Growave vs. Swish (formerly Wishlist King): In-Depth Comparison

Introduction

Choosing the right applications for a Shopify store can often feel like navigating a complex ecosystem. Each app promises specific enhancements, and while specialized tools offer depth in their niche, accumulating too many can lead to management overhead, fragmented data, and an inconsistent customer experience. Merchants face the challenge of selecting solutions that not only deliver on their promises but also integrate smoothly into their existing operations and growth strategy.

Short answer: For merchants primarily seeking a robust, feature-rich wishlist solution with excellent customization and service for that specific function, Swish (formerly Wishlist King) presents a compelling option. However, for those aiming for a more integrated approach to customer retention that combines loyalty programs, reviews, referrals, and wishlists into a single platform, Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist offers a comprehensive suite designed to reduce tool sprawl and streamline customer engagement efforts. This comparison aims to provide a clear, objective analysis of both apps, enabling merchants to make an informed decision based on their specific needs and strategic goals.

This analysis will provide a feature-by-feature comparison of Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist and Swish (formerly Wishlist King). The goal is to offer a practical, objective perspective on each app's capabilities, pricing, and ideal use cases, helping Shopify merchants determine which solution best supports their growth objectives.

Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist vs. Swish (formerly Wishlist King): At a Glance

Deep Dive Comparison

Understanding the nuances of each application beyond a quick glance is crucial for making a strategic investment. This deep dive will explore the core features, customization options, pricing models, integration capabilities, and support structures of both Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist and Swish (formerly Wishlist King).

Core Features and Workflows

The fundamental difference between these two applications lies in their scope and specialization. Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist is designed as a multi-functional platform, whereas Swish (formerly Wishlist King) focuses intensely on the wishlist experience.

Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist Core Offerings

Growave functions as an integrated suite covering several critical aspects of customer retention and engagement. It bundles several tools into one, aiming to streamline operations and offer a cohesive customer journey.

• Loyalty Points Program: This allows merchants to reward customers for various actions, such as purchases, account creation, or social media engagement. Implementing loyalty points and rewards designed to lift repeat purchases can significantly enhance customer lifetime value.
• VIP Tiers: Merchants can segment their most valuable customers into VIP tiers, offering exclusive benefits and incentives. This strategy encourages higher spending and fosters a sense of exclusivity among top shoppers. The creation of VIP tiers and incentives for high-intent customers is a powerful mechanism for building long-term relationships.
• Referral Program: Growave includes tools to enable customers to refer friends, rewarding both the referrer and the referred. This taps into word-of-mouth marketing, a highly effective and cost-efficient acquisition channel.
• Product Reviews & User-Generated Content (UGC): The platform facilitates the collection and display of product reviews, photo reviews, and other UGC. This social proof is vital for building trust and improving conversion rates. Efforts towards collecting and showcasing authentic customer reviews can significantly boost credibility.
• Wishlist: Customers can save products they are interested in for later purchase. This feature not only improves user experience but also provides valuable insights into customer preferences. Growave's wishlist functionality integrates seamlessly with its other modules, allowing for targeted marketing efforts.

The unified nature of Growave's features means that a wishlist can directly feed into loyalty points, or reviews can be incentivized through the rewards program. This interconnectedness allows for holistic retention programs that reduce reliance on discounts by creating deeper engagement.

Swish (formerly Wishlist King) Core Offerings

Swish, as a specialized wishlist solution, focuses on providing a highly refined and engaging experience for customers saving desired products. Its features are tailored to maximize the impact of wishlists on conversion and engagement.

