Loyalty & Rewards
Love Loyalty vs Upzelo: Honest Comparison [2027 Edition]
If Love Loyalty vs Upzelo is the shortlist in front of you, you’re choosing between two different ideas of where a loyalty program lives. Love Loyalty keeps it in the cart and stores the data inside Shopify. Upzelo puts it in a branded launcher on your storefront and a pass in your customer’s phone wallet.
Their track records look quite different, too. Love Loyalty has 424 App Store reviews, with the newest from September 2026. Upzelo has just five, and its newest review dates back to September 2024. That’s a thin public record for a product you’re being asked to commit $2,149 a year to.
Love Loyalty vs Upzelo: Our top pick
For most Shopify merchants, Love Loyalty is the easier choice to justify. It costs less, has a much stronger public track record, and keeps loyalty data inside Shopify. Upzelo has a narrower advantage, but it’s an important one for retailers with physical stores.
Choose Love Loyalty: You’re under about 4,000 orders a month and don’t want a $2,149 annual commitment to start. You want paid memberships as a real revenue line, or you sell B2B and D2C from one store and need different rules for each. And you’d like to test a working program on a free plan this afternoon.
Choose Upzelo: You run a physical store alongside your online shop, and you want customers to identify themselves through an Apple or Google Wallet pass. Just make sure someone on your team will keep those customers engaged with push notifications. That’s a big part of what you’re paying $199 a month for.
Look beyond both: Both apps list only English on the App Store, so neither suits a multi-language storefront. And if you want a long public track record before you sign, an older app such as Smile.io or BON Loyalty is the safer place to look.
What does each app offer?
Love Loyalty
The decision that shapes Love Loyalty is where the data lives. Points balances, tier status, and membership state are written into Shopify metafields. So you can read them in Shopify Admin, build rules against them in Shopify Flow, or hand them to a headless front end without learning a separate API.
On the storefront there’s no widget to open. Points show up across the product page, cart, customer accounts, and thank-you page, and each placement switches on or off on its own. Customers redeem in the cart in two steps, and free-product rewards drop the item straight into the cart. That sounds minor until you’ve watched customers fail to apply a voucher code, and Agradi.nl, a Dutch store past its first year, named it as the reason it switched.
In store, a staff-facing POS widget handles sign-ups and earning or redeeming at the till. For B2B, you attach different programs to different customer segments, so wholesale and retail buyers run on separate rules inside one install. The main reservation is its age. Love Loyalty is still a relatively young app, and the one functional complaint in its reviews concerns referrals. Otherwise, it’s a particularly good fit for stores that want loyalty, POS, and separate B2B and D2C programs without installing multiple apps.
Upzelo
Upzelo’s storefront is the Launcher, a branded button that opens a Rewards Panel. It’s even cross-listed in the App Store’s Pop-ups category, and its own pricing page lists the Launcher Widget as a plan feature. The widget is the design, not an add-on.
The wallet pass is the real product. Every paid plan includes unlimited Apple and Google Wallet passes and unlimited push notifications to them. That gives you a channel that isn’t email or SMS and costs nothing per message. In store, staff scan the pass, and nothing else in this comparison does that as well.
Upzelo also puts a lot behind its support offering. Every plan includes 24/7 live chat, onboarding, and migration help. There’s one thing I’d check before installing it, though. Its permissions include theme editing and access to only the last 60 days of order history. That limitation matters if you plan to calculate loyalty tiers using lifetime customer spend. Upzelo makes the most sense for retailers who will actively use its wallet and push features.
How we compared Love Loyalty and Upzelo
We wanted to know whether Upzelo’s wallet-pass focus is worth a $199 floor, and for which kind of store.
- Features: Points, referrals, VIP tiers, paid memberships, POS, wallet passes, reporting, and API access, and which plan unlocks each.
- Pricing: Every published plan, order limit, and overage, priced at six order volumes, with Upzelo’s quote-only tiers marked as such.
- Integrations: The named connectors on each listing and what fills the gaps.
- Merchant feedback: Shopify App Store reviews, Capterra, G2, and Reddit, plus our study of 3,410 loyalty app reviews.
- Migration: What moves between the two, what has to be rebuilt, and what each app’s permissions allow.
