Shopify subscription apps: Seal Subscriptions vs Appstle Subscriptions
There are dozens of subscription apps in the Shopify app store, and sometimes the users can have a hard time selecting one. Two of the most popular ones are Seal Subscriptions and Appstle. In this article, we will first talk about the good features that subscription apps should have, then we will compare the two and show you the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are many factors to consider when picking the right app such as the features, integration with other apps, and the pricing model.
What exactly to look for in a subscription app?
You should always look for that a subscription app is good to use not only from your side, as a merchant, but should also offer great interaction for customers. The app should be easy to set up and should have a low learning curve. It's always good to check if an app has tutorial videos on how to do certain things and enable certain settings. We will now look at some of the basic features that every subscription app should have.
Different types of subscriptions
The most popular and used subscriptions are auto-charging subscriptions. These subscriptions are the ones that automatically charge your customer that is subscribed to certain products. However, if a subscription service also offers different types of subscriptions, such as recurring invoices, it means they considered also others scenarios. Recurring invoices are the ones where your customer does not get charged automatically. However, for auto-charging subscriptions you are required to use one of the supported Shopify payment gateways, so if you don't have any of these, you can always use recurring invoices which work with every payment gateway!
Customization
While it's great if the functionality of an app is to your liking and it works like you want it to work, it's also important for the subscription widget to stand out to customers and to fit with your website. It's always a big plus if a subscription app offers a variety of customization options for you to change the way you like!
Flexibility when creating subscription rules
There are many possibilities when creating subscription rules, and the more the app offers to you, the more different subscription rules will you be able to create that will be to your liking! Changing the delivery interval, setting up all sorts of different requirements, setting discounts, and automatically changing discounts on certain intervals are all great options that can help you build different subscription rules for your products.
Automations
I'm sure we all love automatization in our daily lives. By having the option to automate all sorts of functionalities, we can spare a lot of time doing something every few days or weeks. That is also possible with subscriptions in Shopify. Some subscription apps such as Seal Subscriptions offer automations like loyalty, product swaps, and automated interval changes, which we will talk more about later.
Pricing model
And of course, a big factor to always consider for your business is the pricing model of the app. It's always important to calculate how much will you invest into a certain app through the future weeks or months and if it's actually worth spending your money on it. You should always first try the free trial, if the app offers one, and decide for yourself if the app is something you would be comfortable with. Also, look at the transaction fees of the app, Seal Subscription offers 0% transaction fees in the subscription app market and is one of a kind that does that.
Now that you know the general things to look for in the subscription app, let's move to comparing Seal Subscriptions with Appstle.
Main difference between Seal Subscriptions and Appstle
Let's first briefly describe both apps and their main features.
Seal Subscriptions
Seal Subscriptions is a very popular app that has recently seen a rapid growth. It provides many different features that you can try and doesn't miss on anything. From a simple interface which you can get the feel of it relatively quickly, to a variety of possible settings, this app offers a lot. But that is not even the biggest advantage, the biggest thing that make this app stand out from the rest is the fact that it has 0% transaction fees on all subscriptions. That's right, even with the free plan, Seal Subscriptions doesn't take anything! It also has great integration support with other apps such as Bundler - Product Bundles, where you can combine subscriptions with bundles. You can read more about bundling apps on this article.
Appstle Subscriptions
Appstle is also a big name in the subscription app market. It offers useful functionalities such as bundling, flexible billing, loyalty features, a build-a-box option, and more. Just like Seal Subscriptions, it shares similar functionalities such as auto-charging subscriptions, customizable customer portal, and automations. Also like Seal Subscriptions, it has a 0% transaction fee on all plans, however, it offers fewer plans than Seal, which could lead to fewer flexibility options when selecting the plan.
Below we can see a price comparison between Seal Subscriptions and Appstle Subscriptions:
| Fees | Seal Subscriptions | Appstle Subscriptions |
| Subscription limit for free plan | 150 subscriptions on FREE plan | Only up to $500 subscription revenue |
| Cheapest plan | $4.95 | $10 |
| Plans available | 5 | 7 |
Let's now further dive into each app separately, look at the key functionalities, and show you the detailed pricing plan that each app offers.
Seal Subscriptions
Pricing Model
The biggest advantage of Seal Subscriptions is its most definitely its pricing model. As mention it has 0% transaction fee. While Appstle also does have that and has some affordable plans, it's always good to look at all the features that you get in each plan. Seal Subscriptions offers a high flexibility when picking a plan. The free plan offers up to 150 subscriptions and you will quickly see if you need more or not. The free plan also includes variety of features such as subscription discounts, inventory forecast, custom email HTML template, automated product swaps, option for app integrations, multilanguage support and an astonishing support team that will help you at any time!
The paid plans offer more features and are very affordable. For example, the $4.95 supersale plan gives you access to global statistics insight, API & webhooks and options to enable reminder about upcoming billings. The $7.95 plan allows you to to manage payment calendar, to manage cancellation flow and automated interval changes. And of course, the main thing why one would want to upgrade to a higher plan is the number of maximum subscriptions that gets increased with each plan. You can view all of the plans by going to this link.
Seal can also offer you a custom enterprise plan if you want to.
