Swish (formerly Wishlist King) vs. Next Level Wishlist: An In-Depth Comparison

Introduction

Choosing the right wishlist app for a Shopify store can feel like splitting hairs. Both Swish (formerly Wishlist King) and Next Level Wishlist promise to increase engagement and recover interest from shoppers, but they approach the problem with different product depth, signals, and investment in merchant support.

Short answer: Swish (formerly Wishlist King) is a polished, full-feature wishlist solution with strong social proof (272 reviews, 5.0 rating) and built-in onboarding for stores of all sizes; Next Level Wishlist is a lightweight wishlist focused on easy setup and basic wishlist behaviors but currently shows no public reviews or pricing signals. For merchants seeking a single, reliable wishlist tool Swish is the safer choice; for teams that need advanced retention features beyond wishlists, an integrated platform such as Growave often delivers better value by replacing multiple single-purpose apps.

This post provides a feature-by-feature, neutral comparison of Swish and Next Level Wishlist so merchants can decide which fits their store strategy. After the direct comparison, the article examines the trade-offs of single-purpose apps and shows how a consolidated retention platform addresses common limits.

Swish (formerly Wishlist King) vs. Next Level Wishlist: At a Glance

Deep Dive Comparison

Features

Core wishlist functionality

Swish provides the full set of wishlist behaviors merchants expect: save items across browsing sessions, anonymous and account-linked wishlists, sharing options, and automated reminders tied to product status. The app emphasizes unlimited wishlists and saved items across all plans, which removes caps that can limit large catalogs.

Next Level Wishlist offers fundamental wishlist interactions with a focus on immediate usability: one-click setup, wishlist icons across product, collection, and quick view, and sharing via email and social media. It explicitly supports wishlisting without login, lowering friction for guest shoppers.

• Swish strengths:
  • Unlimited wishlists and sessions across plans.
  • Personalised and automated wishlist notifications to drive conversion.
  • Advanced analytics and wishlist curation for merchandising decisions.
• Next Level Wishlist strengths:
  • No-login wishlists reduce friction for anonymous shoppers.
  • Lightweight interface and quick theme compatibility for fast deployment.
  • Low-stock email reminders tied to wishlist items.

Personalization and automation

Swish includes automation capabilities to nudge customers when wishlisted items change status (price drops, restocks), and integrates with major marketing analytics/automation platforms (Klaviyo, GA4, Meta). The presence of these integrations enables targeted campaigns and deeper segmentation based on wishlist behavior.

Next Level Wishlist calls out email reminders for low stock and APIs for advanced customization, but lacks published examples of integrations with common ESPs or analytics platforms. The API and JS hooks are useful for custom implementations but require developer resources.

• Swish is stronger for merchants that want out-of-the-box automation and marketing integrations.
• Next Level Wishlist is an attractive starting point for stores that have developers on hand and want to build custom flows around wishlist events.

Analytics and merchandising

Swish highlights “advanced analytics and wishlist curation,” which suggests built-in reporting for popular wishlisted products, customer intent, and conversion paths — useful for merchandising and inventory planning.

Next Level Wishlist does not publicly advertise comparable analytics dashboards. That makes it less suitable for merchants who want immediate, actionable reporting without building custom analytics.

Sharing and social behavior

Both apps support sharing wishlists via email and social networks. Swish’s integration stack (Meta, etc.) suggests more capability when driving paid and organic social campaigns tied to wishlist behavior. Next Level Wishlist supports social sharing and positions itself as simple to use for shoppers who want to share gifts.

Implementation & Setup

Onboarding and installation

Swish offers free setup and customisation across all plans, and Shopify Plus merchants get white-glove onboarding and dedicated account management on the Plus plan. That approach reduces merchant friction and can speed time-to-value.

Next Level Wishlist advertises one-click setup and automated installation for popular themes. For merchants using standard Shopify themes, this can mean rapid deployment without configuration.

