Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist vs. Smart Wishlist: An In-Depth Comparison

Introduction

Choosing the right retention and wishlist tool is a common friction point for Shopify merchants. Hundreds of apps promise higher conversion, stronger retention, and better customer experiences, but not all solutions fit every store. Picking a single-purpose widget or an integrated platform affects long-term growth, maintenance time, and total cost of ownership.

Short answer: Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist suits merchants who need an integrated retention stack — loyalty, referrals, reviews, wishlists, and VIP tiers — bundled into a single platform with enterprise-ready features and strong integrations. Smart Wishlist is a lightweight, focused wishlist app that delivers fast setup and simple wishlist experiences for stores that only need that one function. For teams trying to reduce tool sprawl and improve customer lifetime value, Growave presents better value for money because it consolidates multiple retention tools and reduces ongoing integration overhead.

Purpose of this article: provide a practical, feature-by-feature comparison of Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist and Smart Wishlist so merchants can decide which app aligns with their priorities — or whether moving to a consolidated retention platform is the smarter long-term choice.

Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist vs. Smart Wishlist: At a Glance

Deep Dive Comparison

Product Positioning and Target Merchant

Growave: Positioning and Market Fit

Growave positions itself as a flexible retention platform that helps stores convert, retain, and grow customers using an integrated set of tools: loyalty and rewards, VIP tiers, referral programs, product reviews and UGC, and wishlist. The product is clearly aimed at merchants who want to build a durable retention engine without stitching together multiple single-purpose apps. It supports Shopify Plus capabilities and integrates with commonly used marketing and helpdesk tools, which makes it suitable for brands that scale beyond basic Shopify stores.

Smart Wishlist: Positioning and Market Fit

Smart Wishlist is a specialized app built to provide wishlist functionality with minimal friction. It targets merchants whose immediate problem is enabling customers to save and share products quickly, including guest users without login. The value proposition leans on simplicity: low payload, easy install, and an emphasis on not breaking themes during uninstall. It fits merchants that prioritize a lightweight wishlist button over a full retention platform.

Ratings, Reviews, and Reputation

Growave: Ratings and Signals

Growave has 1,197 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 on the Shopify App Store. That volume of feedback paired with a high rating suggests a mature product with many active users and a generally positive reception. High review counts typically indicate more use cases, more live deployments, and more feedback cycles to improve the product. Growave’s higher rating also signals consistent satisfaction across support, features, and reliability.

Smart Wishlist: Ratings and Signals

Smart Wishlist has 81 reviews at a 3.6 rating. The lower review count and lower average score point to a smaller user base and a more mixed set of experiences. For merchants evaluating trust signals, fewer reviews make it harder to predict long-term reliability or support responsiveness. The lighter adoption could be acceptable if a business only needs wishlist functionality and is comfortable with lower-touch support.

Features Comparison

Wishlist UX and Functionality

• Growave:
  • Offers wishlist as part of a wider platform; wishlist supports back-in-stock notifications (on Growth plan and up), account-linked wishlists, and integration with loyalty/rewards for experiential nudges.
  • Customizable UI and branding to fit store themes; supports both guest and logged-in wishlist flows depending on configuration.
  • Wishlist data feeds into reviews, referrals, and email automation workflows when combined with other modules.
• Smart Wishlist:
  • One-click saving on product, collection, search results, and cart pages.
  • Supports guest and logged-in users, shareable lists, and unlimited wishlists.
  • Lightweight payload and APIs (Javascript and REST) for advanced customizations.
  • Minimalist focus: fast performance and easy uninstall without theme breakage.

Verdict on wishlist: If the only requirement is a fast, low-effort wishlist button that works for guests, Smart Wishlist excels for simplicity. If wishlist is one part of a broader retention strategy — where saved items tie into back-in-stock emails, loyalty points, and VIP experiences — Growave provides greater long-term utility.

