Best Shopify abandoned cart recovery apps 2026: 11 ranked on live numbers

Short answer: turn on Shopify’s built in abandoned checkout automation first, because it costs nothing. When you outgrow it, Omnisend recovers carts across email, SMS and web push from one workflow builder. It runs 4.7 stars across 2,936 reviews, carries the Built for Shopify badge, and its free tier covers 250 contacts.

Cart abandonment is the most over sold problem in Shopify apps. Every listing in this category promises to recover revenue you already earned, which is true, and every one of them quietly depends on the same three levers: how fast the first message goes out, which channel it goes out on, and whether the message is worth opening. Nothing else in the feature list matters much.

So this roundup is organised by channel rather than by brand, because that is the decision you are actually making. Email is cheap and nobody reads it. SMS gets read and costs real money per send. WhatsApp is somewhere in between and depends heavily on which country your buyers are in. Push is free to send and only reaches people who already opted in on your site. Pick the channel, then pick the app.

Ratings, review counts and prices below came off each App Store listing on 29 July 2026, read from the pricing cards rather than the summary badge. Verify before you install, because review counts move weekly.

Craftshift builds two Shopify apps, Rubik Variant Images and Rubik Combined Listings. Neither one recovers carts, so neither is in the table below and none of this ranks our own product. Rubik Variant Images assigns a separate image set to every variant so the right photo follows the right colour, and it holds 5.0 stars across 410 reviews. It matters here for exactly one reason, covered near the end, and it is not a reason to install it instead of any app on this page. Where a competitor below is the better pick for you, we say so.

In this guide

• Start with the free built in automation
• The comparison table
• Email platforms: Omnisend, Klaviyo, Privy
• Web push: Brevo PushOwl
• WhatsApp: Dondy and CK
• SMS: TxtCart and Recart
• Budget email: Cartly and Amplified
• The reason your recovery email gets ignored
• How to choose
• FAQ

Start with the free built in automation

Shopify ships abandoned checkout emails as a platform feature. No app, no monthly fee, no theme edit. You switch it on in Marketing, pick a delay, edit the template, and it sends. It has been there for years and a surprising number of stores install a $30 a month app on top of an automation they never turned on.

What the built in version does not do: multi step sequences, SMS, push, segmentation by product or customer value, or anything conditional. It sends one email, to everyone, the same way. That is the ceiling, and it is the honest reason to upgrade. Not before you hit it though. Why pay to send the email you were already sending for free?

The first party app alongside it is Shopify Messaging, which builds email and SMS campaigns inside your admin. It is free to install, your first 10,000 emails each month are free, and after that pricing starts at $1 per 1,000 emails. At 4.7 stars across 4,043 reviews it is the most reviewed thing in this whole category. It is also the cheapest way to send volume by a wide margin, and its weakness is the same as the native automation’s: the automation logic is thinner than the specialists.

The best Shopify abandoned cart apps compared

Ordered by review volume, which is a fact rather than an opinion. Prices are the cheapest paid tier shown on each listing’s pricing cards, checked 29 July 2026.

App	Rating (reviews)	Main channel	Free tier	Cheapest paid
Shopify Messaging (first party)	4.7 (4,043)	Email, SMS	Free to install, 10,000 emails/mo	$1 per 1,000 emails
Privy	4.5 (3,973)	Popups, email, SMS	Free to install	$24/mo
Omnisend	4.7 (2,936)	Email, SMS, push	Yes, 250 contacts	$16/mo
Klaviyo	4.7 (2,926)	Email, SMS	Yes, 250 contacts	$20/mo email
Brevo PushOwl	4.8 (2,007)	Web push, email, SMS	Yes, 500 push/mo	$19/mo
Dondy: WhatsApp Marketing	4.8 (770)	WhatsApp	Yes, manual only	$6.99/mo
Amplified Email and Abandon Cart	4.5 (486)	Email, SMS, push	Yes, 500 emails/mo	$29/mo
Recart	4.7 (448)	SMS	Free to install	$299/mo
TxtCart AI	4.9 (438)	SMS	No, $29/mo minimum spend	$79/mo
CK: Abandoned cart on WhatsApp	5.0 (278)	WhatsApp	Yes, 100 manual messages	$9.99/mo
Cartly Abandoned Cart Recovery	4.8 (231)	Email, push	Yes, 100 emails	$14.99/mo

Email platforms: Omnisend, Klaviyo and Privy

Omnisend is the pick for most stores under a few thousand orders a month. 4.7 stars across 2,936 reviews, listed since March 2014, and it is the only one of the three big email platforms here carrying the Built for Shopify badge. The free plan covers 250 contacts with 500 emails and 500 web push notifications a month. Standard is $16 a month for 500 contacts and 6,000 emails, Pro is $59 for 2,500 contacts and unlimited sends. Cart recovery, browse abandonment and post purchase flows are prebuilt, so you are editing copy rather than building logic.