• Swish: emphasizes concierge onboarding and theme compatibility; better for teams that prefer assisted setup.
• Next Level Wishlist: built for speed and self-service installation; better for teams that want minimal assistance.

Theme compatibility and headless/advanced stacks

Swish explicitly supports all themes and calls out Hydrogen and headless stacks for Shopify Plus customers. That matters for merchants using headless storefronts or custom frameworks.

Next Level Wishlist mentions automated setup for popular themes and REST/JS APIs for advanced customization, which enables support for custom storefronts, but it does not publicly advertise headless-ready, packaged support for Hydrogen.

Developer flexibility

Next Level Wishlist provides REST API and JavaScript API endpoints for integrations and bespoke features, which is attractive for stores that want to deeply embed wishlist behaviors.

Swish also supports integrations and advanced setups, and its onboarding service likely smooths gaps where merchant teams lack developer capacity. Overall, both apps provide developer options, but Swish couples that with merchant-facing support.

Customization & Design

Look and feel

Swish emphasizes seamless visual integration with store themes and free customization. Merchants who prioritize brand-consistent UI will find value in the customization service offered.

Next Level Wishlist focuses on a mobile-friendly UI and instant integration into product lists and quick views. For many stores, the default look is acceptable, but brand-heavy stores may require styling adjustments.

Placement and UI controls

Both apps support wishlist icons on product pages, collection pages, and quick view popups. Swish’s promise of full customization plus free setup suggests greater control over placement and behavior, while Next Level Wishlist’s quick install emphasizes a consistent out-of-the-box placement.

Integrations & Analytics

Marketing platform connections

Swish lists native integrations with Klaviyo, GA4, and Meta — these are standard for sending wishlist events, building segments, and running remarketing campaigns. These integrations mean merchants can use wishlist signals directly in email workflows and ads.

Next Level Wishlist lists “immediate support for popular apps” and offers APIs, but it does not list explicit native integrations. This increases integration effort if merchants want to funnel wishlist events into their marketing stack.

Data capture and analytics exports

Swish’s advanced analytics functionality implies built-in dashboards and the ability to export insights for merchandising decisions. Next Level Wishlist will likely require custom exports via the API or developer-built endpoints to connect to existing analytics.

Measurement of impact

Swish’s higher volume of reviews (272) and perfect rating (5.0) suggest merchants seeing measurable value. Next Level Wishlist’s 0 reviews and 0 rating provide no public indication of impact. While reviews are not perfect proxies, they do provide confidence signals about reliability and results.

Pricing & Value

Published cost structure

Swish lists clear pricing tiers that correspond to Shopify plans:

• Basic Shopify — $19/month
• Shopify — $29/month
• Advanced Shopify — $49/month
• Shopify Plus — $99/month (includes white-glove onboarding, priority support, dedicated account manager, Hydrogen & headless support)

Those prices include all features, free setup, and unlimited wishlists/sessions.

Next Level Wishlist does not publish pricing in the provided dataset. Lack of visible pricing forces merchants to contact the developer or install the app to learn costs, which can slow evaluation and introduce uncertainty.

Value for money

Swish presents transparent pricing and bundled onboarding that reduces implementation cost and developer time. The unlimited usage and support justify the monthly fee for merchants who want a reliable, fully-supported wishlist.

Next Level Wishlist may offer competitive pricing but without published figures, it is difficult to assess upfront value. For merchants who prioritize strictly minimal cost and have internal development capabilities, an unlisted pricing model may be acceptable — but uncertainty increases procurement friction.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) considerations

When assessing TCO, merchants should consider:

• Setup time and potential developer hours required.
• Integration effort with email and analytics platforms.
• The need to add additional apps for loyalty, referrals, or reviews.

Swish reduces setup and integration time with included onboarding and native integrations, lowering TCO for merchants who prefer fewer internal resources spent on configuration. Next Level Wishlist may reduce monthly costs but could increase TCO if engineering is needed to access analytics and automation.

