Seal Subscriptions vs Subify Subscriptions App

Finding the right app in the Shopify app store can quickly become overwhelming. If you looked at some of the most popular subscription apps in the Shopify app store you might have seen the names Seal Subscriptions and Subify Subscriptions app. They are two of the most competitive subscription apps on the market right now offering various of features. But it's easy to say that one is much better than the other, and the obvious answer is Seal Subscriptions. 

In this article we will first show you a quick overview of both apps and later on we will compare the two and show you why exactly you should go with the Seal option. We will show you advantages of Seal in different aspects from functionalities, to customization to pricing plans.

If you have not yet, we strongly recommend that you install the best subscription app on Shopify app store Seal Subscriptions here.

Overview of Seal Subscriptions

Seal Subscriptions is by far the best option on the market. From a very user-friendly interface both for you as a merchant and other customers, to flexible and heavily customizable options, to bunch of functionalities, Seal offers everything you you will need to start subscription service in your shop. Each day it receives a lot of positive reviews and merchants are constantly happy with the experience they have with Seal. The biggest thing that separates Seal from other subscription apps is Seal's amazing 0% transaction fee on ALL subscriptions. You heard it right, the only investment you will have with Seal is the monthly pricing plan value if you decide to go with a paid plan and that's it. Seal also has integration with a variety of other Shopify apps such as best bundling app Bundler - Product Bundles where you can combine subscriptions with bundles. 

Overview of Subify Subscriptions

Subify subscriptions are a relatively newer name in the market and they did see some growth in the past few months. You can offer your customers subscriptions with different discounts such as flexible percentage or fixed discounts & delivery frequency. You can also create a subscribe and save button, offer membership plans, or create subscription boxes for your subscribers. However, all of these features + more are also accessible in Seal Subscriptions. Subify also has other basic features available such as customizable widget templates, customer portal, responsive customer support, integration with other apps and more. And if we mention pricing plans, while their overall pricing plans are relatively cheap, Subify also has different transaction fees on plans unlike Seal Subscriptions. More detailed cost comparison will be shown below.

Let's further discuss each app in-detail and describe the main key-features of each.

Quick comparison table

Before proceeding to dive deeper into each app individually where we will describe all of it's pros and cons, let's show you the overlook table of main differences between Seal Subscriptions and Subify

Seal Subscriptions

Pricing model

Whenever mentioning Seal Subscriptions the biggest advantage that will always show up in all scenarios is simply of just how affordable it is. Seal offers 6 paid plans + you can even arrange a custom enterprise plan if you wish to do so. The cheapest paid plan starts at $4.95 where you can have up to 750 subscriptions, subscription login form, global statistics insight, access to API & webhooks, reminders about upcoming billing, and more! Seal also comes with a completely FREE plan where you can have up to 150 subscriptions and has the basic features such as auto-charging subscriptions, dashboard analytics, custom email HTML, customer portal settings and more. Also, the 0% transaction fee is applied on ALL of the plans, including the free plan! The free plan will give you a great feel of what the app is worth and you will quickly see most of the Seal's features since a lot of them are included in the free plan.

Detailed breakdown of all plans can be seen by clicking here.

Features

On to the main section of what you are probably the most interested when picking up a subscription app. It's functionalities. We are glad to tell you that Seal offers everything that majority of subscription apps nowadays offer on the market. It also has some additional features that might be unique to Seal and that you might find useful.

Making subscription rules

Of course, just like any other subscription app on the market, you need to define a specific set of rules that would define how exactly would you like your customers to subscribe to your products. From selecting products, to changing delivery intervals, to giving them discounts. All of these you can freely define when making a subscription rule. 

Subscription rule can be one of the two:

• Auto-charging subscription rules, which means that on renewals your customers will be automatically charged. This is the most popular option since everything happens automatically and your customers can freely manage their subscriptions or
• Recurring invoice subscription rules, which means that you customers will not be automatically charged and they will have to manually pay for their subscriptions.

When making auto-charging subscription rules you can define a bunch of different options for your customers:

• Selecting the products that you wish this rule will apply to,
• Managing selling plans, where you can create as many selling plans as you want,
• Set delivery intervals, where you define an option that the customer can select on what interval does he want the product delivered,
• Set requirements, where you can setup an options for minimal required number of payments before the customer can cancel their subscription or maximum required number of payments where subscription will get cancelled automatically
• Set different discounts on your subscriptions such as fixed amount discount, percentage discount, or fixed product price,
• Set automatic discount modification, which means that the discount will change after a specific number of payments,
• and more!

Customer portal

Important thing when picking up a subscription app is finding a great way so your customers can interact with their subscriptions. This is usually done with a page called customer portal. Customer portal is like a wallet where your customers will be able to access and manage their subscriptions depends on what you allow them.

In Seal Subscriptions there are various things your customers can do in customer portal:

• Changing product quantity,
• Adding/Removing products,
• Changing subscription intervals,
• Rescheduling upcoming payments,
• Changing email address,
• Changing delivery and billing address,
• Pausing and cancelling subscriptions,
• Editing notes on their subscriptions,
• And many more!

