Best Shopify apps for plant and garden stores in 2026, ordered by review count
Short answer: selling live plants online is a stock and timing problem before it is a marketing one. STOQ handles the seasonal sold-out gap at 5.0 stars across 3,424 reviews, and Rubik Variant Images, built by Craftshift, assigns a separate image set to every pot size so a 2 litre and a 10 litre stop sharing one photo. Free to install, 5.0 stars across 410 reviews.
A plant shop is the only kind of Shopify store where the product keeps growing after you photograph it. That single fact breaks most of the usual advice. Stock is seasonal and finite, the thing in the box is never quite the thing in the picture, and half the year you cannot ship at all without the courier delivering a frozen stick.
The variant structure is unusual too. Pot size is a real axis with real inventory: a 9cm Monstera and a 24cm Monstera are different plants commercially, priced three times apart, and they look completely different. So do bare root versus potted, and one year versus three year stock. Which means a plant listing needs a photo set per size, not one hero shot with a note underneath saying sizes may vary.
Disclosure: we build Shopify apps ourselves. Craftshift makes Rubik Variant Images and Rubik Combined Listings, and both appear below at the position the App Store’s review count puts them, flagged as ours. Seven apps on this page have more reviews than one of ours, and eight have more than the other. Where a competitor is the better buy for a nursery, we say so in its section.
In this guide
- How this list is ordered
- What actually breaks in a plant catalogue
- The comparison table
- Appstle Subscriptions
- STOQ Preorder and Back In Stock
- REZ Preorder and Back In Stock
- Bird Pickup Delivery Date
- Rubik Variant Images (ours)
- MB Push Down Hide Out of Stock
- Flare Delivery Date Picker
- Rubik Combined Listings (ours)
- Addify Country Restrictions
- How to choose
- FAQ
How this list is ordered
By Shopify App Store review count, highest first. We sell into one of these categories, so a ranking we authored would be worth nothing to you. Every rating, count and plan price was read off the live listing in July 2026, and they move. Review count also tells you nothing about seasonality: a plant shop’s needs in February and in June are not the same list.
What actually breaks in a plant catalogue
Three things, and none of them are the things people write about.
Sold out is the normal state, not an exception. A nursery sells out of half its range every season and restocks when the crop is ready, not when demand arrives. Every one of those sold-out variants is a shopper who wanted to buy. Handled well it is an email address, handled badly it is a dead end, and our guide to handling out of stock variants on Shopify covers the merchandising side.
Delivery timing is part of the product. Ship a fern on a Thursday and it spends the weekend in a depot. Ship anything frost tender in January and you are refunding it. A date picker is not a convenience feature for a plant shop, it is quality control.
And the photographs. Pot size changes what the customer receives more than colour changes anything in apparel, yet Shopify features exactly one image per variant, so the 9cm and the 24cm share a gallery and the shopper picks the one in the picture. Which is why an app that gives every pot size its own image set and filters the gallery earns its keep in a nursery. Free to install, 5.0 stars across 410 reviews, and yes, that one is ours.
The best Shopify apps for plant stores compared
Verified July 2026. Prices come off the plan cards, not the badge at the top, because a free trial and a free tier are not the same thing and the badge treats them as one.
| App | What it does for a nursery | Rating (reviews) | Free plan | Cheapest paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Appstle Subscriptions | Plant of the month, feed and compost replenishment | 5.0 (7,988) | Yes | $10/mo |
| STOQ Preorder and Back In Stock | Restock alerts and preorders for the next crop | 5.0 (3,424) | Yes | $10/mo |
| REZ Preorder and Back In Stock | Same job, lower price floor, waitlists | 5.0 (1,303) | Yes | $4.99/mo |
| Bird Pickup Delivery Date | Delivery and collection dates at checkout and POS | 4.9 (468) | Yes | $19.99/mo |
| Rubik Variant Images (ours) | An image set and swatch per pot size or plant size | 5.0 (410) | Yes, 1 product | $25/mo |
| MB Push Down Hide Out of Stock | Pushes sold-out stock to the end of a collection | 4.8 (137) | Yes | $4.99/mo |
| Flare Delivery Date Picker | Lead times, delivery zones, cut-off rules | 4.9 (108) | No | $39/mo |
| Rubik Combined Listings (ours) | Groups separate size products into one listing | 5.0 (63) | Yes, 5 groups | $10/mo |
| Addify Country Restrictions | Hides products or the buy button by country | 5.0 (10) | No | $3.99/mo |
Appstle Subscriptions: 5.0 stars, 7,988 reviews
The largest install base on this page by a wide margin, and the fit is better than it first looks. Plant of the month boxes, seed club deliveries, monthly feed and compost replenishment, curated build-a-box formats. Subscription revenue also smooths the brutal seasonality of a garden business, which is the actual reason to look at it: December stops being a hole in the accounts.