• Advanced Wishlist Functionality: Swish offers a robust system for customers to wishlist items throughout their entire shopping journey, ensuring ease of use and accessibility. This can include options for logged-in and guest wishlists, as well as multiple wishlists for different occasions.
• Personalized & Automated Notifications: A key strength of Swish is its ability to send highly personalized and automated notifications related to wishlisted items. These can include back-in-stock alerts, price drop notifications, or reminders about items left in a wishlist. Such timely communications are designed to drive conversions at optimal moments.
• Advanced Analytics & Wishlist Curation: The app provides meaningful insights into customer preferences and popular wishlisted items. Merchants can leverage these analytics to understand demand, optimize inventory, and tailor marketing campaigns. The data can inform merchandising decisions and promotional strategies.
• Free Setup & Customization Service: Swish stands out by offering a free setup and customization service across all its plans. This ensures that the wishlist integrates seamlessly with the store's aesthetic and branding without requiring the merchant to undertake complex technical work.

For merchants whose primary focus is to elevate the wishlist experience and leverage it as a direct conversion tool, Swish offers a powerful, dedicated solution.

Customization and Control

Both apps emphasize customization, but their approaches and the scope of what can be customized differ, aligning with their core missions.

Growave: Customization for a Unified Experience

Growave provides extensive flexibility for merchants to customize the look and feel of all its modules to match their brand. This is crucial for maintaining a consistent customer experience across loyalty programs, review widgets, and the wishlist interface.

• Branding Flexibility: Merchants have full control over the branding of loyalty widgets, review sections, and wishlist displays. This ensures a cohesive appearance with the store's theme.
• Tailored Experiences: The platform allows for tailoring experiences, especially for headless Shopify setups, providing the necessary APIs and SDKs for deeper integration and custom front-end development. This capability aligns with the needs of larger, more complex operations that demand capabilities designed for Shopify Plus scaling needs.
• Custom Reward Actions: For loyalty programs, the Plus plan allows for custom reward actions, meaning merchants can design unique ways to engage and reward their customers beyond standard options. This supports sophisticated retention tooling suited for Plus governance needs.

Swish: Customization Focused on Wishlist Integration

Swish's customization efforts are concentrated on making its wishlist feature feel like an native part of the store, rather than an add-on.

• Seamless Theme Integration: The app prides itself on integrating with all themes to seamlessly match the store's aesthetic. This is supported by its free setup and customization service, where their team ensures the perfect look and functionality.
• Personalization for Notifications: The ability to send highly personalized wishlist notifications indicates a strong degree of control over messaging and timing, allowing merchants to tailor communications directly to customer behavior and preferences.

For merchants where brand consistency and advanced front-end control across a broad set of retention tools are paramount, Growave offers greater depth. For those where seamless, theme-agnostic integration of a single wishlist function is the priority, Swish's approach is highly effective.

Pricing Structure and Value for Money

Comparing the pricing models requires understanding the scope of each app and what value they deliver for different merchant stages and needs.

Growave: Tiered for Comprehensive Growth

Growave's pricing is structured to scale with a merchant's business volume, particularly based on monthly orders. It offers a free tier, making it accessible for newer or smaller stores to begin with basic loyalty and wishlist functionalities.

• FREE Plan: This plan is suitable for stores with up to 100 orders per month (500 total orders). It includes loyalty points, wishlist, product reviews, and data imports/exports, albeit with Growave branding and 48-hour email support. This is an excellent starting point for merchants looking to test core retention functionalities.
• ENTRY Plan ($49/month): This tier introduces advanced rewards, a referral program with fraud protection, on-site nudges, review request email series, and compatibility with Shopify POS and Shopify Flow. It also includes one integration (e.g., Klaviyo) and 24/7 email support. This plan begins to offer a more integrated retention stack.
• GROWTH Plan ($199/month): Expanding on the ENTRY plan, this tier adds VIP Tiers, a dedicated loyalty page, Shopify POS Loyalty QR, points expiration, gift cards, account extensions, and advanced review features like Google Shopping Reviews and Instagram UGC. It also includes back-in-stock wishlist emails and enhanced onboarding and support. This is positioned for stores with substantial growth ambitions that require deeper engagement tools.
• PLUS Plan ($449/month): Designed for larger operations, this plan provides checkout extensions, headless API & SDK support, custom loyalty page design, custom reward actions, unlimited integrations, a customer success manager, and dedicated launch plan, with 24/7 multi-channel support. This aligns with evaluating feature coverage across plans for enterprise-level needs.