Klaviyo is where you go when segmentation is the point. 4.7 stars across 2,926 reviews, listed since September 2012, free to install with email free forever up to 250 contacts and 150 SMS credits. Paid email starts at $20 a month for 251 to 500 contacts, SMS at $15 for 1,250 credits. It is the deepest data model in this category and most agencies default to it. Two honest caveats: it does not carry the Built for Shopify badge, and its pricing scales with your contact list rather than your sends, which punishes stores with big inactive lists. Is that overkill for a store doing 200 orders a month? Usually, yes.

Privy has the second highest review count on this page, 3,973, at the lowest rating of the group, 4.5. Listed since June 2015. Its shape is different: popups and on site displays come first, email and SMS second. Pop Ups and Displays is $24 a month priced on monthly pageviews starting at 10,000, Email is $30 for 1,500 contacts, Email and SMS is $45. If your problem is capturing the email address before the cart is abandoned rather than chasing it after, that ordering is a feature.

Web push: Brevo PushOwl

4.8 stars across 2,007 reviews, listed since July 2017, now part of Brevo. Why bother with the channel most stores skip? Because it is the cheapest one to run: no per message carrier fee, no email address required (which also means no consent form to design), and the opt in is a single browser prompt. The Basic Bundle is free and includes 500 web push notifications a month plus Brevo’s email suite with back in stock reminders and price drop alerts. Plus is $19 a month for 10k to 30k pushes, Power is $79 for unlimited plus browse abandonment automation.

The limitation is structural rather than anything the app did wrong: push only reaches people who accepted the browser prompt on your site, and on iOS that has historically been the weakest surface. So push is an addition to email, not a replacement for it. Nobody recovers a cart on push alone.

WhatsApp: Dondy and CK

If a meaningful share of your buyers are in Brazil, India, the Gulf, Southern Europe or most of Southeast Asia, WhatsApp beats email and it is not close. Two apps to look at.

Dondy holds 4.8 stars across 770 reviews with the Built for Shopify badge, listed March 2023. The free tier is a WhatsApp chat button with unlimited conversations. Pro at $6.99 a month adds manual cart recovery and order confirmations. Automated recovery lives on Power Automation at $79.99 a month, where message rates start at $0.0158 in the US with 1,000 one click messages included every 30 days. Elite at $159.99 adds an AI chatbot.

CK: Abandoned cart on WhatsApp is the highest rated app in this entire roundup at a flat 5.0 across 278 reviews, Built for Shopify, listed June 2020. Free forever gets you unlimited chats and 100 manual cart abandonment messages. VIP at $9.99 a month unlocks automated recovery messages and an order CRM, Advanced at $29 adds custom templates and sending from your own number. Automated message rates start at $0.02 per message on top of the subscription.

Read those per message rates carefully. A WhatsApp app’s subscription is rarely the real bill.

SMS: TxtCart and Recart

TxtCart AI is the highest rated dedicated SMS app here, 4.9 stars across 438 reviews, listed February 2021. Its Starter tier is free to install but carries a $29 a month minimum spend, then $0.009 per SMS and $0.045 per MMS plus carrier fees. Growth is $79 a month with no minimum and cheaper per message rates, Pro is $399. The two way conversational AI is the differentiator: it replies to the shopper rather than just blasting a link.

Recart sits at 4.7 stars across 448 reviews, listed July 2016, and it is the most expensive entry point in this roundup by a wide margin. It is free to install with no platform fees and unlimited contacts, and then the Starter plan is $299 a month. That is not a mistake in the table. Recart is aimed at stores where SMS is already a real revenue line and the $299 buys strategy and support alongside the software. If you are not already sending SMS at volume, this is the wrong door.

One thing worth saying about SMS in general, because the category never says it: every message you send costs you money whether or not it works (the carrier fee lands on the ignored ones too), which is the opposite of email. That changes the maths on discounting. Our free ROAS calculator is a blunt but useful way to sanity check whether a recovery flow with a 10% code is actually profitable once carrier fees are in.

Budget email: Cartly and Amplified

Cartly Abandoned Cart Recovery holds 4.8 stars across 231 reviews, listed October 2017. The free Basic plan covers 100 abandoned cart recovery emails, unlimited email subscriber collection, unlimited push notifications, a cart reminder and a spin to win popup. Pro is $14.99 a month for unlimited emails and unlimited recovered carts. For a few hundred orders a month, that is the cheapest full featured recovery stack here.

Amplified Email and Abandon Cart sits at 4.5 across 486 reviews with the Built for Shopify badge, listed June 2016. Its distinctive feature is a persistent shopping cart plus live cart activity, so you can watch carts fill in real time. Free covers 500 emails a month capped at 10 a day. Growth 500 is $29, Growth 5K is $99, Growth 50K is $800, all with unlimited sends. That pricing is contact based, so it climbs quickly. The 4.5 rating is the joint lowest here, which is worth stating rather than glossing over.