Customization and flexibility

While the functionality of the subscription app and the customer portal are an important factors to consider when picking up a subscription app, it's also good to mention the customization. While the default look of the widgets are fine and everything, it's a big plus if an app offers a complete freedom when it comes to changing the look. Seal Subscriptions offers you a bunch of different customization options from changing the colors, to changing the text of the widget to even completely changing the layout of the widget with CSS, if you have to knowledge to do that.

Here are some of the things you are able to customize with Seal Subscriptions:

• Text colors and button colors,
• Radio buttons,
• Savings badge colors,
• Subscription info popup,
• Customer portal,
• Everything with CSS!

Automations

Seal Subscriptions offers you three different perks that can help you extend the subscription service in your store. Those are:

• Loyalty discounts, that gives discounts to your loyal subscribers that have been already subscribed for a certain period. They are a very useful tool that can be implemented on auto-charging subscriptions.

• Product swaps, that allow you to either add, remove or replace the products in subscriptions. This will allow your customers to receive different products on some renewals, if you've setup product swaps to be like that. This feature is great if you for example would like to add gifts to subscriptions, or simply swap the products when you run out of stock. You can watch our great tutorial video about product swaps by clicking here!

• Automated interval change is a setting where you can set the app to automatically change intervals in your subscriptions. For example, you can provide a 10 day free trial and then after that the interval changes to 30 days. Or you can change all 4 week intervals to monthly intervals if you've changed your business logic. There are many different ways that you can play around with here.

Integrations

We already mentioned a lot of advantages of Seal Subscriptions, however it's most definitely worth mentioning the support Seal has with many other popular Shopify apps. Of course, it's always good for every app in Shopify to have support for other apps, since you might already have installed a variety of other apps. Seal has great support for popular page-building apps such as PageFly and GemPages, however it also works great together with some of the apps that enhance the subscriptions such as best bundling app in Shopify Bundler - Product Bundles, that allows you to combine subscriptions with bundles. This way, your customers are able to buy products together while gaining discounts and are still able to subscribe to products within bundle.

Subify Subscriptions

Now that we've looked at all the great things that Seal offers, let's look at some features of Subify Subscriptions and their shortcomings. 

Pricing Model

We already mentioned that Seal offers a blasting 0% transaction fees on all subscriptions. Subify does have transaction fees. Depending on a plan, the cheapest essential plan has 2.5% + 19 cents per transaction, basic plan has 1% + 19 cents per transaction and Subify plan has 1% + 9 cents per transaction, which is still a lot. You can see the cost comparison below. But not only transaction fees, Subify also does not have as many flexible plans as Seal Subscriptions. You can see the plans listed here:

Cost comparison - Subify Subscriptions vs Seal Subscriptions

Let's take a Seal Subscriptions's LEGEND plan that costs $20 and let's take Subify's BASIC plan that costs $39 (essentialy both provide similar array of functionalities)

Let's say you are a merchant with a traffic of exactly $20,000 ($10 per order) per month:

Subify's transaction fee is 1% + 19 cents

Subify transaction fees calculation:

• Percentage fee of 1% on each trasaction
  • 1% of $20,000 = $200
• Fixed fee of 19 cents on each transaction
  • 2000 transactions x $0.19 = $380
• Total transaction fees = $580
• Subify's basic plan cost: $39
• Total monthly cost with Subify subscriptions: Transaction fees + Plan cost = $580 + $39 = $619

For Seal Subscriptions, you are just paying $20 in this example and nothing else!

This means that you are paying 3100% more for Subify per month! Which means that with Seal Subscriptions you are saving around $7200 each year!

Features

Let's now look at some of the popular features of Subify subscription app.

Just like with Seal Subscriptions, Subify also has easy creation of auto-charging subscriptions. Buyers simply add the subscription plan and pick a product that they wish to subscribe to, and they are now they are subscribed to that product. The user-interface of Subify is relatively easy to understand and they do have a low learning curve. They also offer various templates that you can use for customizing Subify's widget that could fit your store. With Subify, you have the option to reduce churn by letting customers manage their subscriptions through a password-less subscription portal (just like how Seal uses customer portal) in Subify subscriptions app. They also have a responsive customer support team that might help you if you get into any issues.

As you can see Subify offers a bunch of basic features just like most of subscription apps on the Shopify app store. Also keep in mind that some features listed above are locked to Subify's paid plans.

Integrations

Subify also has integrations with most of Shopify's themes and apps. Some of the integrations include PageFly, Klaviyo, Shopify flow, mailchimp, Shopify's Translate & Adapt app, and more.

Choosing the right app

Making the right choice and picking the right app can be crucial for your business. So make sure you sit down and carefully read all the functionalities of the app and make sure it really does fits your needs for your business. Compare pricing plans with the functionalities and ask yourself if investing into this app will make it worthwhile for your business and for your growth. I can guarantee you that picking Seal Subscriptions will most definitely be worth it for you in terms of functionalities and also in terms of pricing.

This way your store will have a rapid growth and better customer experience, so it will provide satisfaction not only for you, but also for your customers!

Happy subscription management!