Where it stops: a subscription is a promise to ship something every month, and a nursery’s stock does not respect that promise. If your curation depends on what is ready, you are committing to a delivery you may not be able to fill. Free plan, then $10 a month. Alternatives sit in our subscription app roundup.
STOQ Preorder and Back In Stock: 5.0 stars, 3,424 reviews
If you buy one app off this page and you sell live plants, buy a restock alert app. Nothing else on this list recovers as much demand you have already paid to attract. A shopper who wanted the sold-out Alocasia leaves an email, and the next crop sells before it reaches the shelf. Preorders go further: you sell the batch while it is still growing. Free plan, paid from $10 a month.
Where it stops: it notifies, it does not merchandise. If your collection pages are still full of clickable sold-out plants, shoppers hit dead ends before they ever see an alert button. Fix the sorting first, then collect the emails. Longer comparison in our back in stock app roundup.
REZ Preorder and Back In Stock: 5.0 stars, 1,303 reviews
The same category at half the entry price. Waitlists, preorders, backorders and presale, with a free plan and a $4.99 first tier against STOQ’s $10. For a small nursery running a few hundred lines, that difference is a bag of compost a month, and the feature you actually use is identical.
Where it stops: 1,303 reviews against STOQ’s 3,424 is the honest gap, and on an app that sends email on your behalf, deliverability track record is worth paying for. Try REZ first if budget is tight. Move if the alerts stop landing.
Bird Pickup Delivery Date: 4.9 stars, 468 reviews
Dates at checkout for local delivery, click and collect and shipping, with POS support, which matters because most garden centres are a physical site with a website attached. Letting a customer pick Saturday morning collection turns a fragile courier problem into a car boot. Free plan, then $19.99 a month.
Where it stops: it schedules, it does not decide what is safe to send. Nothing here knows that a frost is forecast on Tuesday. You still set the rules, the app just enforces them. More options in our delivery date app roundup.
Rubik Variant Images (ours): 5.0 stars, 410 reviews
Ours, so weigh it accordingly. It attaches a full image set to each variant instead of the single featured image Shopify allows, and filters the gallery when a shopper picks one. For plants the shared image handling is the part that matters: a 9cm, a 12cm and a 17cm of the same species get their own size photos, while the care card and the leaf detail stay visible across all three rather than being uploaded three times. Swatches included. Metafield based, no external API calls, native on 350+ themes.
“This app makes it super easy to manage images for products that have multiple variations (size and flavor in my case). The support is great as well!”
Anonymous merchant, 2026-02-18, Rubik Variant Images reviews on the Shopify App Store
Where it is the wrong pick, said plainly. It does nothing about stock, nothing about delivery dates and nothing about shipping restrictions, which are the three problems that actually cost a nursery money. If you have one app’s budget this season, spend it on restock alerts, not on us. It also does very little for a store selling seeds, tools and compost, where a packet looks like a packet at every size. And 410 reviews against STOQ’s 3,424 makes us the smaller option here. Free plan covers one product, Starter is $25 a month for 100. See it on the live demo store or read the getting started guide.
MB Push Down Hide Out of Stock: 4.8 stars, 137 reviews
Small app, unglamorous job, and for a seasonal catalogue it is the cheapest fix on this page. It sorts sold-out products to the end of a collection automatically, or hides them, so a shopper browsing in March does not scroll through forty greyed-out summer lines before reaching something they can buy. Free plan, then $4.99 a month.
Where it stops: hiding is a blunt instrument. A hidden product collects no restock signups and loses whatever ranking that URL had built, which is a real cost on a plant that sells out every summer. Push down rather than hide, and pair it with an alert app.
Flare Delivery Date Picker: 4.9 stars, 108 reviews
The rules engine version of a date picker: per product lead times, delivery zones, cut-off times, blackout dates. That combination is exactly what a nursery needs, because a rooted tree and a packet of seeds do not ship on the same schedule and should not offer the same dates.
Read the pricing before you install. There is no free plan, and the tiers are banded by monthly revenue rather than by feature: $39 up to $20K a month, $99 up to $60K, $249 up to $150K. Grow and the bill grows with you whether or not you use anything new. We have a fuller Flare review with the detail.
