Eleven of these twenty-two tools have no price you can read off the page. Three of those eleven sit in the top six: Bloomreach, Attentive and Constructor. Klaviyo and Triple Whale keep their paid tiers behind an interactive calculator, and Rep AI's own pricing page renders its numbers as a chart you can't read. None of that opacity buys you anything. You're adding one capability to a store that already works. Recover more carts, deflect the "where is my order" tickets, fix on-site search, mass-produce product copy, clean up product photos. The deepest tool is rarely the right answer to any of that. The one that quotes you a predictable number usually is.

Now the meter. Nearly every tool here that does publish a figure attaches your bill to something that grows when your store grows: searches, replies, resolved tickets, active profiles, visitors, products, even gross merchandise value. Your bill is a moving target by design.

Does that actually decide anything? Look at the two lowest-rated products on this list. Manychat sits at 2.1/5 across 301 reviews. Photoroom, 2.2/5 across 259. Billing draws the loudest complaints in both, though reviewers also report failed automations at Manychat and crashes and slipping output quality at Photoroom.

So your practical shortlist is shorter than twenty-two. Seven tools have a permanent free plan: Algolia, Klaviyo, Rebuy Engine, Triple Whale, Describely, Alhena AI and Manychat. Two more start low enough to test on a real store without booking a meeting. Zipchat AI opens at $49 a month and Octane AI at $50.

Here is the short version, by the job you came for:

Carts and average order value: Rebuy Engine, rank 9.
"Where is my order" deflection: Zipchat AI, rank 4.
On-site search: Algolia, rank 1.
Product copy: Describely, rank 20.
Product photos: Photoroom, rank 13, with a warning attached.

Algolia takes the top spot, and its free tier is one of the few here you can run a real store on. Rank is only half the story, though. What decides whether a tool still fits you next year sits in one column below.

The whole list, and the column to read first

That column is Metered by. It decides whether this purchase still feels comfortable at triple the traffic, and a dash means the figure isn't established, so carry that cell into the demo as a question.

Tool	Entry price	Metered by	Permanent free plan	How you buy	Platforms
1. Algolia	Free, then $0.50 per 1K search requests	Search requests and records	Yes	Self-serve; Elevate by contract	Most platforms
2. Bloomreach	-	Modules plus usage	No	Demo, annual contract	Shopify; 175+ connectors via Loomi Connect
3. Attentive	-	List size and messages sent	No	Demo	Shopify; 100+ integrations
4. Zipchat AI	$49/mo	Replies	No, 7-day trial	Self-serve	Shopify plus Woo, BigCommerce, Magento, Wix
5. Klaviyo	Free; paid via calculator	Active profiles	Yes	Self-serve	Most platforms
6. Constructor	-	-	No	Demo plus 10-14 business day evaluation	Shopify, commercetools, Salesforce
7. Gorgias	-	Tickets, plus about $0.90 per resolved AI interaction	No	-	Shopify plus Woo, BigCommerce, Magento
8. Rep AI	$104/mo; free to install at 100 visitors	Visitors, $12 per 1,000 in overage	No, free to install at 100 visitors a month	Self-serve, 14-day trial	Shopify first, also Woo
9. Rebuy Engine	Free, then $25/mo per package	Monthly order volume	Yes	Self-serve	Shopify only
10. Triple Whale	Free; paid by calculator	Annual gross merchandise value	Yes	Self-serve; Enterprise by sales	Shopify plus ad platforms
11. Siena AI	$750/mo plus $0.90/ticket	Automated tickets	No	Sales	Shopify plus helpdesks
12. Fast Simon	-	-	No	Demo	Shopify plus Woo, BigCommerce, Wix
13. Photoroom	-	AI credits and exports	No, trial only	Self-serve	Developer tooling; Shopify from Max up
14. Lily AI	-	Catalog size, use case, markets	No	Demo or feed audit	Shopify, Google Merchant Center
15. Klevu	-	-	No	Custom quote	Most platforms
16. Nosto	-	-	No	Demo, no trial	Most platforms
17. Syte	-	-	No	Demo	Enterprise stacks only
18. Octane AI	$50/mo	Credits	No, 14-day trial	Self-serve	Shopify only
19. Claid AI	-	-	-	-	Developer only
20. Describely	Free, then $28/mo or $0.75 per product	Products and enrichment credits	Yes	Self-serve	Shopify only
21. Alhena AI	Free, then $199/mo billed annually	Conversations, $1.20 per overage credit	Yes	Self-serve	Helpdesks; Shopify claimed
22. Manychat	Free, then $14/mo; AI add-on $29/mo	Active contacts	Yes	Self-serve	No native Shopify connector

What are those ratings actually resting on?

Prices you can compare across that table. Review counts you cannot, and the gap there is bigger than it looks. Attentive's 4.5/5 rests on more than 1,200 reviews and Rebuy's 4.7/5 on 743. Describely's perfect 5.0/5 rests on three. Klevu's Shopify score comes from 13 reviews, its G2 profile from 2. Lily AI has 4. Claid 18, Zipchat 26, Siena 28. The truth is, a high score on thirteen reviews tells you very little.