Loyalty & Rewards

• Growave:
  • Full-featured loyalty system: points accrual, advanced reward options, VIP tiers, customizable actions, points expiration, gift cards, and POS support.
  • Built-in nudges and customizable email templates for point reminders and reward promotion.
  • Loyalty is available across plans (basic on free), with advanced and enterprise features on higher pricing tiers.
  • Integrates with checkout and POS systems for omnichannel loyalty.
• Smart Wishlist:
  • No native loyalty program. Would require a separate app for rewards, creating another integration and potential data silos.

Verdict on loyalty: Growave is the clear choice for brands that want loyalty programs. Smart Wishlist does not compete here.

Referrals & Affiliate Capabilities

• Growave:
  • Referral program built-in with fraud protection, sharing incentives, and tracking. Referral rewards can be tied to loyalty balances.
  • Customizable rewards and referral flows help convert existing customers into acquisition channels.
• Smart Wishlist:
  • No native referral solution.

Verdict on referrals: Growave provides referral tools that can amplify word-of-mouth and reduce CAC through customer-driven growth.

Reviews & UGC

• Growave:
  • Automated review collection and display, review request email series, and Instagram UGC integration on higher tiers.
  • Features to collect review attributes and surface social proof across product pages and marketing channels.
• Smart Wishlist:
  • Focused wishlist app; no review or UGC features.

Verdict on reviews: Growave offers a complete review workflow. Stores that need social proof and UGC should prefer Growave to avoid adding a separate review app.

Customization, Theming, and Headless Support

• Growave:
  • Offers theme customization, API & SDK for headless setups (Plus plan), and checkout/account extensions for Shopify Plus stores.
  • Provides options to tailor visual placement, email content, and admin behavior.
• Smart Wishlist:
  • Lightweight and theme-safe by design; provides JS and REST APIs for custom experiences.
  • Easier to maintain for small shops that want hands-off implementation.

Verdict on customization: For complex or headless setups, Growave’s Plus features win. For basic theme-safe wishlist placement and light APIs, Smart Wishlist is sufficient.

Performance & Resource Footprint

• Growave:
  • Larger footprint by nature of offering multiple modules; performance will depend on which modules are active and how integrations are configured.
  • Designed to work with enterprise traffic patterns on higher plans, and maintains 24/7 support for troubleshooting.
• Smart Wishlist:
  • Emphasizes lightweight payload and minimal theme impact. That advantage reduces the risk of performance issues caused by a wishlist widget.

Verdict on performance: Smart Wishlist has the edge for pure front-end minimalism. Growave’s multi-module platform requires attention to configuration but delivers more capability.

Pricing & Value

Growave Pricing Overview

• Free plan: basic loyalty, wishlist, product reviews; 100 orders/month (limit 500 total orders in free tier), Growave branding, 48-hour email support.
• Entry plan: $49/month — advanced rewards, referrals with fraud protection, nudges, review request emails, POS and Flow support, +1 integration.
• Growth plan: $199/month — VIP tiers, dedicated loyalty page, points expiration, enhanced integrations, back-in-stock wishlist emails, priority support.
• Plus plan: $499/month — checkout extensions, headless API & SDK, custom reward actions, unlimited integrations, CSM, dedicated launch plan.

Value assessment:

• Growave is priced to scale with merchants. The tiers map to increasing complexity and volume. For stores that will use multiple modules (loyalty + reviews + referrals + wishlist), the bundled pricing tends to deliver better value than buying four separate best-of-breed apps.
• Free tier allows trialing basic features, which reduces adoption risk.

Smart Wishlist Pricing Overview

• Standard plan: $4.99/month.
• No multi-tier pricing is provided in the app data — the app is intentionally low-cost and single-function.

Value assessment:

• Smart Wishlist is excellent value for stores that only need wishlist functionality. The low price lowers friction for testing wishlist features.
• For merchants who later need loyalty, referrals, or reviews, adding separate apps will increase monthly spend and complexity.

Price comparison summary:

• For single-feature usage, Smart Wishlist is the lowest monthly cost.
• For multi-feature retention strategies, Growave provides better value for money because it consolidates functionality that would be more expensive and harder to manage if purchased à la carte.