Growave's model reflects its all-in-one nature. While the higher tiers represent a significant investment, they encompass functionalities that would otherwise require multiple separate apps, each with its own subscription. This can lead to a lower total cost of ownership when considering the breadth of features included, making a clearer view of total retention-stack costs a key consideration for merchants.

Swish: Tiered by Shopify Plan for Wishlist Specialization

Swish's pricing structure is simpler and directly tied to the merchant's Shopify plan, offering all its core wishlist features across every tier.

• Basic Shopify Plan ($19/month): For stores on the Shopify Basic Plan, this tier includes all wishlist features, free setup and onboarding, unlimited wishlists & saved items, and unlimited sessions.
• Shopify Plan ($29/month): Tailored for stores on the standard Shopify Plan, with identical feature inclusions as the Basic Shopify tier.
• Advanced Shopify Plan ($49/month): For stores using the Shopify Advanced Plan, again with all features, free setup, and unlimited usage.
• Shopify Plus Plan ($99/month): This top tier specifically for Shopify Plus stores offers "exclusives" such as free white glove onboarding, priority support, a dedicated account manager, and support for Hydrogen & headless stacks, alongside all core features.

Swish offers a very accessible entry point for a dedicated wishlist solution, especially for smaller stores. The flat feature set across tiers means merchants primarily pay for compatibility with their Shopify plan, rather than for escalating feature access. For a merchant whose sole current need is a sophisticated wishlist without the complexity of a broader retention suite, Swish offers better value for money in that specific niche. However, if a merchant anticipates needing loyalty, reviews, and referrals in the future, the cost of adding those functionalities through separate apps would quickly surpass Swish's standalone pricing, making choosing a plan built for long-term value a more complex decision for a broader strategy.

Integrations and Ecosystem Fit

The ability of an app to integrate with other tools in a merchant's tech stack is paramount for efficient operations and a unified customer experience.

Growave: Broad Integration for a Connected Ecosystem

Growave is designed to be a central hub for customer retention, and its integration capabilities reflect this. It works with a wide array of popular Shopify and marketing tools.

• Marketing & Support: Seamlessly integrates with email marketing platforms like Klaviyo and Omnisend, customer service solutions such as Gorgias and Attentive, and SMS marketing tools like Postscript and Ampify.
• Shopify Ecosystem: Extends functionality to Shopify POS, Shopify Flow for automation, and works with customer accounts, enhancing native Shopify features. It also integrates with page builders like Pagefly, LayoutHub, GemPages, and Shopney.
• Subscription & Checkout: Works with Recharge for subscriptions, and for its PLUS plan, offers powerful checkout extensions that are crucial for supporting advanced storefront and checkout requirements. The platform's commitment to API & SDK for headless setups further solidifies its fit for complex tech stacks.

This broad integration strategy minimizes data silos and ensures that customer interactions across different touchpoints (loyalty, reviews, wishlist) are synchronized with marketing and support efforts.

Swish: Focused Marketing Integrations

Swish's integration strategy is focused on enhancing the marketing potential of its wishlist feature.

• Marketing Platforms: It offers out-of-the-box integrations with Klaviyo for email marketing, GA4 for analytics, and Meta for advertising. These are critical for leveraging wishlist data in retargeting and personalized campaigns.
• Shopify Ecosystem: Integrates with Shopify Checkout, Customer Accounts, and for Plus plans, supports Hydrogen & headless stacks. Its claim to integrate with "all themes" highlights its front-end compatibility focus.
• Search and Recommendations: Also works with Search and Recommendations tools, which is logical for a wishlist product, helping customers discover and save items.