Support & Onboarding

Merchant support levels

Swish highlights free setup across all plans and priority/white-glove onboarding for Plus merchants, plus a dedicated account manager on its highest tier. Those services are important for stores that prefer guided launches and ongoing help.

Next Level Wishlist claims “rapid and effective customer care” and automated setup for popular themes but provides no public customer feedback to validate support quality. The presence of robust support is an important factor for merchants evaluating the risk of adding a new storefront component.

Documentation and developer resources

Next Level Wishlist offers REST and JS APIs, which suggests documentation is available for developers. Swish’s focus on integrations and onboarding implies both merchant-facing documentation and developer resources; merchants should verify documentation quality before committing.

Security, Privacy & Compliance

Data handling and GDPR

Next Level Wishlist explicitly mentions GDPR compliance and wishlist usage without requiring login, which is important for EU customers and privacy-conscious stores. Anonymous wishlists are attractive for conversion but must balance with re-engagement opportunities.

Swish does not explicitly mention GDPR in the provided description, but it integrates with customer accounts and marketing systems — merchants must validate privacy practices with the vendor. Swish’s deep integrations mean verifying consent flows with Klaviyo or analytics platforms is essential.

Account and checkout behavior

Both apps work with Customer Accounts and should obey checkout flow policies. Swish indicates compatibility with Checkout and Hydrogen markets, while Next Level Wishlist lists broad theme compatibility and APIs for more advanced setups.

Performance & Mobile Experience

Load times & site performance

Performance impact is a common concern for any third-party storefront script. Swish’s enterprise positioning and onboarding service suggest attention to performance and theme-level optimizations. Next Level Wishlist’s one-click setup and lightweight approach imply good performance for standard themes, but performance on custom themes should be tested.

Mobile UX

Both apps advertise mobile friendliness. Next Level Wishlist calls out mobile focus explicitly, and Swish claims visual integration across themes — both strong indicators of mobile-ready experiences. Merchants should test interactions like wishlist saves and share flows on a range of devices.

Use Cases & Recommendations

When Swish is the better fit

• Merchants who want a fully-managed wishlist experience with free setup and hands-on onboarding.
• Stores that depend on marketing integrations (Klaviyo, GA4, Meta) and automated wishlist-driven campaigns.
• Brands on Shopify Plus who need Hydrogen and headless support or dedicated account management.
• Merchants who prefer transparent pricing and strong social proof (272 reviews, 5.0 rating).

Suggested actions:

• Use Swish to capture intent signals and feed them into email flows and ad audiences.
• Leverage analytics to identify high-intent items for promotions or bundle offers.

When Next Level Wishlist is the better fit

• Stores that require a fast, low-friction wishlist install and minimal configuration.
• Merchants with in-house development resources who want to leverage REST/JS APIs for custom wishlist experiences.
• Small catalogs or early-stage stores that prioritize a quick MVP wishlist without immediate marketing automation.

Suggested actions:

• Deploy the app and use the API to forward wishlist events to an internal analytics pipeline.
• Use low-stock reminders to trigger scarcity-driven email nudges.

When neither single-purpose wishlist is enough

• Merchants seeking to increase retention, LTV, and repeat purchases often need loyalty, referrals, reviews, and wishlists working together. Adding multiple single-purpose apps increases admin overhead, integration complexity, and monthly fees.

Next section explores the alternative path: replacing multiple single-point apps with a single integrated retention platform.

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

Understanding app fatigue

Many merchants start with best-of-breed single-purpose apps: a wishlist app, a loyalty app, a reviews app, a referral app, and so on. Each app solves a specific problem but increases complexity. Common pain points include:

• Multiple monthly fees and overlapping capabilities.
• Fragmented data across different dashboards and analytics sources.
• Integration headaches between marketing tools, consent, and customer profiles.
• Increased theme and performance maintenance as new scripts and UI components accumulate.

This phenomenon—often referred to as app fatigue—raises the cost of ownership as the store scales. The strategic trade-off merchants must consider is whether a stitched-together stack or a consolidated platform provides better long-term ROI.