Integrations & Ecosystem

Growave Integrations

• Integrates with common stacks: Klaviyo, Omnisend, Gorgias, Recharge, PushOwl, Postscript, Page builders (Pagefly, LayoutHub, GemPages), Shopify Flow, Shopify POS, and checkout extensions for Plus.
• Designed to feed loyalty and review data into marketing automation and support tools.

The ability to connect loyalty and reviews with email flows and customer service enables better lifecycle marketing and support responses. These integrations reduce duplicated work and provide consistent data across systems.

Smart Wishlist Integrations

• Works with ShareThis, Sendgrid, and provides JS/REST APIs for custom integration.
• Focused integrations; needs external solutions to cover email flows, reviews, and loyalty.

Integration summary:

• Growave offers a broader ecosystem suitable for merchants who rely on marketing automation and advanced POS/checkout behaviors.
• Smart Wishlist gives the essentials for wishlists with developer hooks for custom integrations.

Implementation & Time-to-Value

Growave

• Implementation scope depends on modules selected. Basic setup (wishlist + basic loyalty) can be accomplished faster, while full loyalty programs, review automation, and VIP tiers require configuration and strategy.
• On higher plans, onboarding support and a Customer Success Manager accelerate launch for complex setups.
• The all-in-one approach reduces integration time versus coordinating multiple vendors.

Smart Wishlist

• Minimal setup; designed for one-click install and immediate use. No coding required for basic flows.
• Quickest path to adding wishlist capability with minimal dependencies.

Recommendation:

• If the immediate need is to add a wishlist and keep setup time minimal, Smart Wishlist provides the fastest time-to-value.
• If a thoughtful retention program is required, the initial investment of time in Growave yields more strategic long-term returns.

Support & Customer Success

• Growave: Offers 24/7 email/chat support on higher tiers, dedicated CSM/AM on Plus, and world-class documentation. This level of support aligns with enterprise needs and reduces operational risk for larger merchants.
• Smart Wishlist: Lightweight support model typical for small apps. The app promises easy setup and reliability but has fewer reviews to validate support responsiveness.

Data Ownership & Portability

• Growave: Provides data imports/exports and is built to integrate with external systems. Higher tiers provide more API and headless support.
• Smart Wishlist: Lightweight payload and APIs help with portability; app claims to not break themes on uninstall, increasing safety during migrations.

Merchants should always verify data export policies to ensure wishlist and loyalty customer data remain accessible if switching providers.

Security, Compliance & Reliability

• Both apps operate within Shopify’s app framework and are expected to follow Shopify’s data handling standards. Growave, serving many enterprise clients, emphasizes secure integrations and Plus support.
• Reliability should be measured by uptime, incident history, and support responsiveness — areas where Growave’s higher review count and enterprise onboarding suggest stronger operational maturity.

Use Cases and Recommendations

When Smart Wishlist Is the Better Fit

• A store wants an immediate wishlist feature with minimal setup and cost.
• The merchant prefers a tiny app footprint and is cautious about adding multiple modules.
• Wishlist behavior for guest users and shareable lists are the primary needs.
• The brand plans to keep wishlist as an isolated feature and is okay managing loyalty, referrals, and reviews with other apps or not at all.

When Growave Is the Better Fit

• The store seeks a retention strategy that combines loyalty, referrals, reviews, and wishlists to increase repeat purchases and LTV.
• The merchant wants fewer vendors and integrated data flows between loyalty, email, and reviews.
• The brand is scaling and needs Plus-ready features like checkout extensions, headless API support, or dedicated success resources.
• The business values deep integrations with Klaviyo, Recharge, and helpdesk tools to create personalized lifecycle campaigns.

Comparative Examples of Outcomes (No hypothetical characters)

• Stores that convert wishlist saves into back-in-stock emails and loyalty nudges typically see higher re-engagement rates than those using wishlist alone.
• Brands that combine reviews and UGC with loyalty incentives can increase user-generated content and social proof, improving conversion rates across the catalog.
• Using separate single-purpose apps can increase monthly spend and create data silos, while an integrated suite reduces the time engineers and marketers spend synchronizing behavior and data.