For three tools here, no independent rating could be found at all: Syte, Octane AI and Alhena AI. A rating you can't find is its own kind of answer, and it deserves the same weight you'd give a missing price. Every tool below carries its review count beside its rating, where one exists. And where a rating is low, read what the complaints are actually about.

Reviewers call Photoroom's background removal "insanely good". The same 259-review pool describes the signup flow as a trap designed to trick them into accidental annual subscriptions, with plans and credit renewals hard to manage afterward. At Manychat the automation gets credit and the billing does not. Users there report confusion over what counts as an "active contact", charges continuing after they tried to cancel, and accounts suspended mid-campaign. In this category a lot of the punishment lands on how a vendor charges you, though the products take hits too: failed automations at Manychat, crashes and slipping output quality at Photoroom. Read that before you hand over a card.

The top six

Card still in hand? Then start at the top. These are the broadest platforms here, and the ones most likely to outgrow you. Three of the six will take an hour of your calendar before they name a number: Bloomreach, Attentive and Constructor. The other three let you sign up today.

1. Algolia, the search platform with a free tier you can actually run on

Price: Free, then $0.50 per 1K extra search requests on Grow
Metered by: search requests and records
Free tier: Yes, 10K search requests a month and 50K records
Platforms: most platforms per the vendor, plus ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
Rating: 4.3/5 for ease of use on Capterra from 74 reviews

Algolia is search infrastructure with a retail layer on top: Hybrid Search, AI Ranking, a no-code Merchandising Studio and generative "Ask AI" shopping assistants. The merchandising side was built for retail, not bolted on.

Reviewers keep returning to two things you'll meet on day one. Results arrive near-instantly, and the documentation is clear enough that one of them described it as "explain to me like I'm 5". The company says it serves over 18,000 organizations across 150+ countries, and a Forrester study found $3.1M in net present value over three years for commerce teams. On security it holds ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and ISO/IEC 27017:2015 certification plus SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls), with a public bug-bounty program.

Now the catch, and it's the one that follows you. The meter counts searches, searches climb with your traffic, and that is why Capterra reviewers describe costs as hard to predict at scale. The $10K startup credits expire after one year whether or not you've launched.

The meter isn't the only surprise. Non-technical admins find the dashboard overwhelming, and a catalog past a million stock keeping units brings real setup friction. Grow Plus raises the rate to $1.75 per 1K search requests to unlock AI Synonyms, AI Ranking and Advanced Personalization, and the top Elevate tier drops the transparency for a custom annual contract. Budget for the tier you actually need.

2. Bloomreach, the enterprise stack with a long connector list

Price: - (custom module fee plus usage, annual contract)
Metered by: modules plus usage
Free tier: No
Platforms: 175+ tools via Loomi Connect including Shopify, Snowflake and AWS
Rating: 4.6/5 on G2 from 735 reviews

Algolia starts free. Bloomreach starts with a meeting. Is your stack already sprawling? Then this is the one built to plug into it. Loomi AI reads intent in real time and personalizes against your inventory and margin, then runs autonomous Marketing and Shopping agents across email, text, WhatsApp and ads. Commerce search and A/B testing sit in the same platform.

The company counts 1,400+ brands including Red Bull, Pandora and T-Mobile, and the compliance list runs deep: SOC 2 and SOC 3 certification, ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 compliance, and verification by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Reviewers score quality of support 9.3.

Small stores need not apply. Reviewers describe a steep learning curve, and typical implementations run 3 to 9 months with dedicated specialist staff you'd have to hire or borrow. Third-party sources put the cost above $50k a year. There's no free tier and no published price for you to compare, and no trial is mentioned either. If you're the only marketer at your company, this platform will out-configure you long before it pays you back.

3. Attentive, messaging that reviewers rate 9.1/10 for ease of use

Price: - (usage-based bundles)
Metered by: list size and messages sent
Free tier: No, demo-gated trial
Platforms: 100+ including Shopify, Snowflake, Yotpo and Gorgias
Rating: 4.5/5 on G2 from 1,200+ reviews, ease of use 9.1/10

Luckily, Attentive asks less of you. It runs your SMS (short message service), email, RCS (rich communication services) and push from one place, and the AI arrives in modules that map to jobs you already have: AI Pro for optimization, AI Grow for list growth, AI Journeys for triggered messaging.

What helps, if this is your first messaging tool, is the 9.1/10 ease-of-use score. Reviewers say building campaigns and pop-ups involves no steep learning curve, and that account managers get hands-on with you. The company's own case studies cite 576% email revenue growth at FRYE and 20x return on investment at Steve Madden. It raised a $230 million Series D led by Coatue, per its funding announcement.

The price is the friction. Nothing on the pricing page is a number you can act on, every bundle runs through a sales conversation, and the "free trial" starts with a demo request.