Swish excels at ensuring its wishlist data can be effectively used by core marketing channels. For merchants who have already invested in separate loyalty and review solutions, Swish's focused integrations for wishlist marketing can fit well.

Analytics and Reporting

Understanding customer behavior is vital for optimizing retention strategies. Both apps offer analytics, but their scope aligns with their core functionalities.

Growave: Insights Across Retention Pillars

While the specific details of Growave's reporting dashboard are not exhaustively listed in the provided data, an all-in-one retention platform inherently generates data across loyalty, reviews, and wishlists. The mention of "Data imports/exports" suggests capabilities for analysis. Merchants would expect to see metrics related to:

• Loyalty program performance (points earned/redeemed, VIP tier progression).
• Review collection rates, average ratings, and impact on conversions.
• Referral program success (new customers acquired, referral revenue).
• Wishlist engagement, popular products, and conversion rates from wishlist actions.

The ability to measure the impact of reward mechanics that support customer lifetime value across various channels is a key benefit of a unified platform.

Swish: Deep Wishlist Analytics

Swish explicitly highlights "meaningful insights with advanced analytics and wishlist curation." This suggests a specialized focus on data related specifically to wishlist usage. Merchants can expect to gain insights into:

• Most wishlisted products.
• Wishlist-to-purchase conversion rates.
• Trends in customer preferences.
• Effectiveness of wishlist-triggered notifications (e.g., price drop alerts).
• Demographics or segments of customers using the wishlist feature.

These insights are crucial for optimizing inventory, personalizing marketing campaigns, and understanding product demand based on saved items. The integration with GA4 further enhances its analytics capabilities, allowing merchants to track wishlist events within their broader website analytics framework.

For comprehensive retention analytics spanning multiple engagement points, Growave is designed to provide a more holistic view. For deep, specialized insights into wishlist behavior and its direct impact on conversions, Swish offers a strong, focused solution.

Customer Support Expectations

The quality and availability of customer support are critical for smooth operation, especially when implementing complex features.

Growave: Comprehensive Multi-Channel Support

Growave emphasizes robust support across its plans, escalating in breadth and dedication for higher tiers.

• Entry-Level Support: Provides 48hr email support for the FREE plan and 24/7 email support for the ENTRY plan.
• Enhanced Support: The GROWTH plan includes 5* onboarding and 24/7 email/chat support, indicating a more proactive and accessible support experience.
• Enterprise Support: The PLUS plan offers 24/7 email, live chat, and phone support, along with a dedicated customer success manager and a dedicated launch plan. This level of support is consistent with features aligned with enterprise retention requirements.
• Review Volume: With 1198 reviews and a 4.8 rating, Growave has a high volume of user feedback, generally indicating a mature product and responsive support given its extensive feature set. This supports checking merchant feedback and app-store performance signals for reliability.

Swish: Dedicated Setup and Priority Service

Swish highlights its commitment to a smooth setup and personalized support, particularly for its specialized offering.

• Free Setup & Onboarding: A significant differentiator is the free setup and onboarding service available across all plans, ensuring that the wishlist feature is perfectly integrated without technical burden on the merchant.
• Priority Support: The Shopify Plus plan explicitly offers priority support and a dedicated account manager, recognizing the needs of larger operations.
• Review Rating: A perfect 5.0 rating from 272 reviews suggests a highly satisfied user base, often correlating with excellent support for its specific function. While the volume is lower than Growave, the perfect score is a strong trust signal for a focused app.

Merchants prioritizing white-glove setup and dedicated support for their wishlist functionality may find Swish's offering highly appealing. Those who require comprehensive support across a broader suite of retention tools, with escalating service levels for complex needs, would lean towards Growave.

Performance, Compatibility, and Operational Overhead

The impact of an app on store performance, its compatibility with different Shopify environments, and the overall operational burden it introduces are crucial considerations.

