty and VIP tiers.
Growave includes referrals, a wishlist with back-in-stock and price-drop alerts, and Instagram UGC in every plan. Yotpo's referral features live inside its Loyalty product rather than as a separate offering, and it doesn't have a wishlist or Instagram UGC product at all. Merchants who want those need a separate app.
Growave connects natively with Klaviyo and Attentive, syncing loyalty, reviews, referral, and wishlist data directly into email and SMS campaigns on both. Yotpo also integrates with Attentive, though only because it retired its own email and SMS products in December 2025 and now depends on an outside partner to cover ground it used to own itself. Growave additionally connects natively with Gorgias and Shopify Flow, and supports 70+ languages with per-currency point values out of the box, which matters for multi-region stores that don't want to manually translate the storefront widget.
Growave's pricing is a single ladder that covers all five programs, with a 14-day free trial on every plan:
Yotpo prices Reviews and Loyalty separately, and both scale with monthly order volume. As of 2026, Yotpo's Reviews plans start free for stores under 50 orders a month, with paid tiers from roughly $15 to $119+ a month depending on volume. Yotpo Loyalty's paid plans start higher, commonly cited around $199/month before overage. Running both products together, which most stores comparing Yotpo to an all-in-one platform will want to do, means combining two separate bills. Because Yotpo's pricing changes fairly often, check Yotpo's own pricing page for current numbers rather than relying on any article, including this one.
See the current Growave pricing page for full plan details, or book a demo if you want help figuring out which tier fits your order volume.
Growave holds a 4.8 rating on the Shopify App Store from 1,200+ reviews, plus 4.7 on G2, 4.9 on Capterra, 4.9 on TrustRadius, and 4.9 on GetApp.
Yotpo's ratings are split across its separate apps: Reviews sits around 4.8 on the Shopify App Store from several thousand reviews, while Loyalty sits closer to 4.7 from a smaller review base. On G2, where reviewers tend to be more enterprise-weighted, Yotpo sits around 4.3. That split itself is a useful data point: it reflects two products with two review histories rather than one unified platform.
Where it's strong:
Trade-offs:
Where it's strong:
Trade-offs:
Choose Yotpo if: you're an enterprise or Shopify Plus brand that wants to keep reviews and loyalty with the company that built the original review product, and you're comfortable managing two separate subscriptions (Reviews and Loyalty).
Choose Growave if: you're a growing Shopify brand that wants loyalty, reviews, referrals, wishlist, and Instagram UGC working together on one customer profile, you run physical as well as online stores, or you'd rather pay one predictable bill that scales with you instead of stacking separate app subscriptions.
Both platforms can run a solid retention program, and the right choice comes down to how your store is structured. Yotpo makes sense if you're already deep in its ecosystem and have the budget to run reviews and loyalty as separate products. Growave makes more sense if you want those programs, plus referrals, wishlist, and Instagram UGC, working off one connected customer profile without juggling multiple apps and bills.
Want to see how it would look on your own store? Book a demo and we'll walk you through it.
Yotpo sells reviews and loyalty as separate products with separate pricing (it exited email and SMS marketing in December 2025). Growave combines loyalty, referrals, reviews, wishlist, and Instagram UGC into one platform sharing a single customer profile and a single price.
For stores that want both reviews and loyalty, usually yes: Growave includes both in every plan starting at $15/month, while Yotpo bills them as two separate apps that each scale with order volume. Check both platforms' current pricing pages for your specific order volume before deciding.
Yes. Reviews, including a Q&A widget and customer-submitted review attributes, are included on every Growave plan at no extra cost and connect to the same customer profile as loyalty and VIP tiers.
Yes, natively. Growave syncs loyalty, reviews, referral, and wishlist data directly into Klaviyo and Attentive campaigns. Yotpo connects with Attentive too, but only because it exited its own email and SMS products in December 2025.
Growave's team handles migration, including moving over existing customer and points data where applicable. Book a demo to talk through what a migration from Yotpo would look like for your store.
Yes, every Growave plan includes a 14-day free trial.
Find Growave in the Shopify App Store, click install, and follow the onboarding steps. Once onboarding is complete, you'll land in the Growave admin panel with full control over all five programs.
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