Reviewers also flag audience segmentation as harder than it should be, and reporting as less customizable than they want. The compliance page covers text-marketing law, including a "Litigator Defender" feature, and does not state SOC 2, GDPR or CCPA certification. Budget a call before you get a figure.

4. Zipchat AI, agentic chat with a published price list

Price: $49/mo Starter, $129 Growth, $249 Pro, $499 Scale, Unlimited from $999/mo
Metered by: replies
Free tier: No, 7-day trial
Platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and Wix, plus access by API (application programming interface)
Rating: 4.8/5 on Capterra from 26 reviews

No call needed here. Zipchat is built to act, not only to answer. The agent generates discount codes, pulls order data for "where is my order" questions, processes refunds and recommends products across your site, WhatsApp and Instagram.

The company says 97% of conversations resolve without human escalation, and that 2,500+ e-commerce brands use it, with $1M+ in attributed revenue credited at Burger Motorsports. Capterra reviewers call setup "super easy" and say training took under 15 minutes, which matters when the setup is yours to do. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with residency in the European Union or the United States, and the vendor claims compliance with GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) and the EU AI Act.

But look at what Starter buys: 500 replies a month, roughly 200 conversations. An active store can run through that well before month end, which is why reviewers call the entry tier limiting, and there's no permanent free plan to soften the landing after the 7-day trial.

Reviewers report shallow analytics, occasional misreads of complex questions when your source content is thin, and advanced customization that runs into coding or feature limits. Redaction of personally identifiable information, audit logs and single sign-on are held back for Enterprise. Twenty-six reviews is a modest base for a tool you're letting talk to your customers.

5. Klaviyo, email and text built on your store data

Price: Free; paid tiers priced by active profiles through an interactive calculator
Metered by: active profiles
Free tier: Yes, 250 active profiles, 500 emails a month, $5 mobile-message credit a month
Platforms: 350+ including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento and Wix
Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 539 reviews

Zipchat talks to shoppers on your site. Klaviyo talks to them after they leave: email, text and push sitting on a customer data platform. That's why its abandoned-cart flows get so much credit in reviews: your store data is already there, syncing in real time.

Two AI agents ship inside it. Composer audits your existing flows, segments and forms, then builds a fully branded campaign from one prompt. Customer Agent is claimed to resolve 65% of queries autonomously. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under KVYO on September 20, 2023 at $30 a share, a $9.2B valuation, and reports 205,000+ customers processing an average of 2.5B events a day. Being publicly listed reduces the platform-continuity risk you'd weigh with a smaller vendor.

Then the meter.

The free plan is real but small: 250 active profiles, and the paid tiers are priced by active profiles after that, so ask what makes a profile active before you model the bill. Reviewers complain steadily that pricing escalates fast as your list grows.

You also can't see a paid price without feeding a contact count into a calculator. Beginners describe the platform as overwhelming and intimidating, and reviewers say the interface buries things that should sit front and center. Budget a few evenings before it feels like yours.

6. Constructor, enterprise discovery behind a long evaluation

Price: -
Metered by: -
Free tier: No
Platforms: Shopify, commercetools and a Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge
Rating: 4.8/5 on G2 from 58 reviews, ease of use 9.7/10

Constructor asks for more than evenings. It calls its core a Commerce Reasoning Engine, and the pieces that matter to a store are search and autosuggest, recommendations and an AI Shopping Agent. It reports 400+ billion requests processed a year, a 98.5% three-year client retention rate and an 8-week average implementation, and it was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery. Merchandisers score it 9.7/10 for ease of use, the highest ease-of-use sub-score on G2 among the tools here that carry one.

So why isn't it higher for you? Buying it is the hard part. The pricing page carries no plans and no figures, every prospect goes through a multi-stage demo, then a 10 to 14 business day custom data evaluation before anyone talks money. If your timeline is measured in weeks, start elsewhere.

Ranks 7 to 12: the working middle

Those six sell you a platform. These six sell you one job, and the per-unit meters get sharpest here. Read the overage rates twice, starting with the one that counts your tickets.

7. Gorgias, the Shopify helpdesk that bills by ticket

Price: - (Helpdesk billed by ticket volume, from 50 to 5,000 tickets a month)
Metered by: tickets, plus a per-resolution charge for the AI
Free tier: No
Platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce and PrestaShop, plus 300+ apps
Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 135 reviews

Gorgias puts your order, customer and product data inside the ticket, so your agent answers a refund question without tabbing out to the store admin. The inbox covers email, chat, text, WhatsApp, Instagram and voice. The company says its Support Agent is pre-trained on 1B+ conversations, and puts routine-inquiry automation at roughly 60%.

Plus, reviewers like the pricing shape as much as the product: billing counts tickets, so seats are free and your whole team can have access without another line item. Gorgias says it powers support for 40% of Shopify brands and 17,000+ e-commerce brands.

Two meters run at once on your account.

Helpdesk: billed by ticket volume, 50 to 5,000 tickets a month
AI Agent: about $0.90 per resolved interaction on most plans
Overage: about $1.50 per interaction

Reviewers describe a steeper learning curve than they expected. The automation rules builder gets unwieldy at scale, and failed automations are hard to troubleshoot. They also miss basics like saved filtered views and a mobile app, and report occasional loading glitches. Model both meters against your ticket volume before you commit.

