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Subbly vs. Shopify

Find out how both platforms stack up and make the best decision for you subscription business.

Summary

Subbly’s strength is rooted in subscription ecommerce and has all the features you need to grow, built right in.

Shopify's focus is being an platform for single purchase eCommerce orders, and lacks built in advanced subscription features and customization options merchants need to maximize growth and revenue.

Key comparison points

Wrangling with a dozen apps and plugins not designed to work together? Subbly has all the essentials you need to set up subscriptions built right in, without any apps needed, so you can say goodbye to compatibility issues and bugs.

Losing revenue to payment processing failures during high-traffic periods? Subbly's tested in-house payment integrations are built to seamlessly process your customers' payments no matter the volume of traffic or sales being pushed through.

Lacking insight and visibility into key growth metrics? Subbly's analytics are tailored for subscriptions businesses, and empower you to make informed and impactful decisions.

Struggling to boost average order value? Subbly's built-in, configurable dynamic bundles, upsells and addons allow you to quickly tailor purchase flows to encourage more spending.

Operations and fulfillment eating up your time? Making bulk edits to customers and subscriptions, filtering through data and other key admin tasks are a breeze on Subbly.

Ready to upgrade your subscription solution?

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Talk to our migration team

Subbly is a subscription-first platform

💪 All-in-one ecommerce platform with subscription at its core

Everything you need to grow your subscription business is built right in, no plugins needed.

🚀 Advanced sales and retention features

Enable build-a-box functionality with fixed and customizable bundles, set up auto-scaling discounts, checkout funnels, cancellation offers and more.

💳 Standard payment processing integrations

Support for major processing services built and maintained by Subbly for flawless, reliable payments even during peak seasonal traffic.

🌎 Optimized for local and international commerce

Take your subscription business global with built-in multi-language and multi-currency checkout options, discount codes, a fully flexible translation suite, and more.

🤝 Industry-leading support

Subbly’s customer support team is best-in-class, with ultra-fast response times and a proactive, community-driven approach.

Shopify treats subscriptions as a bonus

🛠️ Requires plugins for basic features

Shopify requires 3rd-party apps and plugins for features from basic subscription management to gift cards and referral programs - adding cost and complexity.

🔂 Lacks advanced subscription options

Core subscription features such as creating customized billing and shipping cycles aren't possible out of the box, and are missing on a lot of 3rd-party subscription apps as well.

⛓️ Inaccessible customer payment data

Shopify requires merchants to use their checkouts, and holds on to subscriber payment data with no options and support to migrate it out of the ecosystem.

⛔️ Increases risk of instability

3rd-party apps that aren't specifically designed to work together can stop functioning unexpectedly and lead to in payment processing failures, missed renewal order billing, and other long-term issues.

Which to choose?

If you want maximum flexibility to create custom subscription and order shipping cadences, optimize for efficiency and focus on delivering a world-class customer experience.

If you need stable and scaleable payments processing integrations that still let you access your customers' payment data.

If you want to avoid the added costs, complexity and other consequences of relying on 3rd-party apps to power your business.

If you're okay with the potential lack of support and stability issues arising from using multiple 3rd party Shopify apps.

If you don't need access to your customers' payment data and never plan to move away from Shopify

If you're okay with the additional costs of extending functionality through Spotify's plugin and app ecosystem.

Try Subbly today!

Here's what our customers think:

Find more on Capterra

"“I highly recommend you signup, because from subs, upsells, to email automations and reporting, there is no system out there that does it better than Subbly. Oh, and the customer service is the best I have ever experienced. Period."