Shopify inventory and reorder apps, honestly compared

If you ran Stocky and now need something else, the shortlist is shorter than it looks. Search results keep returning the same five names: Inventory Planner, Prediko, Assisty, Merchbees and Cogsy. They are not five versions of the same thing. Inventory Planner and Cogsy sell themselves as forecasting and purchasing platforms for teams with someone whose job title includes planning. Prediko positions itself as a Shopify-native planning and purchase order tool. Assisty is a reporting app that layers restock suggestions on top of your sales data. Merchbees is a focused inventory reporting and low stock alert app.

So pick by the job, not the feature grid. Most merchants used a thin slice of Stocky. If you used it to raise purchase orders, receive stock against them and keep supplier costs in one place, you need a purchasing suite and you should look at Inventory Planner, Prediko or Cogsy. If you used it to tell you which SKUs were about to run dry, you need an alerting tool and the heavier platforms will cost you setup time you will never get back. Restoc, when it launches, is built for the second job only. That is the honest frame for everything below.

First, name the job you lost

Write down the three things you opened your old inventory tool to do. Not the things it could do. The things you did on a Monday morning.

For a lot of stores with 50 to 2,000 SKUs, that list reads: check what is low, work out how much to order, send the order to the supplier by email. Only the middle item is maths. The first is a monitoring problem. The third rarely needs software at all.

If your list includes landed cost tracking, multi-warehouse transfers, barcode receiving or purchase order approval steps, you are in platform territory and you should budget for onboarding time as well as subscription cost. If it does not, a platform will bury the one number you need under nine screens you will not open twice.

The five apps and what each one is for

Inventory planner

The replenishment and forecasting suite most often named as the successor for larger catalogues. It is built around demand forecasts, purchase order creation and supplier lead times, with reporting across locations and sales channels. It expects you to feed it structure: suppliers, lead times, minimum order quantities, seasonality assumptions. If you have that discipline and enough SKU volume to justify it, it does the widest job on this list. If you do not, you will spend your first month in configuration.

Prediko

A Shopify-native inventory planning and purchase order tool aimed at direct-to-consumer brands. The pitch is forecasting plus ordering in one place, built for merchants who plan buys in cycles rather than reacting daily. Closer to Inventory Planner in intent than to a simple alerting app, with a setup that assumes you want to manage the whole purchasing loop inside the tool.

Assisty

A reporting and analytics app first. It reads your Shopify sales history and produces the reports Shopify's own admin does not, including restock and inventory forecast reports. Choose it if your real complaint was losing visibility into sell-through and you want flexible reporting more than you want a purchasing workflow.

Merchbees

The narrowest of the five. Inventory value, stock counts by location and low stock alerts, delivered as focused apps rather than a planning platform. If your question is "tell me what is low, by location, without a project", Merchbees is the closest of the mainstream options to that brief.

Cogsy

An inventory operations tool built around demand planning, purchase orders and handling demand you cannot fulfil, with backorder workflows rather than silent stockouts. It assumes a brand that is scaling and wants ordering decisions, cash commitments and supplier timelines in one system. It is a change of process, not a widget.

Where Restoc is narrower

Restoc does one job. It watches stock and tells you before a SKU runs out.

Here is what that means in practice when it launches. Restoc installs through Shopify OAuth and pulls your real-time inventory levels and historical sales through webhooks plus a scheduled sync. It calculates a reorder point per SKU from a sales velocity window you choose, 7, 14 or 30 days, and a lead time you enter for that SKU. When a SKU crosses its reorder point, it fires an alert by email or to a Slack webhook. Once a week it produces a reorder report, viewable in the app and exportable as CSV, listing every SKU below its reorder point with a suggested order quantity. The dashboard shows current stock, days of inventory remaining and reorder status per active SKU. Billing runs in three tiers, Starter, Growth and Pro, with SKU caps enforced by tier, and there is a 60-day free trial designed so at least one full weekly reorder cycle completes before the first charge, with annual billing offered at signup.

Now the part comparison posts usually skip. Restoc does not raise purchase orders. It does not store supplier records, costs or minimum order quantities. It does not do barcode receiving, stock transfers between locations, landed cost, or scenario planning for a seasonal buy. It is a web app, with no mobile app and no browser extension. If any of those are on your Monday morning list, one of the five apps above is the better buy and we would rather you found that out here than after an install.

What Restoc is built to do is remove the class of mistake where a hero SKU quietly hits zero because nobody looked. Merchants who catch a reorder point early can avoid that, and the cost of missing it is rarely small.

A quick way to choose

1. Count your SKUs and your suppliers. Many suppliers with real lead time variance points to a planning suite. Few suppliers and steady lead times points to alerts.
2. Ask who will own the tool. If nobody has half a day a week for it, do not buy a platform. It will go stale and stale forecasts are worse than none.
3. Check whether you need purchase orders inside the app or just an email with quantities. This single question separates the list in half.
4. Decide what a miss costs you. If a stockout on one line ruins the month, pay for monitoring even if you also run a planning tool.
5. Run the trial against a real week. Not a demo store. The only useful test is whether the tool flagged the SKU you would have flagged yourself, before you flagged it.

It is also fine to run two. A planning suite for the quarterly buy and a lightweight watcher for the daily surprise is a reasonable stack, and the watcher should be the cheap half.

What we will not claim

Restoc is not launched yet, so there are no customers to quote and no results to publish. What we can tell you is the scope, which is above, and the boundary, which is that everything in the purchasing workflow sits outside it. If that boundary moves, we will say so on this blog with a date attached.