Shopify apps: Best subscription app for Shopify in 2024

Subscription apps have always been in demand as one of the most looked-up and searched types of apps in Shopify. Setting up subscriptions can significantly improve your business model and increasingly grow your business. Most subscriptions work in a way that a customer simply subscribes to a certain product, picks a selling plan (such as the delivery interval to which they want to receive the product) and that's it! Now they will automatically get charged at each renewal period until they either cancel or pause their subscription. If subscriptions didn't exist, they would have to manually order a product each week or month, which can be quite bothersome for some. So subscriptions are a very useful feature to add to your store that will make it easier for you to keep a healthier relationship between a customer and product and increase the revenue of your business!

However picking which subscription app can be hard, especially if you are new to the e-commerce business. In this article, we will first explain to you the key features that a good subscription app should have and then we will show you the top 5 most popular subscription apps in the Shopify app store and tell you exactly why Seal Subscriptions simply is the best out of them all.

What should a good subscription app have?

Let's first look at some of the important features of majority subscription apps, so you will get an idea of the things that you can do with them. You might know in general how subscriptions work and its basic features, but it's good to know if there is anything else that you can do with them that you might not know it's possible or just didn't thought of it.

Auto-charging subscriptions

Of course, the main type of subscription is the kind where the customer gets charged automatically in certain periods. You mostly would want to create subscription rules for this type of subscription as the main reason why someone would want subscriptions is to automate the whole process and make it easier. Be aware though that Shopify does have a condition for auto-charging subscriptions. To set up auto-charging subscriptions in your shop you need one of the following supported payment gateways: Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, Bankful, PayPal Express or Authorize.net.

If there is any particular reason why you can't have auto-charging subscriptions, some apps such as Seal also offer you recurring invoices, which are subscriptions where the customer does not get charged automatically. This method works with any payment gateway.

Selling plans

When creating subscription rules you need to decide which products in your store will have a subscription option. And then you will want to set up different options that customer can select in the subscription widget such as delivery interval. Those options are called selling plans. Great subscription app should offer you many different options that you can set up for selling plans. So flexibility is important. A popular option are also prepaid selling plans where customer has to pay in advance for more than just one delivery.

Customer portal

The important feature is a customer portal. Customer portal is a place where your customers go to view and manage all of their subscriptions. You probably don't want to keep it as it is by default and would perhaps want to limit some things to customers such as ability to add/remove products from subscriptions, allowing to add additional notes to subscriptions, preventing customers to add out of stock products & more!

Customer portal can be heavily customized with Seal so you can really set it up the way you think it's the best for your business!

Automations

Instead of just auto-charging subscriptions it's also good if you can also automate other processes. Adding additional discounts to your loyal subscribers and swaping products during specific renewals are all great features that you could consider for your store!

Cancellation Flow

Your customers might often cancel their subscriptions for any reason, however it would be good if you knew exactly why did someone cancel. It's good if a subscription service provides you additional settings where you can add additional cancellation reasons where customers that cancel can select them. A very useful feature is also to enable notes for customers so that they can write their own reasons for canceling. This way you will know exactly what you should improve in your store!

Free shipping

You might want to offer your customers the functionality to give them free shipping on their subscriptions. Some apps include features that can enable you such as delivery profiles, where you can set up different delivery zones and rates for specific countries or worldwide.

Customization

Now that we talked about the functionalities it's also important how everything looks not only to you as a merchant, but also to your customers. You would want the customer portal and subscription widget to fit with your site and so that it brings attention to your customers. Good subscription apps will offer you a way to customize basically everything in any way you want it!

Top 5 Subscription apps on the Shopify apps store

1. Seal Subscriptions (best choice!)

The best pick out there is without question Seal Subscriptions. With astonishing features, constant updates, and outstanding support team they provide you everything you would want to start the subscription business in your Shopify store. All the features mentioned above when we talked about best features for subscriptions apps are available in Seal Subscriptions plus more! However that is not even a biggest advantage…Seal Subscriptions gives you 0% transactions for ALL subscriptions in your store! And that not only comes with a paid plan but also a FREE plan. Yes, you heard it right, with a free plan in Seal Subscriptions, you can have up to 150 subscriptions in your store, subscription discounts, inventory forecast, automated product swaps, accessible support team, and more!