We checked prices and plan contents on 5 November 2026 against both Shopify App Store listings, loveloyalty.app/pricing, and upzelo.com.
Love Loyalty vs Upzelo: At a glance
| Love Loyalty | Upzelo | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Shopify stores under about 4,000 orders that want tiers, memberships, or B2B | Retail-plus-online brands built around a wallet pass |
| Entry price | Free, then $12/mo | $199/mo |
| Free plan | Yes, 150 orders/mo | None |
| Free trial | 14 days on paid plans | None listed |
| Built for Shopify | Yes | No |
| App Store rating | 5.0 from 424 reviews | 5.0 from 5 reviews |
| Newest review | September 2026 | 16 September 2024 |
| On the App Store since | 24 October 2024 | 2 May 2022 |
| Storefront | 15+ placements, redemption in the cart | Launcher widget and Rewards Panel |
| VIP tiers | Growth, $79/mo | All plans, from $199/mo |
| Paid memberships | Growth, $79/mo, plus 1.8% of sales | Not listed |
| Wallet passes | Growth, $79/mo | Unlimited on all plans, with push |
| Shopify POS | Professional at $12 monthly, Growth on annual billing | All plans |
| Order history the app can read | Full | Last 60 days |
| API access | Plus, $399/mo | Enterprise, $799+/mo |
| Languages | English on the listing | English on the listing |
Love Loyalty has the advantage across most categories, while Upzelo stands out when wallet passes and in-store engagement are central to the program.
How do Love Loyalty and Upzelo compare on features?
One question can settle this on its own. If the wallet pass is the centre of your program, Upzelo earns its price. If it isn’t, Love Loyalty does more for less almost everywhere else.
Which app is better for wallet passes and in-store loyalty?
Upzelo, clearly. Every plan includes POS, unlimited Apple and Google Wallet passes, and unlimited push notifications to those passes. The pass works as the customer’s in-store identity, and push lets you reach members without paying per message.
Love Loyalty puts POS on Professional at $12 a month (Growth at $59 if you pay annually) and wallet passes on Growth at $79. It covers the basics of loyalty across POS and online, but there’s no push channel to match Upzelo’s.
Best for: Upzelo. This is where its $199 earns its keep.
Which app makes VIP tiers cheaper?
Love Loyalty, by $120 a month. Its Growth plan includes VIP tiers at $79, or $59 billed annually, with automatic upgrades based on spend or points. Upzelo includes tiers on every plan, but its cheapest plan is $199.
Best for: Love Loyalty, on the price of entry.
Which app supports paid memberships?
Only Love Loyalty. You can sell monthly or yearly memberships, with a one-click upsell at checkout that applies the benefits to that same order. It takes 1.8% of membership sales on Growth and 0.8% on Plus. Upzelo doesn’t list memberships as a program type on its App Store page.
So if recurring membership revenue is why you’re shopping, this decides it.
Best for: Love Loyalty, outright.
Which app handles referrals better?
Love Loyalty, on access. It runs referrals on the free plan, with five placements and built-in fraud protection. Upzelo includes them on every paid plan, and Cult Pens customers were sharing its referral links in r/fountainpens discount threads in November and December 2025 without being asked, which is good independent evidence that they work.
Love Loyalty has one real complaint here. Ten Twelve, a Spanish store, edited its review down in June 2026 because referrals didn’t separate new customers from returning ones. Ask about new-customer detection before you launch.
Best for: Love Loyalty, provided you test how it identifies new customers before launch.
How do points and rewards compare?
It’s a tie, because the two apps work in different ways. Love Loyalty redeems in the cart with nothing to open and lists both store credit and cash back as reward types. Upzelo’s Launcher opens a Rewards Panel where customers browse and claim, with gift cards and digital wallets among its reward types.
Both award points for sign-ups, orders, reviews, and social follows.
Best for: Love Loyalty if you want customers to redeem in the cart. Upzelo if you want them to browse a dedicated rewards panel.
Which app connects to more tools?
It’s a clean split. Love Loyalty connects to Klaviyo, Judge.me, Shopify Flow, Shopify Email, and customer accounts, and uses Flow to bridge to anything without a native connector. Those integrations sit on Professional at $12 a month, or Growth if you pay annually. Upzelo lists Klaviyo, Gorgias, Dotdigital, Recharge, Feefo, and Reviews.io on every plan.