The Alternative: Solving App Fatigue with an All-in-One Platform

App fatigue is a real operational problem for growing merchants. When each function — wishlist, loyalty, reviews, referrals — requires a separate vendor, stores face:

• Fragmented customer data across multiple dashboards.
• Increased maintenance and compatibility risks during theme updates.
• Higher combined monthly subscriptions that rise as the business scales.
• Slower time-to-insight because marketing and product teams must reconcile data manually.

An alternative approach is consolidation: choose a platform that covers multiple retention functions in one place. This reduces the overhead of managing multiple apps and centralizes customer behavior, enabling more sophisticated lifecycle marketing.

Growave’s “More Growth, Less Stack” proposition addresses these problems by combining loyalty, reviews, referrals, wishlists, and VIP tiers inside a single product that can be configured to match store needs. The benefits of this approach include:

• Centralized customer profiles connecting points earned, wishlist activity, and review submissions to a single customer record.
• Easier automation: wishlist saves can trigger review request flows or loyalty reminders without stitching events between different vendors.
• Reduced vendor management and less risk associated with app conflicts or theme changes.
• Access to enterprise features (checkout extensions, POS loyalty) without cobbling together separate integrations.

Merchants who want to understand how consolidating retention features works in practice can compare outcomes between using multiple point solutions and a single suite. For many brands, the long-term savings in time and improved retention metrics outweigh the higher up-front cost of a consolidated platform.

To evaluate Growave for consolidation, merchants can explore pricing transparently and compare plan features to existing spend. For those who prefer to trial the platform or examine details hands-on, it’s straightforward to browse Growave plans and compare features. For stores running on Shopify Plus, Growave also offers targeted support and extensions for more advanced checkout and account experiences; merchants can review the options for solutions for high-growth Plus brands.

Growave’s loyalty capabilities are core to its consolidation strategy. Merchants interested in turning repeat shoppers into long-term customers should review how to build loyalty and rewards that drive repeat purchases. Rewards programs, VIP tiers, and POS loyalty help brands reward repeat behaviors across channels and consolidate loyalty data in the same platform that powers reviews and wishlists.

Authentic reviews and user-generated content are another consolidation win. When a platform handles review collection and showcases UGC, it’s easier to programmatically surface social proof where it matters. Stores that want to collect and showcase authentic reviews while integrating review automation into loyalty and referral flows reduce the friction of running separate apps for reviews and rewards.

Beyond product pages, consolidation simplifies marketing flows. For merchants using email and automation platforms, Growave’s integrations ensure wishlist saves, referral completions, and review submissions are easy to wire into lifecycle messaging. For example, a wishlist save can trigger a targeted email series via Klaviyo, and a completed referral can automatically credit loyalty points — all without moving data across vendors. To verify integration compatibility, merchants can check platform support for common tools and connectors and consider installing from the Shopify marketplace to preview how Growave fits the store stack.

From a value perspective, consolidation often presents better long-term economics. Compare the monthly cost of buying a wishlist app, a loyalty app, a review app, and a referrals app individually against Growave’s bundled plans. Consolidation reduces the total recurring cost and lowers the operational overhead of managing multiple billing relationships. For merchants who want to examine pricing tiers and what each plan unlocks, it’s helpful to review Growave’s plan choices and calculate total cost of ownership against existing subscriptions.

Growave also supports stores that want to adopt a phased approach: start with wishlist and basic loyalty features on the Free or Entry plan, then progressively enable reviews, referrals, and VIP tiers as the retention program matures. This approach reduces risk and spreads the implementation effort while keeping all customer data within one system. Merchants can find examples of how brands use an integrated approach by viewing customer stories from brands scaling retention.

To restate the advantages of consolidation in plain language:

• Less vendor management means fewer friction points for marketing and engineering teams.
• Unified insights improve personalization and increase the efficacy of lifecycle campaigns.
• Bundled features deliver better value for money when multiple retention tactics are required.