Features
Auto-charging subscriptions
As already mentioned, auto-charging subscriptions are the most popular type of subscriptions that exist. Seal offers many different functionalities that you can enable when creating a subscription rule. You can do the following with auto-charging subscriptions in Seal:
- Pick an option to apply a subscription rule to specific products or to all products in your store,
- Create as many selling plans as you want in one subscription rule, selling plans can differ by things like delivery interval, requirements and discount,
- Pre-paid selling plan, which means that the customer will pay in advance for more than just one delivery,
- Set up requirements, which means that you can pick a minimum and maximum number of required payments before a customer can cancel their subscription,
- Set up a discount with a subscription,
- Set an automatic discount modification that can change the discount after a specific number of payments.
Customization options
Seal Subscriptions offers many options for you to customize the widget the way you like it. Simple options include changing the colors of the widget such as the colors of the buttons, text colors, price colors etc.. However if you have some CSS knowledge you can also use it to extend the customization of your widget even further.
You can freely customize the following:
- Subscription widget (text colors, interval selector colors),
- Auto-charging widget (price colors, savings badge colors, subscription info colors, etc…),
- Recurring invoices widget (button colors),
- Subscribe now button,
- Customer portal (button colors, text colors, date and time picker colors, loyalty discounts colors, etc…),
If you would like to experiment with CSS, you can do that by going to Seal Subscriptions → Settings → General Settings → Custom CSS for widget & custom CSS for customer portal, however keep in mind that this requires CSS knowledge and you should only use this function if you know what you are doing!
Customer portal
It is very important that the customers have a nice interaction with the app where they can clearly see all of their subscriptions and can manage them. Seal Subscriptions offers a very friendly customer portal that is very simple to use. Customers can edit, pause, cancel, or reactivate their subscriptions.
Theres also a variety of settings for customer portal that you can play around with such as:
- Enabling and disabling what the customers can change about their subscriptions, such as changing product quantity, adding/removing products, changing the subscription interval, pausing and cancelling their subscriptions, and more!,
- Enabling different options on how the customers will be able to access their customer portal,
- Customization of customer portal.
Automations
I'm sure we all love automation that can help automate many processes in the subscription management process. Seal Subscriptions offers three different automation that you can use for your store:
- Loyalty, which gives you an option to give discounts to your loyal subscribers. You can make it so that an additional discount is applied on a certain renewal. This feature works on auto-charging subscriptions only,
- Product swaps, which gives you an option to swap products at certain intervals. This gives you more control over products in subscriptions and allows you to create subscription logic that will be interesting to your customers,
- Automated interval changes, which allows you to automatically change intervals in your subscriptions. This means you can offer free subscriptions or change intervals for subscriptions, which can be great for new customers.
All automation settings are available at Seal Subscriptions → Automations
Analytics
Another setting that can help you understand your subscriptions and customers overall are statistics and analytics that you can constantly check to see useful stats such as churn rate, growth rate, retention rate and inventory forecast. Seal has a very well-designed analytics window that you can definitely use to further utilize your store!
To see analytics you can go to Seal Subscriptions → Analytics
Integrations
Seal Subscriptions has seen many support for different app integrations in the past and more apps are still getting the support for integration with Seal Subscriptions. Popular apps that Seal can integrate with include PageFly and GemPages page builders, which are the biggest on the market and there's also support for Bundler - Product bundles, where you can further extend subscriptions to combine them with bundles which can even further motivate your customers to subscribe to your products!
Appstle Subscriptions
Pricing Model
While the pricing model is still affordable, the cheaper plans don't nearly offer as much as Seal Subscriptions does. In the free plan, Seal Subscriptions limits you to maximum of 150 subscriptions, but Appstle limits you to monthly subscription revenue instead, which can unexpectedly reach it's limits. For the free plan for example, you can have up to $500 of subscription revenue. Free plan also includes subscriber customer portal, pay as you go & prepaid subscription plans and customer subscription management.
Appstle subscriptions has 4 paid plans. With each of them you can get more subscription revenue, for example the starter plan that is $10 per month plan gives you up to $5000 subscription revenue, the business plan that is $30 per month gives you up to $30,000 monthly revenue and so on. But as said, monthly revenue can be less predictable than simply telling you how many maximum subscriptions can you have in each plan, which is exactly what Seal does. Just like Seal, Appstle also offers you a custom enterprise plan.
Features
Appstle has many features just like Seal Subscriptions. Popular features include Bundling, where you can combine subscriptions with bundles, quick checkout links, that allow you to send your customers straight to checkout with subscription product checkout links, build a box option that makes subscribing easy with a customizable build-a-box option, customizable customer portal, which gives your customers easier interaction with their subscriptions and automations, where you can make bulk changes to your subscriptions at any time.
Appstle also offers integrations with many apps such as Bundler (just like Seal), Zapier, PageFly, Gorgias and more. They also offer you a nice overlook of your statistics with analytics with growth focused metrics. You can forecast upcoming orders, or dive into customer LTV data.
So as you can see majority of the features that Appstle offers are relatively the same as Seal Subscriptions.
Making the right choice
Picking up the right subscription app is very important, since it can heavily improve your business model and increase your sales. Both Seal Subscriptions and Appstle are great and popular picks for majority of merchants. If you try one and change your mind, both apps also have a very simple way to import your subscriptions from one app to another.
If you are looking for an app that can provide you better flexibility with more options, I recommend Seal Subscriptions.
This way, your store will have the option to offer you products with subscription options and you will see the positive results for better customer experience really quickly.
We hope this article helped you to further explore subscription management in Shopify!
Happy subscription management! 🛒