Both cover Klaviyo, but check what syncs to Klaviyo on each before you rebuild your flows.
Best for: Upzelo for helpdesk and subscription stacks. Love Loyalty for reviews and workflow automation.
Which app has better reporting?
Love Loyalty. It has native analytics from Professional at $12 a month, and every metric also sits in Shopify metafields, where your existing reports can reach it. Upzelo’s Insights dashboard filters by metric and exports customer activity to CSV.
Having the data inside Shopify also means you keep the numbers if you ever leave.
Best for: Love Loyalty.
Which app has better setup and support?
Love Loyalty, on evidence. It offers live chat on every plan, including the free one, and co-founder Bálint Jakabos replies to reviews publicly. AGUGU imported a large historical points database in May 2026 and said support handled the CSV within minutes. Founder-led onboarding comes with Plus.
Upzelo promises more on paper, with 24/7 live chat, onboarding, and migration support on every plan. The difference is that Love Loyalty has more recent merchant feedback showing what that support looks like in practice.
Best for: Love Loyalty, on proof. Upzelo if round-the-clock chat matters more than recent reviews.
How much do Love Loyalty and Upzelo cost?
The starting loyalty apps prices tell only part of the story. Love Loyalty has several entry points depending on what you need, while Upzelo asks you to start at $199 a month. The gap becomes especially noticeable for smaller stores.
Love Loyalty pricing
| Plan | Cost | Order limit | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 150/mo | Testing a real points program |
| Professional | $12/mo, or $10/mo billed annually with fewer features | 500/mo | Small stores that want POS, integrations, and analytics (monthly billing) |
| Growth | $79/mo, or $708/yr | 2,000/mo, then $15 per extra 100 | VIP tiers, memberships, wallet passes, and B2B segments |
| Plus | $399/mo, or $3,588/yr | Unlimited | High volume, checkout extensions, and API access |
Upzelo pricing
| Plan | Cost | Order limit | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $199/mo, or $2,149.20/yr | First 1,000/mo | Wallet passes and push on a fixed budget |
| Pro | $349/mo, or $3,769.20/yr | First 1,000/mo | Extended Experiences |
| Enterprise | $799+/mo | 7,000+/mo | API access, custom migration, and an account manager |
A few things to know before you budget:
- Pay monthly for Love Loyalty Professional: At $12 a month it includes POS, integrations, and analytics. Billed annually, it drops to $10 and loses them, and they reappear on Growth at $59.
- Expect a quote from Upzelo above 1,000 orders: Its pricing page uses a slider up to 7,000 orders, and the price at each step isn’t published in a form we could cite. So $199 is the only firm number.
- Ignore Upzelo prices on Capterra and GetApp: Both still show $149 a month and a $572.47 custom tier. Those belong to the cancellation-flow product Upzelo sold before it built its loyalty app.
- Ask what Experiences means before choosing Pro: Upzelo gates Experiences as Limited on Standard and Extended on Pro, and the listing doesn’t say what falls on either side.
- Budget for Love Loyalty’s membership fee: It takes 1.8% of membership sales on Growth and 0.8% on Plus, on top of the plan price.
The annual discounts differ too. Upzelo takes 10% off, while Love Loyalty takes 17% off Professional and about 25% off Growth and Plus.
Which free plan gives you more?
Only Love Loyalty has one. Its free plan covers 150 orders a month with a working points program, two-step cart redemption, referrals, full customisation, and live chat. It leaves out VIP tiers, a loyalty page, free-product rewards, points expiry, analytics, POS, and integrations.
Upzelo has no free plan, and its Shopify listing advertises no free trial either. The cheapest way to see it on your own store is to book a demo. If you’re still figuring out what kind of loyalty program works for your store, this gives you room to experiment before committing to a monthly subscription.
How do costs change as order volume grows?
