How-to · 7 min read
How to see what apps a Shopify competitor uses — for free
Your competitor's app stack is one of the most valuable pieces of research you can do — it reveals how they collect reviews, run email, handle upsells, and more. The good news: most of it is public, and you can see it for free in seconds. You don't need an expensive "spy tool" subscription. Here's how it works and how to use what you find.
The fast way: scan the store
Paste the competitor's URL into the app detector and click to check its apps. Within seconds you'll see the apps it's running, grouped by category with logos. No login, no payment, no browser extension — it reads the store's public code and matches it against known app fingerprints. That's the entire process for 90% of cases.
Scan a competitor now
See their app stack free, in seconds.
Why this is possible (and legal)
When a store installs an app, that app usually adds code to the storefront — scripts, styles, tracking snippets — that loads in every visitor's browser. That code is public by necessity; it has to run on the customer's device to work. Reading it is exactly what your own browser does when it loads the page. So detecting apps isn't spying or hacking — it's reading what the store already sends to everyone who visits. Completely legitimate competitive research.
The manual way, for verification
If you want to confirm a result or dig for something, you can do it by hand. Right-click the competitor's page, choose "View page source," and search (Ctrl+F) for an app's name or the domain its script loads from. See klaviyo.com in the code? They use Klaviyo. It's slower and you need to know what to look for, but it's the same principle the detector automates — and a useful way to double-check anything surprising.
What you can't see for free
Be realistic about the limits. You can see apps that leave a public footprint — which is most customer-facing ones. You can't see back-office apps that don't touch the storefront (accounting, internal inventory), or functionality a store has custom-coded instead of installing as an app. So "no apps detected" doesn't always mean "no apps" — sometimes it means the store built things custom, which is itself a signal that they've invested in bespoke development.
Almost every app that affects the customer experience is visible for free. The hidden ones are usually the back-office tools you didn't need to see anyway.
Turning the list into an advantage
Finding the apps is step one; using the insight is the point. Scan three or four successful competitors and look for what repeats. If they all run the same category of app — reviews, say, or email — that's a proven lever in your niche, and a gap if you're not using it. If one competitor runs something unusual and is clearly winning, that's worth investigating. Don't blindly copy a whole stack, but let the patterns across your competitors point you to your highest-priority experiments.
Do it now
Pick your biggest competitor and scan their apps. Note their reviews tool, their email platform, and anything in the upsell or subscription categories. Compare it to your own store. The gaps you find are your roadmap — and you got it all free, in about five minutes, from public information.
Keep reading: what a store's apps reveal about its business model, or the apps successful stores actually use.