Growave’s all-in-one approach is designed to break the cycle of app fatigue by centralizing retention features, making it easier for merchants to focus on growth rather than maintenance.

Implementation Checklist & Migration Considerations

• Inventory existing apps: document which features each app covers (wishlist, loyalty, reviews, referrals) and list dependencies (email platforms, POS, checkout customizations).
• Decide which functions will move to the consolidated platform first. Wishlist and basic loyalty are common first steps.
• Plan data migration: export wishlists, loyalty balances, review content, and referral records from current apps where possible.
• Test on a staging or development theme: verify UI placement, performance, and checkout behavior before releasing to production.
• Use integrations to connect marketing automation and customer service tools to the consolidated platform to preserve lifecycle automation.
• Monitor KPIs during the migration: wishlist saves, email CTRs, repeat purchase rate, and LTV changes. This helps quantify the payoff of consolidation.

For merchants considering a trial, checking pricing and plan differences is essential. Compare current monthly spend across apps to the cost of a consolidated plan and factor in engineering time saved from fewer integrations. To quickly evaluate plan fit and costs, merchants can compare Growave plans.

Support, Onboarding, and Long-Term Success

• Growave offers tiered support with higher tiers providing dedicated customer success resources, which helps brands execute complex loyalty launches and campaigns.
• Smart Wishlist emphasizes easy setup and lightweight maintenance; the support model matches its simple scope.
• For long-term success, merchants should have a roadmap that ties feature adoption (e.g., moving from wishlist to loyalty and referrals) to measurable KPIs like repeat purchase rate and average order value.

Stores that plan to grow aggressively — expand channels, adopt Shopify Plus, or run enterprise checkout experiences — benefit from the extra onboarding that platforms like Growave provide. To evaluate Plus readiness, merchants can examine how Growave supports advanced stores and checkout extensions for larger merchants by reviewing options for solutions for high-growth Plus brands.

Conclusion

For merchants choosing between Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist and Smart Wishlist, the decision comes down to scope and strategy. Smart Wishlist is an effective, low-cost solution for stores that only need wishlist functionality and value a quick, lightweight install. Growave is the better choice for brands that want to build a retention engine — combining loyalty, referrals, reviews, and wishlists — and prefer a single platform that reduces tool sprawl and integrates with marketing, POS, and checkout flows.

Growave’s bundled approach reduces operational overhead, centralizes customer data, and unlocks lifecycle strategies that single-purpose apps cannot deliver on their own. Merchants who plan to scale retention and increase customer lifetime value will find Growave offers stronger long-term value.

Start a 14-day free trial to see how consolidating loyalty, reviews, referrals, and wishlist into one platform drives better retention and simplifies operations: Start your 14-day free trial.

FAQ

How do Growave and Smart Wishlist differ in terms of long-term value?

Growave bundles loyalty, referrals, reviews, and wishlist in one platform, which typically reduces long-term vendor costs and engineering effort compared with purchasing separate best-of-breed apps. Smart Wishlist offers low monthly cost for wishlist-only needs; however, adding loyalty or reviews later will increase total subscription costs and integration work.

Which app is faster to implement?

Smart Wishlist is faster to implement because it focuses solely on wishlist functionality and emphasizes no-code setup. Growave requires more configuration when multiple modules (loyalty, referrals, reviews) are enabled, though its onboarding on higher tiers speeds up complex implementations.

How does an all-in-one platform compare to specialized apps?

An all-in-one platform centralizes data and automations, enabling wishlist saves, review collection, and loyalty point actions to work together natively — reducing data fragmentation and operational complexity. Specialized apps can be lighter and cheaper initially but often require additional integrations and vendor management as the brand grows.

Which app should a merchant pick if they use Shopify Plus and need checkout-level customizations?

Merchants on Shopify Plus that require checkout extensions, headless APIs, or deep POS loyalty should favor Growave because it includes Plus-ready features and dedicated support for enterprise customizations. Smart Wishlist is primarily a front-end wishlist solution and does not provide checkout extensions or Plus-level onboarding.