Upzelo’s floor is the number that matters most, because it doesn’t change until you pass 1,000 orders. This table uses published prices and shows Upzelo’s floor where it quotes above that.
| Orders/month | Love Loyalty | Upzelo | Cheaper option |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | Professional, $12 | Standard, $199 | Love Loyalty by $187 |
| 500 | Professional, $12 | Standard, $199 | Love Loyalty by $187 |
| 1,000 | Growth, $79 | Standard, $199 | Love Loyalty by $120 |
| 2,500 | Growth, $154 with overage | Quoted, above $199 | Love Loyalty |
| 5,000 | Plus, $399 | Quoted | Love Loyalty on published prices |
| 10,000 | Plus, $399 | Enterprise, $799+ | Love Loyalty by at least $400 |
Love Loyalty’s own ladder has one crossover to plan for. Growth with overage stays cheaper than Plus up to about 4,100 orders a month. At 4,200 orders, the overage takes Growth to $409, so move to the $399 Plus plan before you get there.
What do merchants say about Love Loyalty and Upzelo?
The review gap is one of the biggest differences between these apps. Love Loyalty has a growing collection of recent merchant feedback. Upzelo has very little public feedback to help you understand what using it looks like over time. Ratings were checked on 5 November 2026.
| Source | Love Loyalty | Upzelo |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify App Store | 5.0 from 424 reviews, newest September 2026 | 5.0 from 5 reviews, newest 16 September 2024 |
| No discussion of substance | Cult Pens customers sharing referral links, November and December 2025 |
Love Loyalty’s useful reviews are the specific ones. Ironwear, a US store 11 months in, wrote in March 2026 that Love Loyalty was the only app it found willing and able to build the wholesale segmentation it needed. Agradi.nl switched because free products land straight in the cart, and AGUGU praised how quickly support imported its points history. Two critical reviews exist. Ten Twelve’s referral complaint is the only functional one, and a US store charged after deleting the app during its October 2025 trial got a public reply from the co-founder the next day, with the trial dates laid out.
Upzelo’s five reviews were all written between five days and four months into using the app, so none of them tells you what year two looks like. Its public trail has also gone quiet. We found no product update dated 2026, the website footer still reads 2025, and the listing still calls wallet passes new. That’s not proof of neglect, since Upzelo was clearly running for Cult Pens in late 2025. But it does mean you should book a demo and ask for a current customer reference before committing $2,149 a year.
What our Shopify loyalty app review research found
Upzelo wasn’t among the 25 apps in our study of 3,410 Shopify App Store reviews, so the figures below cover Love Loyalty only.
Love Loyalty’s 186 written reviews in the sample mentioned rewards mechanics 97 times, 92 of them as praise, a 52.2% mention rate against a category average of 27.2%. Customisation came up in 24.2% of its reviews, close to double the 13.8% average.
Its 112 support mentions included 110 compliments, and it had no one- or two-star reviews in the study period. The app merchants most often said they’d switched to, named in 8 reviews.
There’s one reason to be a little cautious about Love Loyalty’s otherwise positive picture. Reviewers with more than a year on an app were about twice as likely to leave one or two stars. Most of Love Loyalty’s merchants haven’t reached that point yet, so its clean record is encouraging, but still relatively young.
- Love Loyalty: Merchants praise the rewards, the look, and fast, hands-on support.
- Upzelo: Too little recent public feedback to judge, so ask for references.
How do you migrate between Love Loyalty and Upzelo?
Switching between these two apps takes some preparation. Neither lists the other as a supported migration source, so you’ll need to export customer data and bring it across using CSV files.
Love Loyalty supports migrations from Smile, Yotpo, LoyaltyLion, and Nector, while Upzelo lists Smile, Yotpo, LoyaltyLion, Joy, Stamped, and Influence. Love Loyalty’s support team has publicly handled large points imports, but there are still a few things you’ll need to rebuild yourself..
| Item | Upzelo to Love Loyalty | Love Loyalty to Upzelo |
|---|---|---|
| Points balances | Export to CSV and import | Export to CSV and import |
| Tier status | Recalculate from spend, with full order history available | Must arrive in the import file, because Upzelo reads only 60 days of orders |
| Referral history | Attribution chains are lost | Attribution chains are lost |
| Wallet passes | Reissue and ask members to add the new pass | Reissue and ask members to add the new pass |
| Paid memberships | Not applicable | No listed equivalent, so members need another plan |
- Export points balances and tier assignments to CSV before you cancel anything.
- Moving into Upzelo, put each customer’s correct tier in the import file. Otherwise your best customers start in the bottom tier on day one.