8. Rep AI, a sales-first assistant priced by traffic

Price: $104/mo Starter; free to install at 100 visitors a month
Metered by: visitors
Free tier: No, free to install at 100 visitors a month
Platforms: Shopify first, with 175+ integrations including WooCommerce, Klaviyo and Gorgias
Rating: 4.7/5 on the Shopify App Store from 113 reviews, 95% of them five-star

Gorgias at least ties its meter to work done. Rep AI doesn't. Price this one before you look at the product, because the meter counts visitors and not sales. The ladder, as published on its Shopify listing:

Free to install: 100 visitors a month
Starter $104/mo to 10K visitors, Basic $209 to 25K, Standard $368 to 50K
Overage: $12 per 1,000 visitors

So what happens in a great traffic month? Your bill climbs whether or not those visitors bought, and one merchant reports being upsold to $500 a month. The vendor's own pricing page shows no readable figures, and those Shopify numbers sit oddly beside the homepage's separate $49, $99 and $118 module framing.

The product itself watches your visitors and steps in when intent shows up. That is a different job from waiting for someone to click a chat bubble.

It runs conversational product search on multi-layer AI instructions and guardrails you set, and carries a support helpdesk across your site, email and Instagram. Deployment is advertised at six clicks, with a 14-day trial and no credit card from you. The infrastructure is described as SOC 2-ready, with sensitive-topic blocking and full human override. Unilever, Olly and Lashify are on the customer list.

Some reviewers report the AI answering confidently but inaccurately, and onboarding that needed repeated training sessions. If your traffic is spiky, price the spike.

9. Rebuy Engine, packages you can buy one at a time

Price: Free (Rebuy Monetize); Build Your Own from $25/month per package; Platform One $534/month, 10% off billed annually
Metered by: monthly order volume
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: Shopify only, including Shopify Plus and Hydrogen
Rating: 4.7/5 on the Shopify App Store from 743 reviews; 4.9/5 on G2 from 4

Rep AI bills you for the traffic. Rebuy waits until it converts. If you're on Shopify and you want more out of the traffic you already have, this is the buy.

It is also the rare tool here that lets you buy exactly the piece you need. The catalog splits into four packages: Cart and Merchandising, Checkout and Post-Purchase, Search and Collections, and Flows and A/B Testing, priced à la carte from $25 a month per package. Platform One is $534 if you want everything plus a dedicated customer success manager. Trials run 14 to 30 days with a money-back and return-on-investment guarantee.

The company reports 50,000+ Shopify brands and $3.8B+ in generated merchant revenue, with an 11% average order value increase at DIME Beauty and 63% subscription revenue growth at Olly. Underneath sits the free Monetize tier, which runs partner offers on your thank-you page and pays you $0.20 to $0.35+ per transaction.

It's Shopify only, so if your store runs on WooCommerce or BigCommerce you can stop reading here. Advanced rule configuration will cost you a learning curve. At least one merchant reported a Rebuy deployment causing a cart-blocking issue until it was rolled back, which is reason enough to test it in a quiet week. The security page describes annual penetration testing, Tenable ONE scanning, and GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) work through Vanta, and it doesn't cite SOC 2 or payment card industry certification.

10. Triple Whale, one number to trust across channels

Price: Free; Foundation, Automate and Enterprise priced by annual gross merchandise value through a calculator
Metered by: annual gross merchandise value
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: 60+ including Shopify as a Plus Certified App, Klaviyo, Meta, Google and TikTok
Rating: 4.5/5 on G2 from 481 reviews; 4.2/5 from 91 Shopify reviews; about 3.0/5 from around 46 Trustpilot reviews

Rebuy works inside your store. Triple Whale watches everything feeding it. Does your reporting currently live in a spreadsheet that stitches four dashboards together? This is your fix. It unifies your store and ad data, then layers AI on top. Moby AI reallocates your channel budget, writes creative briefs and generates images and video.

The Willy assistant answers plain-English questions across Shopify, Klaviyo and ad data, using the company's own machine learning plus GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Triple Whale raised a $25M Series B in February 2023 with Shopify participating, and holds a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation from August 2023 alongside a public trust center.

The meter is your gross merchandise value, so the tool costs more precisely because you sold more. Reviewers haven't forgotten the 2024 price increases, and you can't see a paid figure without the calculator. Expect a real ramp before your dashboards look right, and expect it to feel overwhelming without someone on your side who enjoys analytics.

Some reviewers dispute the attribution accuracy the whole product rests on, and G2 says 4.5 while Trustpilot says roughly 3.0. Start on the free dashboard and check its attribution against your own Shopify numbers before you put anything into the calculator.