Rubik Combined Listings (ours): 5.0 stars, 63 reviews
Also ours, and it fixes a specific mess. Nurseries very often publish each pot size as its own product, because that is how the growing list is organised and how the barcode arrives, so a collection page shows the same Ficus four times at four prices. Rubik Combined Listings links them into one listing with a size swatch row, so shoppers see one plant and choose the size. Free plan for 5 groups, then $10 a month for 100. The reasoning is in grouping separate products by size and colour.
Where it is the wrong pick: if your sizes are already variants of one product, you do not need it. 63 reviews is the second smallest count on this page and by some distance the shortest track record. And grouping does not create stock. A tidy listing with four sold-out sizes is still four sold-out sizes.
Addify Country Restrictions: 5.0 stars, 10 reviews
Included because live goods are one of the few categories where you legally cannot sell everything everywhere. Plant health rules, soil restrictions and phytosanitary certificates mean some lines simply must not leave the country. Addify hides products, prices or the add-to-cart button by country, with rules you set, from $3.99 a month.
Where it stops, and it is a real limit: this is country level. A state or postcode restriction needs a different tool, and there is no free plan here to test with. 10 reviews is the smallest number on this page. Treat it as a starting point, not a recommendation, and check it does what your rules require before relying on it.
How to choose, in one rule
Pull last season’s numbers and answer one question: where did the money leave? That is your buying order, and it beats any list including this one.
- Traffic arriving on sold-out plants? STOQ, or REZ if the budget is thin.
- Plants arriving damaged or delayed? Bird for dates and collection, Flare if you need per product lead times.
- Refunds saying “smaller than expected”? A photo problem. That is Rubik Variant Images if sizes are variants, Rubik Combined Listings if they are separate products.
- Collection pages that look dead in winter? MB Push Down, five dollars, ten minutes.
- A December with no revenue in it? Appstle, and start planning it in September.
One free thing before any of it. Work out what a plant actually earns once shrinkage, packaging and breakage are in the maths, because plant margins are not apparel margins and a $25 a month app has to clear a real bar. Our free profit margin calculator does that in a minute, and the variant combination calculator tells you how many variants a species and pot size matrix really creates.
Frequently asked questions
Which app should I use to show different photos for each pot size?
Rubik Variant Images. It assigns a separate image set to every pot size and filters the gallery when a shopper selects one, while shared images such as a care card stay visible across all sizes. 5.0 stars across 410 reviews, free to install for one product, native on 350+ themes. If each size is a separate product, use Rubik Combined Listings to group them.
Should pot size be a variant or a separate product?
Variants keep one URL and concentrate reviews and ranking on it, which suits a species you stock in three sizes all year. Separate products give each size its own URL and its own stock record, which suits a nursery whose growing list is organised by size. Both work. They need different apps, which is the honest reason we build two.
How do I stop shoppers landing on sold-out plants?
Do two things. Push sold-out lines to the end of the collection so browsing stays useful, using MB Push Down Hide Out of Stock or your theme’s sort setting. Then put a restock alert button on the variant so the visit becomes an email address instead of a bounce. Hiding without an alert throws the demand away.
Can I stop selling certain plants in certain places?
At country level, yes, with a restriction app like Addify. Below that it gets harder: state, region and postcode rules generally need shipping rule tooling rather than a product visibility app. Check what your own plant health rules require before choosing, because the two are not interchangeable.
Do I need a delivery date picker to sell plants?
If you ship live goods, yes. A plant posted on a Thursday sits in a depot until Monday, and that is how a healthy fern arrives dead. A date picker also lets you close dates around frost, heat and bank holidays. Bird starts at $19.99 a month with a free plan, Flare at $39 with none.
Are any of these free?
Appstle, STOQ, REZ, Bird, MB Push Down and both Rubik apps list a free tier with limits. Flare and Addify do not, starting at $39 and $3.99 a month. Read the plan cards on the listing rather than the free plan badge at the top, because the badge counts a free trial as a free plan.
Related reading
- Hiding out of stock options in a combined listing
- Inventory management with a lot of variants
- How to show multiple images per variant
- Showing a different size guide per variant
- How many images per variant can Shopify handle
- Out of stock handling in combined listings
Stock and timing are the two things that decide whether a plant shop works, and we solve neither. What we solve is the customer who ordered the 9cm because that is the photo they saw, and opened a box expecting the 24cm.
Umid
Co-Founder at Craftshift