The "More Growth, Less Stack" approach

An alternative to stacking single-purpose tools is adopting an integrated retention platform that unifies the core drivers of customer lifetime value: loyalty, referrals, reviews, wishlists, and VIP tiers. This approach reduces the number of vendor relationships, centralizes customer event data, and simplifies workflow automations for lifecycle marketing.

Growave positions itself as such an integrated retention platform. Its suite includes loyalty programs, referrals, reviews and UGC, wishlists, and VIP tiers, built to work together and reduce the friction of running multiple apps.

How a unified platform changes the math

The benefits of consolidating include:

• Single source of truth: Wishlist events, reward interactions, referral attribution, and reviews live in one system, making segmentation and campaign design simpler.
• Reduced integration overhead: Native connectors and shared data models mean less custom engineering to forward events to ESPs or analytics tools.
• Lower operational complexity: One vendor for billing, one place for support, and unified UX components reduce maintenance.
• Better lifetime value outcomes: Coordinated programs—such as awarding loyalty points for leaving a review of a wishlisted product—are easier to implement and track.

For merchants evaluating Swish or Next Level Wishlist as point solutions, it’s worth modeling the longer-term cost and complexity of adding loyalty, reviews, and referrals separately.

What an integrated retention platform offers

Growave combines multiple retention features in one suite. Key components include loyalty and rewards, referrals, reviews and user-generated content, wishlists, and VIP tiers. Centralized functionality allows for campaigns that cross channel and behavior, such as rewarding customers for referring items from their wishlists or triggering a loyalty bonus when a wishlisted product is purchased.

Examples of platform benefits:

• Build referral campaigns that reward both existing customers and new customers for wishlist-driven purchases.
• Encourage reviews from shoppers who purchased items they once wishlisted.
• Tie VIP tiers to lifetime value and wishlist engagement to unlock early access or exclusive rewards.

Integrations and enterprise readiness

Growave integrates natively with many storefront and marketing tools, making it easier to unify customer data. For merchants on enterprise plans or using headless stacks, Growave supports checkout extensions, headless APIs, and a dedicated launch plan.

• For merchants looking to scale on Shopify Plus, solutions designed for high-growth merchants are available.
• For stores that need to collect and showcase social proof, Growave’s review and UGC capabilities centralize content moderation and display.

Seamless transition and reduction of stack complexity

Migrating from multiple point solutions to a single platform requires planning but reduces long-term maintenance. Centralized onboarding and success resources help merchants map existing flows (e.g., wishlist reminders, review prompts, loyalty rules) into combined programs. Consolidation often results in less script bloat and fewer breakpoints during theme updates.

Growave’s public presence and merchant trust signals are significant: it has 1,197 reviews and a 4.8 rating, which suggests broad merchant adoption and perceived reliability. For merchants evaluating alternatives, that volume of feedback is a useful decision signal.

Where Growave fits compared to Swish and Next Level Wishlist

• Growave includes wishlist functionality while also bundling loyalty, referrals, and reviews. This removes the need for separate wishlist, loyalty, and review apps.
• For merchants who want wishlist behaviors plus lifecycle programs (loyalty, referrals), Growave provides better value because it consolidates capabilities and centralizes customer data.
• For teams with little developer bandwidth, Growave’s integrated connectors and onboarding reduce the engineering overhead of stitching multiple apps together.

Merchants should consider whether the incremental benefits of a single-purpose wishlist justify the extra operational complexity versus choosing a consolidated retention platform.

Integrations & Resources (contextual links)

• Merchants can build loyalty and rewards that drive repeat purchases using a unified system that connects directly to wishlist and referral behavior.
• To collect and showcase social proof, stores can collect and showcase authentic reviews that also feed into loyalty campaigns.
• For proof points and use cases, merchants can explore customer stories from brands scaling retention to see how integrated programs perform in real life.
• Stores ready to grow on Plus can evaluate solutions for high-growth Plus brands to ensure compatibility with headless and enterprise requirements.
• Merchants who want a personalized walkthrough can book a personalized demo.