11. Siena AI, autonomous service with a floor price

Price: $750/month platform fee plus $0.90 per automated ticket
Metered by: automated tickets
Free tier: No
Platforms: Shopify plus Gorgias, Zendesk, Kustomer, Gladly, Dixa and Intercom
Rating: 4.8/5 on G2 from 28 reviews

No free dashboard here. The bill starts before the work does.

Platform fee: $750 a month, before any automation runs
Automation: $0.90 per automated ticket
No published tier list and no trial

What that buys is five named agents: Customer Service, Shopping, Social, QA (quality assurance) and Reviews. Ask Siena handles analytics, Topics Explorer surfaces voice-of-customer themes, and Memory tracks orders. Reviewers praise empathetic, brand-matched replies, and score it 8.8/10 on ease of use and 9.4/10 on support quality. Spanx, HexClad, Prose and MUDWTR are on the customer list.

The Shopify integration is deep enough to give you pause as well as pleasure. The agent can cancel your orders, process refunds, send replacements, edit orders and change customer emails on its own.

Which makes one reviewer complaint worth taking seriously. Reviewers report the agent continuing to reply after a handoff instead of escalating, closing out-of-scope tickets, and occasional hallucinations. Give an agent order-cancellation powers over your store and escalation behavior stops being a detail.

12. Fast Simon, broad platform coverage, quiet on price

Price: -
Metered by: -
Free tier: No
Platforms: Shopify including Plus and point of sale, plus BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Wix and headless Hydrogen
Rating: 4.7/5 from 670+ Shopify reviews, as reported on the company's own Shopify page

Most of this middle assumes Shopify. Fast Simon treats non-Shopify stores as first-class, so it stays on your list if you're on Wix or BigCommerce. You get multimodal and visual search, real-time personalization and smart merchandising, with business-to-business support for catalog number search and custom pricing.

It plugs into Klaviyo, Attentive and Yotpo, and holds Shopify Plus Certified App status plus SOC 2 Type I compliance. Steve Madden, Hey Dude and Juicy Couture are named customers, with press mentions in The New York Times, Forbes and Inc.

Plan names, prices and limits are not published and require a sales demo, and there's no free tier or trial on the pricing page. The headline claims come from the vendor: a 30 to 150% conversion improvement over native Shopify search, and a 25% sales uplift with no developers needed. The 4.7 rating is quoted on the vendor's own Shopify page. Weigh it accordingly before you book that demo.

Ranks 13 to 17: catalog and discovery, mostly by demo

Book that demo and you're in the right frame of mind for the next five. Fast Simon at least tells you which platforms it runs on. These want the call before they tell you anything. Four of them want a call and a signature before they quote, so if you're shopping on a deadline, skim ahead to Octane at 18. The exception is Photoroom, which you can buy this afternoon, and probably ought to read twice before you do.

13. Photoroom, product imagery at catalog scale

Price: - (Pro, Max and Ultra billed monthly or yearly, yearly saves 33%)
Metered by: AI credits and exports
Free tier: No, trial only
Platforms: developer tooling plus Zapier and Make.com; Shopify integration from the Max plan up
Rating: 2.2/5 on Trustpilot from 259 reviews

On capability, Photoroom is strong. Background removal, AI Backgrounds, AI Shadows and virtual try-on cover most of what a catalog needs, and the company describes its background remover as the fastest and most precise on the market, used by 80M+ users. Decathlon reports a 99% cost reduction per image, and DoorDash, Mercari and Depop are named customers. It's SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant. Reviewers who praise it are unambiguous about the cutout quality, and that's the job you'd be hiring it for.

Tiers are set by the allowance you buy:

Pro: 8,000 AI credits and 1,000 exports a month
Max: 25,000 credits and 3,000 exports, adding the video generator and the Shopify integration
Ultra: 75,000 credits and 10,000 exports, with 4K output

So why does a tool this capable sit at 2.2/5? The billing leads it. Trustpilot's dominant theme is a signup flow reviewers describe as designed to trick them into accidental annual subscriptions. They also report app crashes and output quality they feel has slipped. If you go ahead, go in on a monthly plan and read every checkbox on the way.

14. Lily AI, the words shoppers actually type

Price: - (custom quote based on catalog size, use-case complexity and markets)
Metered by: catalog size, use case, markets
Free tier: No
Platforms: Shopify, Google Merchant Center, Algolia and Bloomreach
Rating: 4 reviews on G2

From here on, the checkout disappears. No rate card, no free tier, no trial. The quote turns on your catalog size, use cases and markets, and the ways in are a quote estimator, a demo or a feed audit. Four G2 reviews is all the outside sentiment there is.

What you'd be buying: your product data describes items the way your supplier does, and shoppers search the way customers do. Lily Max enriches your attributes and activates them on Google Shopping, Meta Advantage+ and onsite search. The company publishes a matched-spend A/B test putting a 28% revenue lift on Google Shopping for a large apparel brand, a self-reported case study rather than an independent benchmark. Coach, HOKA and Foot Locker are named as clients.

