Judge.me vs Loox Pricing: Which Shopify App to Pay For

The two apps meter opposite things, and that is the whole decision. Loox prices on how many orders your store does, so your bill rises as the store grows whether or not you collect a single extra review. Judge.me has no order tier at all: it is free, or it is $15 a month. If you are picking on cost, the question is not which app is cheaper today, it is how many orders a month you will be doing in a year.

The second fact surprises most people shopping this pair. On Judge.me's Shopify App Store listing, read September 3, 2026, the forever free plan includes "unlimited visual reviews (photos/videos)." On Loox's own pricing page, read the same day, video reviews start on the Convert plan at $49.99 a month. So the sentence "I want video reviews on my product pages" costs nothing on one app and $49.99 a month on the other.

Judge.me vs Loox: the short version

Prices come from each vendor rather than from roundups. Loox from its own pricing page, Judge.me from its Shopify App Store listing after judge.me/pricing returned a 403 to our fetch. Both read September 3, 2026. Re-check them before you commit, because app pricing in this category moves.

How much does Loox cost?

Read that middle column carefully, because it is where the money is. The step from Beginner to Convert is 3.3 times the price, and it is triggered by two completely different things: hitting 500 orders in a month, or wanting a single video review. A store doing 520 orders a month of a functional product with no interest in video is paying $49.99 for a plan whose headline features it will not use.

One caveat we could not resolve from the page itself: Loox's pricing page does not explain how orders are counted or what happens when you exceed the Beginner limit. Whether that is a hard stop, a prompt to upgrade or an automatic tier change matters if your order volume is seasonal, and it is worth asking support directly before you pick the entry plan.

How much does Judge.me cost?

Two plans, and the free one is not a trial.

Worth correcting a claim that appears in several comparison articles: they say video reviews are a paid feature on Judge.me and that referrals require a separate app. Neither matches the listing as it reads today, which puts unlimited visual reviews on the free plan and lists coupons and referrals under Awesome. That is the risk of reading this pair through third party roundups written a year ago. Check the listing yourself; it takes thirty seconds.

Which is cheaper at your order volume?

Because one app meters orders and the other does not, the comparison resolves into a simple table rather than an argument.

On pure cost this is not close, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest in the other direction. So the real question is what Loox is charging for, and it is a fair answer.

What Loox is actually selling

Loox is not trying to be a cheaper review database. It is a visual merchandising product that happens to store reviews. The photo gallery, the smart visual sorting that pushes the strongest images up, the review highlights, the referral loop where a customer who left a review gets a discount code to share: those are conversion mechanics, not review management. In categories where the product is bought with the eyes, fashion, beauty, jewelry, home decor, food, a wall of real customer photos does measurable work that a five star average does not.

Judge.me's widget is deliberately light and neutral. That is a strength if you care about page speed and want the reviews to look like your theme rather than like an app. It is a weakness if you wanted the app to do the merchandising for you, because it will not.

There is a second-order argument for photo reviews that neither vendor makes loudly enough. The images customers submit are the cheapest ad creative a store will ever get, and they outperform studio shots in paid social precisely because they look unstaged. If you are already collecting them, it is worth looking at what creative your competitors are currently running before you commission another product shoot, because in most categories the answer is customer photos. That use case alone can justify the Loox premium for a brand spending on Meta.

Which should you pay for?

Three questions, in order.

Do you sell a product people buy with their eyes? If a customer photo is genuinely more persuasive than a description, Loox Convert at $49.99 is defensible. If you sell supplements, tools, software, parts or anything where the spec sheet closes the sale, it is $600 a year for presentation you do not need.

What is your order volume, and where will it be in twelve months? Loox's ladder charges you for growth. Judge.me's does not. A store planning to triple should price the app it will need at the end of that, not the start.

Do you actually need to pay anything yet? Judge.me's free plan collects unlimited reviews including video and displays them with rich snippets. For a store under a hundred orders a month, spending on a review app before you have reviews to display is out of sequence.

The thing neither app does

Both are product review apps. They attach star ratings and comments to a SKU, which is exactly what a product page needs and exactly what a shopper scrolling to the reviews section is looking for. That is a different asset from a testimonial.

A product review says the shirt fit as expected. A testimonial says who the customer is, what problem they had, what changed, and it carries a name, a face and recorded permission to publish it. The first sells the product. The second sells the brand, and it belongs on your homepage, your about page and your wholesale or subscription landing pages, none of which have a SKU for a review app to attach to. Stores that grow past a single product line usually end up running both: a review app on product pages, and something that collects testimonials for everywhere else. The Shopify-specific version of that split is on Shopify testimonials.

There is also a display problem that arrives later. Once you have reviews in Judge.me, Google reviews on your Business Profile and a folder of customer emails nobody has ever published, the constraint stops being collection and becomes knowing what you hold and where it appears. That is what testimonial management software is for, and if the immediate need is simply putting the proof you already have onto your own pages without paying per widget view, a review widget does that on its own.

Whichever you pick, re-read both pricing pages before you install. Loox publishes its ladder openly, Judge.me publishes on its App Store listing, and the numbers above are dated because at least one of them will have changed by the time you read this.

Update, September 6, 2026. Loox's plan structure has moved since this comparison was written. Its Shopify App Store listing now shows a Free tier covering up to 500 orders a month, and describes the $49.99 Convert plan as "300 orders included in base price + $50 per additional 300 orders," which its own pricing page does not spell out in the plan comparison table. That overage changes the arithmetic above once a store passes 600 orders a month. The current numbers, and the same order-by-order comparison against the other end of this market, are in Loox vs Okendo pricing.