Growave: Built for Scale and Integration

Growave is positioned as a solution for growing brands, explicitly "Built for Shopify Plus" and designed to handle enterprise-level demands.

• Shopify Plus Readiness: Offers checkout extensions, headless API & SDK, and loyalty page custom design, all vital for high-volume or customized Shopify Plus stores. These features ensure that the app can scale with complex requirements and multiple touchpoints, meeting an approach that fits high-growth operational complexity.
• Compatibility: Works with Shopify POS, Shopify Flow, and popular page builders, ensuring compatibility across different operational aspects of a Shopify store.
• Reduced App Sprawl: As an all-in-one solution, Growave aims to reduce the number of individual apps a merchant needs, thereby minimizing potential conflicts, data silos, and the operational overhead of managing multiple subscriptions and interfaces. This directly addresses the challenges of tool sprawl by allowing merchants to manage multiple retention channels from a single dashboard.

Swish: Optimized for Wishlist and Theme Compatibility

Swish focuses on delivering a lightweight and perfectly integrated wishlist experience that won't compromise store performance.

• Theme Integration: Its promise to integrate seamlessly with "all themes" suggests a focus on front-end performance and compatibility, ensuring the wishlist doesn't break existing design or create rendering issues.
• Hydrogen & Headless Support: For Shopify Plus stores, Swish offers specific support for Hydrogen & headless stacks, demonstrating its capability to perform in advanced, decoupled commerce environments.
• Dedicated Functionality: By specializing solely in wishlists, Swish might offer a leaner code footprint specific to that function, potentially reducing load times compared to a multi-feature app if only the wishlist is active. However, adding separate apps for loyalty or reviews would negate this benefit, introducing potential for increased total overhead.

For merchants seeking to minimize their app stack and manage a broad range of retention activities from one platform, Growave offers significant advantages in reducing operational overhead. For those who prioritize a standalone, highly optimized wishlist that integrates flawlessly with their theme and advanced Shopify setups, Swish presents a strong, specialized choice.

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

Merchants frequently encounter "app fatigue"—a scenario where the benefits of numerous specialized tools are overshadowed by the challenges of managing them. This fatigue manifests as fragmented customer data, inconsistent brand experiences across different app interfaces, increased integration overhead, and a cumulative rise in subscription costs. Each specialized app, while excellent in its niche, contributes to tool sprawl, demanding separate configurations, data exports, and support interactions. The sheer volume of individual apps can create more problems than they solve, making it difficult to execute a cohesive growth strategy.

Growave addresses these challenges with its "More Growth, Less Stack" philosophy, providing an integrated suite of retention and engagement tools within a single platform. Instead of deploying separate applications for loyalty, reviews, referrals, and wishlists, merchants can manage all these crucial functions from one dashboard. This approach consolidates data, standardizes the customer experience, and simplifies technical management. This consolidation not only simplifies day-to-day operations but also provides a clearer view of total retention-stack costs.

By integrating these features, Growave enables merchants to craft a more unified and impactful customer journey. For example, a customer adding an item to their wishlist could also be earning loyalty points and rewards designed to lift repeat purchases, or receive a review request after purchase that contributes to social proof that supports conversion and AOV. This synergy enhances the effectiveness of each module, far beyond what separate, siloed apps can achieve. For larger, more complex stores, especially those utilizing Shopify Plus, an integrated solution provides capabilities designed for Shopify Plus scaling needs, offering robust features without the headaches of managing multiple disparate systems. If consolidating tools is a priority, start by comparing plan fit against retention goals.