15. Klevu, now a division of Athos Commerce

Price: - (custom quote on all three plans)
Metered by: -
Free tier: No
Platforms: BigCommerce, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, Miva, Salesforce, Shopware and NetSuite
Rating: 4.9/5 on the Shopify App Store from 13 reviews; 2 reviews on G2

Klevu keeps its numbers just as quiet. All three plans need a custom quote, there's no trial, and some reviewers say pricing runs higher than competing vendors. The 4.9 rating rests on 13 Shopify reviews, with 2 more on G2.

It sells discovery in three shapes: onsite search and merchandising, offsite product feed management, or both together. Coverage is broad for this part of the list, from BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce through to Miva, Shopware and NetSuite. In January 2025 it merged with Searchspring and Intelligent Reach to form Athos Commerce, so ask on the call who picks up the phone when search breaks.

16. Nosto, personalization with a policy against trials

Price: - (custom quote, described as no rigid tiers)
Metered by: -
Free tier: No
Platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and PrestaShop
Rating: 235 reviews on G2

There's a call to book here too. Nosto is explicit that it prefers proven results to what it calls generic trials, so there is no trial to take. Pricing is a custom quote after a booked demo, with no published tiers, and reviewers describe a learning curve on the more advanced merchandising and campaign rules.

Two clouds sit inside it. Product Experience covers search, merchandising and recommendations; Content Experience covers A/B testing, pop-ups and shoppable user-generated content, with a named agentic system called Huginn AI underneath. Nosto claims 1,500+ brands, reports a 43% conversion-rate increase at O'Neill, and puts a 99.99% uptime service level agreement on Enterprise.

17. Syte, visual search for fashion, jewelry and home

Price: - (custom, demo required)
Metered by: -
Free tier: No
Platforms: enterprise stacks; technology partners include Microsoft, AWS, SAP, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Klaviyo
Rating: none found on any independent review site

Syte sits a step further up again. Implementation runs through systems integrators like Deloitte and Accenture, which tells you the size of the engagement being planned. Pricing is custom and demo-gated, with no trial. If your last project didn't involve a consulting firm, this one isn't your next purchase.

The problem it solves is one you can watch in your search logs: shoppers who know what a thing looks like and can't name it. Camera and image search feed Shop Similar and Shop the Look, and Deep Tags automate the merchandising side. Founded in 2015, $71 million raised, and 100+ global brands claimed, including Prada and Farfetch.

Ranks 18 to 22: narrow jobs, low entry prices

If Syte is the expensive extreme, this is the cheap end. Single-purpose tools, mostly cheap enough to put on your card this week, and the band where Manychat's billing complaints sit. The one at rank 18 starts with a quiz.

18. Octane AI, quizzes that collect data you own

Price: $50/month Basic, $200/month Plus, $500+/month Enterprise and Unlimited, custom above that; 15% off billed yearly
Metered by: credits
Free tier: No, 14-day full-feature trial
Platforms: Shopify only, plus 50+ apps including Klaviyo, Recharge, Gorgias and Zapier
Rating: none found on any independent review site

A quiz is a friendly way to ask your shoppers what they want. Octane turns the answers into recommendations, and into zero-party data your email tool can use later. The CORE-1 AI Engine drives Smart Products, Smart Copy and photo-based shade matching for beauty. The company reports 5,000+ Shopify stores, 50M+ quizzes completed and a 30% average lift in average order value, and credits Jones Road Beauty with $100M in revenue on the platform.

Basic is $50 a month for 400 credits and only two quizzes, so the credit meter runs alongside the tier price and the entry plan caps your experiments early. It's Shopify only, so your platform decides this one. Every performance number above comes from the vendor, and no independent review profile is on record to weigh them against. Treat the 14-day trial as your evaluation.

19. Claid AI, image editing built for developers

Price: -
Metered by: -
Free tier: -
Platforms: developer only, with AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Web Folder connectors
Rating: 4.1/5 on Trustpilot from 18 reviews

Octane at least gives you a screen to click. Claid is an API. The documentation is built around developer integration, with no no-code interface confirmed. Its e-commerce guide is about standardizing your messiest images at scale: background removal, canvas resizing and machine-learning upscaling, with generative editing and AI Fashion Models alongside. The default rate limit is 120 requests per minute and 4 requests per second, with more available by arrangement.

Reviewers say what comes back holds up: they describe output realistic enough that they can't tell it was edited, real time savings on photo workflows, and support that feels like a conversation with a human being who knows the tool.

If you don't have someone who can call an endpoint, this is the wrong shape of product for you. The 18 reviews sit on a profile Trustpilot notes is unclaimed and not actively solicited, which cuts both ways. It's unmanaged, and it's small. Ask for pricing directly before you plan around it.

20. Describely, catalog copy by the product

Price: Free for 5 products; $0.75 per product pay-as-you-go and $0.55 per enrichment credit; 50-Product Plan $28/month; 250-Product Plan $138/month, both 17% off annually
Metered by: products and enrichment credits
Free tier: Yes
Platforms: Shopify only
Rating: 5.0/5 on the Shopify App Store from 3 reviews

Back to something you can just sign up for. If product copy is your bottleneck and you're on Shopify, five free products will tell you in an hour whether this one works on your catalog.