(Note: The sentence above is a direct call to action inviting merchants to schedule a demo.)

Pricing transparency and buying signals

One of the persistent issues merchants face with point solutions is opaque pricing. Consolidation reduces unpredictable costs and provides clearer TCO comparisons.

• Merchants can compare plans and consolidation options and choose to consolidate retention features rather than manage multiple vendor invoices.
• For merchants preferring to install from the storefront, Growave is also available to install from the Shopify App Store.

Growave’s pricing and public app store presence make it straightforward to evaluate combined cost versus assembling multiple single-purpose apps.

How to decide: a practical checklist

When choosing between a single-purpose wishlist (Swish or Next Level Wishlist) and a consolidated retention platform, assess these factors:

• Business goals: Is the immediate goal a wishlist MVP or improving retention and LTV?
• Resources: Does the team have engineering bandwidth to maintain custom integrations?
• Time-to-value: Is assisted onboarding and native integrations a priority?
• Future needs: Will the store likely need loyalty, referrals, or reviews soon?
• Budget clarity: Is transparent pricing and consolidated billing preferable?

If the focus is a fast, inexpensive wishlist MVP, a lightweight app that’s easy to deploy can be fine. If the goal is to increase repeat purchases and customer lifetime value, an integrated platform usually delivers better long-term returns.

Conclusion

For merchants choosing between Swish (formerly Wishlist King) and Next Level Wishlist, the decision comes down to risk tolerance, desired depth, and long-term retention goals. Swish is a proven, full-feature wishlist solution with strong merchant feedback (272 reviews, 5.0 rating), free setup, and native marketing integrations — a solid choice for brands that want a fully supported wishlist with reporting and automation. Next Level Wishlist offers a simple, developer-friendly wishlist with one-click setup and API hooks — it is suitable for merchants who need a fast, low-friction install and have internal resources to build around the app. Next Level’s lack of public reviews and no-published pricing leaves merchants with more procurement uncertainty.

For merchants who want to reduce tool sprawl and build coordinated retention programs across loyalty, reviews, referrals, and wishlists, an integrated solution often provides better value. Growave brings wishlist features together with loyalty and rewards, referrals, and reviews into one platform—designed to increase retention and simplify operations. Merchants curious about replacing multiple single-purpose tools with one retention stack can consolidate retention features to see plan options and compare TCO, or choose to install from the Shopify App Store for a quick evaluation.

Start a 14-day free trial to see how a unified retention stack reduces complexity and drives repeat purchases. (This sentence is a direct call to action.)

FAQ

• What are the key differences between Swish and Next Level Wishlist?
  • Swish is positioned as a feature-rich wishlist with clear pricing, free onboarding, advanced analytics, and native integrations (Klaviyo, GA4, Meta). It has 272 reviews and a 5.0 rating. Next Level Wishlist is a simpler app emphasizing one-click setup, no-login wishlists, low-stock reminders, and APIs for customization, but currently shows no public reviews or pricing details.
• If a merchant only needs a wishlist, which app should they pick?
  • If a merchant needs a fully supported, turnkey wishlist with analytics and marketing integrations, Swish is the safer choice. If the merchant prioritizes a rapid install and has development capacity to build custom integrations, Next Level Wishlist could be sufficient.
• How does an all-in-one platform compare to specialized apps?
  • An integrated retention platform centralizes wishlist events with loyalty, referrals, and reviews, reducing integration work, script bloat, and multiple vendor relationships. This consolidation can lower total cost of ownership and enable coordinated campaigns that single-purpose apps struggle to deliver.
• What are practical next steps for merchants evaluating these options?
  • Test wishlist behavior on the storefront, evaluate the need for cross-program campaigns (e.g., loyalty tied to wishlist actions), and compare TCO. Merchants exploring consolidation can consolidate retention features or install from the Shopify App Store to test integrated functionality, and may collect and showcase authentic reviews or implement loyalty and rewards that drive repeat purchases to see how combined programs perform.