About Best Widget Apps
An independent index of 118 store widgets across 3 platforms, built because the existing ones are affiliate pages wearing a review as a costume.
Why this exists
Search for the best countdown timer app for your store and you get a page of listicles. Read three of them and you notice they contain the same apps in the same order with the same adjectives, and every link carries a tracking parameter. The ranking is the commission rate.
That is a bad way to choose software you will run on every page of your store. So this index does the opposite: real numbers from the public App Store listings, with the date they were checked, plain links, and honest trade-offs written for each app — including the ones we rate highest.
What is here
- 118 widgets across 3 platforms and 9 categories, each with real marketplace data and a plain assessment.
- Head-to-head comparisons for the choices merchants actually agonise over, scored axis by axis with a verdict at the top rather than a shrug at the bottom.
- Guides on the things app listings never mention: what a widget costs in page weight, how the install model determines what happens when you uninstall, where free tiers stop, and what the rules on urgency claims actually say.
- A calculator that works out the AOV lift an app needs to break even against its subscription.
How it is built
A static site. No ad network, no affiliate tags, and one analytics tool — Google Analytics — so we can see which pages are worth writing more of. Every page is HTML generated at build time from JSON and markdown files, which is why it loads quickly and why the data is auditable — you can read the source of every number.
We take the advice we give: this site runs less third-party JavaScript than most of the widgets it reviews.
Who is behind it
A small team that builds Shopify apps. That is a conflict of interest and pretending otherwise would be worse than declaring it, so: our own apps will never be ranked in this index. They will live on one clearly separated page. The full reasoning is on the methodology page, and the Our widgets page states the commitments plainly.
Get in touch
Corrections, missing apps, disagreements: hello@bestwidgetapps.com. If an app you built is listed and something about it is wrong, tell us — we will fix facts immediately and argue about opinions in good faith.