Describely's pricing is refreshingly literal. You pay per product. It generates descriptions, titles and meta tags in bulk, applies your brand-voice rules automatically, and audits your catalog for search engine optimization. Those five free products come with unlimited generations and 5 enrichment credits. Early reviewers say it reduces hours of writing and optimizing to just minutes.

Three reviews. That is all the independent feedback there is, so the 5.0 tells you almost nothing. It's Shopify only. And the meter counts products, so a large catalog is a different conversation from the $28 headline. Price your actual stock keeping unit count before you commit to a plan.

21. Alhena AI, a published price list for conversational commerce

Price: Free; Essentials $199/month billed annually or $239 monthly; Growth $499 or $599; Scale $999 or $1,199; Enterprise custom
Metered by: conversations, with overage credits at $1.20 each
Free tier: Yes, 25 conversations a month and 1 AI profile
Platforms: Zendesk, Fresh Desk, Intercom and Slack, with 200+ connectors claimed including Shopify, Gorgias and Klaviyo
Rating: none found on any independent review site

Describely isn't the only literalist down here. Alhena shows you its whole price list, tier limits and overage rate on one page.

The product spans an AI shopping assistant that upsells and answers common questions, a 24/7 voice and support concierge that can take actions on your orders, and visibility tracking for AI search engines. Its case studies name real brands. Tatcha is credited with an 11.4% revenue contribution and a 38% average order value uplift, Crocus with an 86% deflection rate at 84% customer satisfaction, and Victoria Beckham and Unilever appear as customers.

Can you run a store on the free plan? No. Here's the ladder:

Free: 25 conversations a month on 1 AI profile, with AI-only support
Essentials: 200 conversations a month; Growth 550; Scale 1,200
Overage: $1.20 per extra conversation credit

Twenty-five conversations a month is a demo. Email support arrives on the paid tiers, with a dedicated manager at Enterprise. Every performance figure here is a vendor case study, and no independent review profile is on record to check it against, so run your own before-and-after.

22. Manychat, social automation with a billing problem

Price: Free; Essential $14/month; Pro $29/month; Business $69/month; Advanced $139/month; Manychat AI is a separate $29/month add-on
Metered by: active contacts
Free tier: Yes, 25 active contacts a month across any 2 channels
Platforms: no native Shopify connector; Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Zapier and Make
Rating: 2.1/5 on Trustpilot from 301 reviews

Buy this for social selling, and only after you've read the billing complaints above.

The pitch is breadth. One builder automates your Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and Messenger: comments turned into direct messages, product questions answered, cart-recovery reminders fired, results tracked through a conversion pixel. The AI layer is named and specific, with AI Replies, AI Comments, a natural-language Flow Builder Assistant, and an AI Step that accepts up to 10,000 characters of context. Reviewers who stay past the initial learning curve call the workflow builder engaging and simple, and the company claims more than a million creators, marketers and brands.

Then there's the 2.1/5 across 301 reviews, the lowest rating on this list, driven by billing disputes, failed automations and multi-hour support waits even on tickets marked critical. Two things that rating won't tell you. The AI you came for isn't in the base plans: it's $29 a month on top of Pro. And Shopify support runs through third-party integrations, with no native connector on the integrations page, which is a real gap if your storefront is the point.

The picks, by the decision you are making

That's the twenty-two. So which one do you buy this month? Well, it depends on which job is pinching hardest.

Carts and average order value: Rebuy Engine. The free Monetize tier pays you $0.20 to $0.35+ per transaction on partner offers, packages start at $25 a month, and 743 Shopify reviews sit behind the 4.7 rating. Shopify only, so check your platform first. On WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop or Wix, start free with Klaviyo's abandoned-cart flows, which are the thing its reviewers credit.

"Where is my order" deflection: Zipchat AI. $49 a month, with a published ladder all the way to $999, so you can model the bill before you sign. Already running a helpdesk? Then Gorgias folds into a tool you already have: it bills by ticket, plus about $0.90 per resolved AI interaction and about $1.50 in overage, though no plan-tier price could be verified to hold against that $49.

On-site search: Algolia. 10K search requests a month against 50K records, free and permanent, with published overage after that. You'll know inside a week whether search was your problem.

Product copy: Describely. Free for five products, then $0.75 per product. Shopify only, and three reviews is all the outside evidence there is, so run the free five before you decide anything. Off Shopify, nothing here writes catalog copy on a self-serve plan; the attribute-enrichment tools that reach other platforms, Lily AI among them, quote by demo.

Product photos: Photoroom. Again, go in on a monthly plan and read every checkbox at signup.

And if you have real budget and a quarter to spend? Bloomreach and Attentive are where the top of this list actually lives. Both will take a call before they name a number.

Six questions to ask before you sign

Whichever call you book, go in with a list. Most of the questions below trace back to a complaint a real customer made about one of these vendors. The rest come from what the pricing pages leave out.

