Recommended product reviews apps

Our theme offer support for 7 different product rating / review applications. Here's our honest opinions on each one of these apps, showcasing their strengths and weaknesses, in hope that it will help you decide which is best for your store.

Because we are testing theme compatibility, we will refer to two main points:

1. Design (how it fits into any theme and whether the app has support for the theme's product grid rating badge design)
2. Performance (how many files does the app add; we are only testing the basic product rating, so this might differ based on your usage of the app)

Loox

Loox is one of the most popular reviews app, with a strong user base, lots of reviews and features. It's also one of the apps that doesn't have any free plan, but this is because it offers a lot of features right from the start.

Design

We like this app's design very much, as it's clean and fits into any theme very well. The product reviews section has lots of design possibilities, so you can tailor the ratings area to pretty much fit your theme. The rating form is pretty nice to interact with and. it also has support for the theme's original product badge, so one point here as well.

Performance

The theme seems to load a single js file which is only 34kb, so it shouldn't affect the speed score too much. Of course, as you add more widgets / functionality, this might increase.

Air Reviews

Dead simple and FREE. Air Reviews is not as popular or with as many options as the ones below, but we have to start with this, because from our perspective, it's the fastest and easiest way to get started with reviews.

Design

It's not exactly our favorite, but it's not bad at all. You have two layouts from which you can choose to display your reviews, some ready to use color schemes and for further customizations you can change all colors. With support for the theme's default review badge, we don't see why you should look further.

Performance

Everything free comes with a price and the performance is not the best on this one. It loads 15 files with a total of 337kb.

Judge.me

Another really popular app, Judge.me is a very solid choice for your store's reviews, especially since it comes with a forever free plan.

Design

We have to be honest here, the design on this one feels a bit dated and the free plan doesn't give you too many design choices, so in some themes it might be a good fit, while in others you'll definitely see it as something completely separate from the theme. You can only change the main color, but for anything else you'll have to subscribe to the payed plan. It does support theme's reviews badge, so it can still be a very good option, especially for stores without a big budget.

Performance

Not sure why, but this one loads 8 js files (100kb) & 2 css ones (10kb). The sizes are not too much, but still, it could have been better.

Stamped

Stamped is another very popular reviews app, not as popular as the first two, but still in the top. It also features a free plan, but it's only for 50 orders / month, so you can quickly go to the second plan which is pretty compared with others.

Design

The standard design is a ok, with a lot of layouts that you can use, a lot of customization options, but somehow the admin is a bit confusing and not as straightforwards as other apps. Also, it doesn't support the theme's badges, so a minus one this one.

Performance

This app also has a lot of files that need to load, and even if the size is not huge, from our tests, it takes a lot of time to appear in the frontend and the admin feels incredibly laggy. It loads a total of 12 files with a total of 100kb, and on top of this it also loads jQuery, which is a big drawback.

Yotpo

At the same level of popularity as the one above, Yotpo is another nice app that can work well for you, especially if you have a small store, as it offers a free plan for up to 50 orders.

Design

Clean & simple with quite a few review display options even in the free plan, you can edit colors, fonts, layouts, being able to make this fit in your theme pretty well. It might not fit your theme's design from the start, but you can definitely make it work.

Performance

Even if it loads a lot of files, it's well optimized, so the widget will show up pretty fast, but this one will drag your score down a bit. By default, it loads a whopping of 25 files which account for almost 2mb (you can reduce this by excluding custom fonts, but still, it's a lot).

Ali Reviews

Another very popular app especially because of Dropshipping integrations, Ali Reviews can be a good option for your store. It has a free plan of 5 reviews / product and the next one is really cheap, so definitely a good choice for starting businesses.

Design

Clean & tidy, the reviews widget of this one is in our top. It looks good and fits your store very well right from the start without any customization from your side. We don't like it that it doesn't have support for our theme's rating badge, so we cannot give it a 5.

Performance

We have to give a bad score here as well, because it loads over 80 files that make a total of 376kb. We didn't do thorough tests, but surely, this will impact your store's speed a lot. So if performance matters for you more than the design or features of this one, you might want to skip it.

Rapid Reviews

An honorable mention, not popular at all, Rapid Reviews is the cheapest option that we've tried (except the free app). It has support for both reviews and questions, so it can definitely be a good choice.

Design

We like that it offers support for the theme's badges, however the widget's design is somehow dated and without too many options. The review form takes you to a third party page which is also not the best UX.

Performance

If performance is the key factor in your decision, then look no more. This app loads a single 11kb js file, which will not affect your theme's speed in any way.

Conclusion

It's hard to draw a conclusion, because each app has it's own strength and weaknesses. Whether it's price, design, functionality or performance, at the end you'll have to decide which is the most important for you and go with that.