This integrated strategy helps businesses focus on key outcomes: increasing customer lifetime value (LTV), improving repeat purchase rates, and driving sustainable growth, rather than getting bogged down in app management. The platform’s ability to streamline operations ensures that resources are directed towards strategic initiatives, rather than navigating a fragmented tech stack. Brands can benefit from lessons from brands scaling repeat purchase rate by adopting a unified strategy, which often leads to more coherent and impactful customer engagement. Furthermore, managing all aspects of retention—from collecting post-purchase review requests that feel consistent to building loyalty programs that keep customers coming back—from a single platform, offers unparalleled efficiency. The system is designed to provide features aligned with enterprise retention requirements for merchants operating at a larger scale. This integrated approach ensures that every interaction contributes to a deeper understanding of the customer and a more effective retention strategy, making it simpler to manage a pricing structure that scales as order volume grows.

Conclusion

For merchants choosing between Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist and Swish (formerly Wishlist King), the decision comes down to the breadth versus depth of their current and future retention strategy. If the primary need is a highly specialized, deeply customizable, and expertly supported wishlist solution to drive conversions solely from saved items, Swish (formerly Wishlist King) stands out as an excellent choice. Its accessible pricing, dedicated setup service, and focused integrations make it a compelling option for optimizing a single, critical engagement point.

However, for merchants who envision a more holistic approach to customer retention—one that integrates loyalty programs, customer reviews and user-generated content, referral campaigns, and wishlists into a seamless experience—Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist presents a robust, all-in-one alternative. Its comprehensive feature set, scalability for growing and enterprise-level businesses, and extensive integration capabilities are designed to reduce app fatigue, minimize data fragmentation, and provide a unified platform for managing diverse customer engagement strategies. The free plan allows new merchants to explore loyalty programs that keep customers coming back before committing to higher tiers. This approach can lead to a more efficient tech stack and a more coherent customer journey, ultimately enhancing customer lifetime value and fostering sustainable growth. To reduce app fatigue and run retention from one place, start by reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from.

FAQ

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

An all-in-one platform, like Growave, combines multiple functionalities (e.g., loyalty, reviews, wishlist) into a single application. This typically leads to better data synchronization, a more consistent customer experience across different touchpoints, and reduced overhead from managing fewer separate apps. Specialized apps, such as Swish, excel in providing deep, feature-rich functionality for a single purpose (e.g., wishlists). They can offer greater nuance and customization within their niche but may require additional apps for other retention needs, potentially leading to app sprawl and integration challenges. The choice depends on whether a merchant prioritizes a streamlined, comprehensive solution or a best-in-class tool for a specific function.

What is the primary difference in pricing models between Growave and Swish?

Growave's pricing is primarily based on the number of monthly orders and the level of features required across its various modules (loyalty, reviews, referrals, wishlist). It offers a free tier for basic functionality and scales up with more advanced features and higher order volumes. Swish's pricing is tiered based on the merchant's Shopify plan (Basic, Shopify, Advanced, Plus) and offers all its core wishlist features consistently across most plans, with additional services like priority support and dedicated account management for higher tiers. Growave's model reflects its all-in-one nature, while Swish's reflects its specialization.

Which app is better for smaller stores just starting out?

For smaller stores just starting out, the decision depends on their immediate priorities. If the primary goal is to implement a robust and highly customized wishlist feature at a lower monthly cost, Swish offers an accessible entry point with its $19/month Basic Shopify plan and free setup service. If a store wants to begin building a foundational retention strategy that includes basic loyalty points, product reviews, and a wishlist without an upfront cost, Growave's free plan provides these core features, making it a valuable option for initial experimentation with a broader retention toolkit. Merchants should consider their future growth trajectory and whether they anticipate needing a full retention suite.

Can either app support Shopify Plus stores?

Yes, both Growave: Loyalty & Wishlist and Swish (formerly Wishlist King) offer explicit support and tailored features for Shopify Plus stores. Growave includes checkout extensions, headless API & SDK support, and dedicated customer success management in its PLUS plan, aligning with the complex needs of enterprise-level merchants. Swish also has a dedicated Shopify Plus plan that includes exclusive benefits like free white glove onboarding, priority support, a dedicated account manager, and support for Hydrogen & headless stacks, demonstrating its capability to serve high-volume, advanced Shopify environments.