What unit does the meter count, and what is the overage rate? Searches, replies, resolved tickets, active profiles, visitors, products, conversations and gross merchandise value all appear on this list, and the answer decides your bill at triple the traffic.
Is this quote monthly, or an annual contract? Bloomreach and Algolia's top tier are sold on annual contracts, and several vendors discount only when you commit for a year.
Does the trial convert automatically, and to which plan? Photoroom reviewers describe a signup flow that landed them on annual subscriptions they did not intend to buy.
Is the connector for my platform native, or a Zapier-style bridge? Manychat's Shopify support runs through third-party integrations, and Rebuy, Octane AI and Describely never leave Shopify at all.
How does the AI escalate to a human, and can I watch it happen? Siena reviewers report the agent continuing to reply after a handoff, and Rep AI reviewers report confident but inaccurate answers.
How many reviews is that rating built on? Five stars from three reviewers and 4.5 stars from 1,200 are not the same claim.

Questions buyers ask

Which AI e-commerce tools have a genuinely free permanent plan rather than a trial?

Seven of the twenty-two, and they split in two. You can run a store on Algolia's free tier, on Rebuy Monetize, and on Describely for five products, and Triple Whale's free dashboard comes with no commitment attached. The other three are demo-sized: Klaviyo at 250 profiles, Alhena at 25 conversations, Manychat at 25 active contacts. Rep AI's free install at 100 visitors a month belongs with those demos, which is why it isn't counted in the seven. Everything else with a "free" label is a clock running against you.

How are these tools actually billed?

By whatever grows when you succeed, and for several of these meters that growth has nothing to do with sales. Rep AI counts visitors at $12 per extra thousand. Klaviyo prices by active profiles and Manychat by active contacts, and Manychat's own users report that what counts as an "active contact" isn't clear, so pin the definition down before you sign. Algolia counts search requests and Attentive counts the size of your list, so both climb on traffic alone. Triple Whale is the opposite case: it prices by your annual gross merchandise value, so that bill only moves when you sell more. The rest at least track work done, whether that's tickets, replies, products or credits. Rule of thumb: model the meter at three times your current volume before you sign anything, then ask what happens in your best month.

Why won't most of these vendors publish pricing, and what does a sales-led purchase cost me in time?

These platforms price by your catalog size, traffic, modules and markets, so there is no single number to print. The cost to you is calendar.

Constructor routes every prospect through a multi-stage demo and a 10 to 14 business day custom data evaluation, and reports an 8-week average implementation. That is the quick one. Bloomreach implementations are reported at 3 to 9 months with dedicated technical staff, at a cost third-party sources put above $50k a year. Nosto won't offer a trial at all, as a matter of policy, and Syte implements through partners like Deloitte and Accenture. If you need something live this month, the self-serve half of this list is your list.

What are the options if my store isn't on Shopify?

Several tools here run natively well beyond Shopify. Zipchat AI installs on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and Wix. Klaviyo covers all of those, then adds Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopware and Square Online. Need the helpdesk instead? Gorgias runs on Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce and PrestaShop. For search, Fast Simon reaches as far as Wix and headless Hydrogen, and Algolia, Klevu and Nosto cover most major platforms too, though of those four search platforms, only Algolia publishes a price. Then the three you can cross off now: Rebuy Engine, Octane AI and Describely never leave Shopify.

Which of these tools publish real security and compliance certifications?

Here is who publishes what:

Algolia: ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and ISO/IEC 27017:2015 certification, plus SOC 2, a public bug-bounty program and regular penetration testing
Bloomreach: SOC 2 and SOC 3 certification, ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 compliance, and verification by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants
Constructor: SOC 2 and ISO 27001, with GDPR and CCPA compliance
Photoroom: SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant
Triple Whale: a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation from August 2023, with a public trust center
Fast Simon: SOC 2 Type I; Rep AI describes its infrastructure as SOC 2-ready
Zipchat: GDPR and EU AI Act compliance, with encryption in transit and at rest
Syte: GDPR and CCPA compliance with 72-hour breach notification, per its privacy policy

Two gaps for your list. Attentive's compliance page focuses on text-marketing law and does not state SOC 2, GDPR or CCPA certification. Rebuy's security page describes penetration testing and Vanta-managed compliance work without citing SOC 2 or payment card industry certification.

Can an AI agent be trusted to answer customers or take order actions on its own?

Partly, and every number below is the vendor's own. Zipchat says 97% of conversations resolve without escalation, Gorgias says its Support Agent handles roughly 60% of routine inquiries, Klaviyo claims 65% autonomous resolution, and Alhena's Crocus case study reports an 86% deflection rate at 84% satisfaction.

Now the failures. Siena reviewers report the agent replying after a handoff and closing out-of-scope tickets, on a product whose Shopify integration can cancel orders and issue refunds by itself. Rep AI reviewers report confident but inaccurate answers. Zipchat reviewers report misunderstandings on complex questions when the training content is thin. So test escalation deliberately before you widen an agent's permissions, and where a tool gives you a human override, as Rep AI does with full conversation visibility, keep it switched on.

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