So you can try the free plan and get a feeling of the app and then later decide if you would like to upgrade or not! Seal also has many integrations with other popular Shopify apps such as PageFly and GemPages which are the two of the most popular page building apps on the market, and it also has integration with Bundler - Product Bundles, which can take subscriptions in your store to next level. You can offer your subscriptions by setting up bundles where you can combine certain products together and then offer the subscription option within those bundles. You can read more about bundles in our other article by clicking here.

Key features of Seal Subscriptions app:

Sell classic & prepaid subscriptions, offer subscription boxes with discounts and more,
Automatic price propagation so price changes are automatically applied to subscriptions,
A bunch of options for setting up selling plans in subscriptions such as:
- Prepaid selling plans allow your customers to pay in advance for more than just one delivery,
- Set different delivery intervals that customers can pick from such as weekly, bi-weekly, monthly etc…
- Set requirements where customers will have to pay a certain number of payments before they can cancel the subscription or set up maximum number of payments where the subscription gets cancelled automatically,
- Set different discounts such as fixed amount discount, percentage discount or fixed product price,
- Automatic discount modification where the discount gets automatically changed after specific number of payments.
A lot of customization options for subscription widget and customer portal. Also support for CSS where you can completely change the looks the way you want it,
Great integration support with other apps such as PageFly, GemPages and Bundler,
Automations options such as loyalty discounts, product swaps and automated interval changes,
Analytics page to see the churn rate, growth rate, retention rate, inventory forecast and more,
Great cancellation flow management,
Delivery profiles to set custom shipping for subscriptions depending on the country,
Notifications & emails management and customization,
Great support team.

Pricing plans of Seal Subscriptions app:

FREE FOR LIFE plan: Up to 150 subscriptions, multi-language support, product swaps, tiered discounts and more,
Supersale plan for $4.95 per month: Up to 750 subscriptions, discount on product swaps, subscription login form, reminders, global statistics insight, API & webhooks, and more,
Leader plan (best value!) for $49.99 per month: Up to 55000 total subscriptions, custom email domain, loyalty discounts, out-of-stock alerts, priority support, and more,
Mega star plan for $149 per month: Up to 150000 total subscriptions, dedicated success manager, robust API & webhooks, delivery profiles, and more,
Option for custom enterprise plan

The main difference between different plans is basically the number of total subscriptions that you can have in your store and is probably the main reason why you would want to upgrade. However, it's also good to know all the features that come together with each plan.

Seal Subscriptions offers everything that you will ever need for setting subscriptions in your Shopify. And if the feature doesn't yet exist that you have in mind, the team probably has it on the feature requests already since they are constantly updating the app with the features merchants just like you want ;)

For more information on how to view and manage subscription in Seal Subscriptions you can check out our other article by clicking on this link that will explain to you in-detail on how you can manage subscriptions in your store and guide your through steps to further help you easier management in your store!

2. Shopify Subscriptions

Shopify Subscriptions is an official app by Shopify itself. While it is fine and offers basic features it does lack some things that Seal Subscriptions has. The functonalities that you can do with it is to offer auto-billed subscriptions with discounts, allowing your customers to cancel, skip or pause subscriptions and set up different delivery intervals. It is mostly a beginner friendly app for everyone that would like to see a quick overlook of the basic features that you can do with subscriptions in Shopify.

Key features of Shopify Subscriptions:

Option to set different selling plans for auto-billing subscriptions such as weekly, monthly or yearly,
Allowing customers to manage basic subscriptions features,
Customizable email templates for order confirmations and payment reminders,
Easy transfer options to transfer existing subscription contracts to Shopify Subscriptions.