- Recreate referral rewards, and tell existing advocates their old links may stop working.
- Email every wallet-pass holder with the new pass, since installed passes don’t carry over.
- Run both programs in parallel for one billing cycle, then uninstall the old app once balances match.
Upzelo includes onboarding and migration support on every plan, with custom migration help at Enterprise. Love Loyalty includes live chat on every plan and founder-led onboarding on Plus. Either way, the wallet-pass reissue is the step that takes longest, because it depends on your customers acting.
Which Shopify loyalty app should you choose?
Three questions settle this.
Will someone own the wallet pass? If nobody on your team will write push notifications, you’re paying $199 a month for a channel that sits idle.
Do you need paid memberships or B2B segments? Only Love Loyalty has them.
Can you commit $2,149 a year to a vendor whose newest public review is two years old? If the answer is no until you’ve spoken to a current customer, book that call before anything else.
| Your store or requirement | Recommended app | Why choose it? |
|---|---|---|
| Under 500 orders a month | Love Loyalty | Free plan, or $12 a month |
| A growing D2C store that wants tiers and memberships | Love Loyalty | Both on Growth at $79 |
| B2B and D2C from one store | Love Loyalty | Separate programs per segment |
| Loyalty data you can read in Shopify Admin | Love Loyalty | Stored in metafields |
| Retail-heavy, with a real in-store program | Upzelo | Unlimited wallet passes and push |
| 24/7 live chat on every plan | Upzelo | Included from $199 |
| Past about 4,200 orders a month | Love Loyalty | Unlimited orders on Plus at $399 |
| Multi-language storefront | Neither | Both list English only |
Final verdict: Love Loyalty or Upzelo?
Love Loyalty is the better choice for most Shopify merchants. Its lower starting price, flexible plans, Shopify-native data, and much stronger recent review history make it easier to adopt and justify. I’d still test its referral logic before building a major acquisition strategy around it.
Upzelo makes sense when physical retail is a major part of your business. The wallet passes and push notifications give it a genuine advantage, especially if you have someone who’ll actively manage that channel. Just be comfortable with the $199 starting price and the limited public feedback.
Before choosing, think about how your customers will actually interact with your loyalty program. If they’ll mostly earn and redeem points while shopping online, Love Loyalty is the more practical investment. If they’ll scan a wallet pass at your till and receive regular push notifications, Upzelo has a stronger case.
FAQs
Is Love Loyalty cheaper than Upzelo?
Yes, at every volume with a published price. At 2,000 orders a month, Love Loyalty Growth costs $79, or $59 billed annually, while Upzelo’s $199 Standard plan covers only the first 1,000 orders and quotes above that.
Does Upzelo have a free plan or free trial?
No. Upzelo has no free plan and lists no free trial on its Shopify App Store page, so entry is $199 a month. To see it working on your store, you book a demo.
Can I redeem points at checkout with either app?
Both support checkout, but Love Loyalty puts checkout extensions on its $399 Plus plan, and Shopify limits in-checkout extensions to Shopify Plus stores for every app. Love Loyalty’s default redemption happens in the cart, so most merchants never need the extension.
Which app has the Built for Shopify badge?
Love Loyalty, which earned it in December 2024. Upzelo doesn’t have it, even though its listing has been live since May 2022. The badge covers Shopify’s performance, design, and integration standards.
What is the cheapest way to get VIP tiers?
Love Loyalty’s Growth plan at $79 a month, or $59 billed annually. Upzelo includes tiers on every plan, but its cheapest plan costs $120 a month more.
Which app is better for in-store loyalty?
Upzelo, because every plan includes POS, unlimited wallet passes, and unlimited push notifications. Love Loyalty covers POS from $12 a month and wallet passes from $79, but has no push channel.
Can Upzelo see my full order history?
No. Its order permission covers only the last 60 days, so it can’t rebuild lifetime spend from Shopify. If you migrate into Upzelo, include each customer’s tier in your import file.
Daniel Smith
Tracks the Shopify App Store so everyday merchants don't have to. Having personally vetted, audited, and reviewed hundreds of apss, he cuts through the marketing noise to recommend tools that actually drive revenue. He helps brands build the ultimate lean, high-performing tech stack.