The reason your recovery email gets ignored

Every app above renders the same thing at the top of the message: the cart, as a list of line items, each with a thumbnail. That thumbnail is not chosen by the app. It comes from the variant the shopper added, and Shopify allows exactly one featured image per variant. Where a variant has no image of its own, the platform falls back to the product’s first photo.

Which means a shopper who abandoned a Rust coloured chair can get an email showing a grey one. Same product, wrong photo, and the single most important element in the message is now lying to them. No amount of subject line testing fixes that, because the fix is in the catalogue and not in the sending tool. This is one of the most common questions we get from merchants who have already installed one of the apps above and cannot work out why the email looks wrong.

Rubik Variant Images is ours and it is not a cart recovery app, so it is not in the table and it never will be. What it does is the upstream half: it maps a full image set to each variant through Shopify metafields, with an AI auto assign step for catalogues too big to sort by hand, so the cart, the checkout and the recovery email all pull the correct photo. 5.0 stars across 410 reviews, free plan for one product. Have a look at the live demo store or the getting started guide. Stores built the other way round, one product per colour instead of one product with many colours, want Rubik Combined Listings to group those separate products into a single listing with swatches.

We wrote up the cart specific version of this in why the wrong variant image shows in the Shopify cart. It takes about ten minutes to check whether it affects you.

How to choose, in one rule

Pick by where your buyers are and what a message costs you, not by feature count.

• Under 50 orders a month: the free built in automation. Add nothing. Seriously.
• Growing, mostly Western buyers, want flows without a consultant: Omnisend at $16.
• Segmentation matters and you have someone to build it: Klaviyo at $20.
• Buyers in WhatsApp first markets: CK at $9.99 or Dondy at $6.99, and budget for the per message rate.
• SMS is already a revenue line: TxtCart Growth at $79. Recart at $299 only when SMS is a department.
• Tiny budget, want everything: Cartly free, then $14.99.

And the opinion this category will not like: a recovery app is a tax you pay on a checkout that is worse than it should be. Before you spend $79 a month chasing people who left, spend an afternoon on why they leave. Shipping cost surprises, a slow mobile product page, a checkout that asks for an account. Our conversion priorities guide ranks the fixes, checkout rules apps handle the shipping and payment logic, and the free conversion rate calculator shows what a half point improvement is worth against what recovery emails actually return. Recovery is the last lever, not the first.

FAQ

Does Shopify recover abandoned carts without an app?

Yes. Shopify includes an abandoned checkout email automation on every plan at no extra cost. You set a delay, edit the template and switch it on. It sends one email to everyone with no branching, no SMS and no segmentation, which is exactly why the paid apps exist. Turn it on before you buy anything.

Which abandoned cart app should I use for a Shopify store?

Omnisend for most stores: 4.7 stars across 2,936 reviews, Built for Shopify, free up to 250 contacts and $16 a month after that, with email, SMS and push in one flow builder. Klaviyo at 4.7 across 2,926 reviews if segmentation is the point. CK at 5.0 across 278 reviews if your buyers live in WhatsApp. Cartly at $14.99 if budget is the constraint.

How many recovery messages should I send?

Three is the common shape: one within an hour, one the next day, one after two or three days. The first message does most of the work because the intent is still warm. Whether the last one carries a discount is a margin decision, and sending a code to someone who would have bought anyway is the most expensive habit here.

Is SMS or email better for cart recovery?

Email is nearly free to send and gets ignored more. SMS gets read and costs real money per message, roughly $0.009 per SMS on TxtCart’s Growth plan plus carrier fees, so a bad send costs you twice. Most stores should run email first, add web push because it is free, and only add SMS once the average order value makes a paid message worth sending.

Why does the wrong product photo show in my abandoned cart email?

Because the line item thumbnail comes from the variant the shopper added, and Shopify allows one featured image per variant. If that variant has no image assigned, Shopify falls back to the product’s first photo, which is usually a different colour. It is a catalogue problem rather than an email problem. Rubik Variant Images, which is ours, assigns image sets per variant and runs 5.0 stars across 410 reviews.

Do abandoned cart apps work with Shopify checkout extensibility?

Recovery apps operate after the checkout, on the abandoned checkout record, so they are not affected by checkout extensibility the way checkout customisation apps are. What does matter is consent capture: you can only message someone who gave you an email address or phone number, which is why popup led tools like Privy and the marketing consent settings in your checkout are part of the same problem.

What is a realistic cart recovery rate?

Anyone quoting you a single number is selling something. It swings with price point, category, paid traffic share and discounting. The useful measure is incremental revenue against app cost plus message cost, worked out from your own numbers after a month of sending. Track that, ignore the case studies.

Related reading

• Best Shopify email marketing apps 2026
• Shopify checkout links, and what they are actually for
• Best Shopify apps to increase sales in 2026
• How variant images cut return rates
• How to display only the relevant variant images on Shopify

Fix the sending tool second. Fix the photo in the email first, because that is the part the shopper looks at before they read a word.