3. Skio Subscriptions

Another option are Skio Subscriptions. While they are one of the most expensive options they do offer functionalities such as performance overview, cohort retention, automation options such as reducing churn with 'surprise & delight' option where you can save subscribers by offering them free gifts, build-a-box option that allows customers to handpick products to bundle (similar to how Seal Subscriptions works with Bundler), volume discounts, tiered discounts and more. They also provide skioSMS option where you can put customers in control of their orders via SMS and maximize efficiency with simplified subscription management that way. Like Seal Subscriptions, Skio also has other functionalities such as customer portal where customers can get a nice overview of their subscriptions. However keep in mind that they do not offer a free plan and they are very expensive. We will mention that below where you can see the pricing plans of it.

Key features of Skio Subscriptions:

Reducing customer tickets with passwordless login,
Reducing churn with a conditional cancel flow,
A lot of subscription types such as access subscriptions, custom subscriptions, donations, memberships etc…
Flexible customer portal,
Automation options like surprise & delight, build-a-box and volume discounts.

Pricing plans of Skio Subscriptions:

Dog plan for $499 per month: includes everything that Skio offers
Cat plan: custom plan where you can design a custom package for your business.

4. Recharge Subscriptions

Recharge subscriptions are another popular name in the subscription market. While they have relatively similar features as Seal Subscriptions, they are on the expensive side. They charge 1.25% + 19 cents per transaction which can make a huge difference if you look at the whole image. Popular features of Recharge include direct checkout links, discount code dashboard, using and managing discount codes that can be used in one-time purchases and subscription products. You can also make gifts which allows your customers to gift their skipped shipment as a one-time order to others. Like Seal Subscriptions, Recharge offers a combination of subscriptions with bundles.

Keep in mind that a lot of features mentioned above are locked to Recharge's pro plan.

For more detailed comparison between Seal Subscriptions and Recharge check out this article where we look at the feature comparison and cost comparison between the two. Seal Subscriptions also has ability where you can transfer existing subscriptions from Recharge to Seal very easily :)

Key features of Recharge:

Discount codes to use in variety of scenarios,
Ability to allow your customers to gift their skipped shipment and gifting subscriptions to others,
Ability to use subscriptions with bundles,
Option to decrease the subscriber churn where you can list a customized cancellation options and learn more about your customers (similar to how Cancellation Flow is in Seal Subscriptions),

Pricing plans of Recharge:

Standard plan for $99 per month: includes subscriptions, subscription management tools, customer portal, analytics dashboard, churn prevention tools and more,
Pro plan for $499 per month: includes bundles, flows, enhanced analytics, gift subscriptions and more

However, keep in mind that both plans listed above include a transaction fee of 1.25% + 19 cents per transaction.

5. Bold subscriptions

Another service that you might've heard before are Bold Subscriptions. Just like other subscription apps like Seal, Bold also offers functionalities that help you set up subscriptions in your store. You can integrate your existing tools with their features due to Bold's open architecture. They also have a customizable customer portal where customers can manage their subscriptions, skip or pause orders, edit preferences, reschedule deliveries and swap products. Just like everywhere you can also create prepaid and ongoing pay-as-you-go subscriptions. You also have ability to manage cancellation flows and automatic management.

Key features of Bold Subscriptions:

Prepaid and pay-as-you-go subscriptions,
Customer portal with passwordless login available,
Manage cancellation flows,
Integration support with existing tools.

Pricing plans of Bold Subscriptions:

Core - Unlimited plan for $49.99 per month that includes subscriptions, monthly and annual billing, dunning, reporting, access to APIs and more. Keep in mind that bold also has a transaction fee of 1% of orders containing subscription products.

If you considered using Bold, but want to switch to Seal Subscriptions, Seal Subscriptions has an easy way to migrate your subscriptions from Bold to Seal :)

Conclusion

Starting a subscription service in your store can be crucial for your business so make sure you pick the app that offers the features you want for your store. As you can see from the above comparison, if we take a look at the price + feature ratio in all apps, Seal Subscriptions offers the most to merchants and customers. Also, it offers so much more than just the things we listed in this article, such as importing subscriptions from other apps. So it really is an affordable app that will help you in many ways.

We hope this article helps you discover what you need for your store and we wish you further growth for your business :)

Happy subscription management! 🛒