Best Shopify Low Stock Alert Apps (2026)

The cheapest tool in this category costs nothing, and it is already installed on most stores. That is the first thing worth knowing before you compare feature grids, because a low stock alert is a small job and this is a market where the small, cheap answer is often the correct one. Disclosure up front: we build StockCue, which is a planning tool rather than an alert app. It appears below with that caveat attached rather than dressed up as a peer.

Alerting is not planning

An alert app answers exactly one question: has this product crossed a number. It does not know how fast the product sells, how long your supplier takes, or how many units to buy when the email lands. Those belong to a different category of tool at a different price, and buying the expensive one to solve the cheap problem is the common mistake here.

So work out which question you are asking first. If your reorder quantities are already settled and your suppliers are reliable, you need a notification and nothing else. If you open the email and think "how many should I order", the alert was never the missing piece.

The free options first

Shopify's own Managing inventory documentation is unusually direct about this. It tells merchants that if they need to receive direct notifications of low stock levels, they should install an inventory alert app from the Shopify App Store, and it separately notes that Shopify Flow lets you automate tasks and processes in your store, including receiving notifications when inventory levels are low. Two routes, both named by Shopify, one of which costs nothing.

Shopify Flow is a free app available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. Older advice calling it a Plus-only feature is out of date, so the free route is open to almost every merchant reading this and the only thing it costs is an afternoon.

Where that afternoon goes is worth being straight about. Flow's published trigger reference covers a product variant going out of stock, coming back in stock, and having its inventory quantity changed, plus triggers for inventory items and transfers. There is no trigger for "inventory fell below a threshold I chose." The nearest buildable equivalent is the quantity-changed trigger followed by a condition step that evaluates the new quantity, so the threshold is something you construct rather than type into a field. Build it against one product and confirm that condition behaves the way you expect before rolling it across a catalogue. The low stock alerts setup guide covers the native routes in full.

The comparison

Every price and rating below was read on the apps' Shopify App Store listings on September 6, 2026 and will drift. On that date: Assisty showed 4.8 stars from 356 reviews, Stockbot Low Stock Alert 4.9 from 40, LSA Low Stock Alert 4.5 from 32, and StockCue, which we build, zero reviews and no rating at all. Shopify Flow carries no comparable rating here because it is Shopify's own free automation app rather than a paid competitor in this set.

One app that shows up in other 2026 roundups is missing because its App Store listing returned a 404 when we went to read it on September 6, 2026. Others are missing because nobody here has read their listing directly, and a roundup that copies numbers from other roundups is how a stale price survives for years.

The apps

Shopify Flow (free)

The honest default for a merchant who does not mind building a workflow. You get the out-of-stock, back-in-stock and quantity-changed triggers, and you assemble the threshold yourself as a condition. There is no per-product threshold field to fill in, so a catalogue with genuinely different thresholds per SKU becomes real workflow maintenance rather than a five-minute setup. That maintenance, not the licence fee, is what the paid apps are charging for.

Stockbot Low Stock Alert

Positioned as notifications when stock runs low, plus forecasting to plan ahead. As of September 2026 the free plan sent a store-wide low stock alert only, daily or weekly, for up to 200 products; the $9/mo Alerts plan added store, product, variant, collection and location level alerts with an hourly option and a 10,000-product ceiling; and a $25/mo Forecasting plan added demand forecasting and replenishment recommendations. It showed 4.9 stars from 40 reviews. The $9 tier is the one to look at for granular alerting without a planning tool attached.

LSA Low Stock Alert

The narrowest and cheapest option here: email alerts for items low in stock, nothing else in the box. Pricing as of September 2026 was tiered purely by catalogue size, at $5.99/mo for 300 products, $9.99 for 500, $19.99 for 1,000 and $29.99 for 2,000, and it showed 4.5 stars from 32 reviews. Read that shape carefully, because a 1,500-SKU store pays more here than it would for tools that do considerably more. For a small, stable catalogue it is the least you can spend and still get a push notification.

Assisty

Not an alert app, but worth naming because plenty of merchants end up here. It describes itself as AI-powered inventory management for multi-location brands, covering forecasting, reorder points, purchase order automation and replenishment. As of September 2026 it had a free tier, a $19/mo paid entry point, and 4.8 stars from 356 reviews, the largest review base in this comparison. If the alert is only the first of several things you want, this is the strongest-evidenced place to start.

StockCue (ours), with the caveat

StockCue is a planning tool that happens to alert. It raises the alert against a reorder point computed from 24 months of sales history and your supplier's lead time rather than a number you typed in, then drafts the purchase order behind it. The caveats in the order they should matter: zero reviews on September 6, 2026, against 356 for Assisty and 40 for Stockbot; pricing tiered by SKU count rather than flat; and email alerts absent from the Free plan, starting at Starter with a daily send limit. If all you want is an email when a number is crossed, one of the $6 to $9 options above is a better use of your money than we are.

What an alert can't tell you

Every tool on this page fires when stock crosses a number. None of the cheap ones has an opinion about whether that number is still correct. A threshold typed in last spring assumes the product still sells at last spring's rate, so when a SKU's velocity doubles the alert arrives exactly on schedule and far too late. That argument has its own section and diagram in the low stock alerts guide, with the arithmetic in how to calculate reorder points.

If stockouts keep happening on the same few products despite the alerts firing, the alert is not the thing to upgrade. Predicting stockouts before they happen covers the signals that arrive earlier than a threshold does; the forecasting category is compared in the forecasting app roundup, and the category map is the shorter route if you are still unsure what you are shopping for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Shopify send low stock alerts natively?

Not on its own. Shopify's Managing inventory documentation tells merchants that if they need to receive direct notifications of low stock levels, they should install an inventory alert app from the Shopify App Store, and it separately points at Shopify Flow as a way to receive notifications when inventory levels are low. Those two routes, an app or a Flow workflow, are the ones Shopify itself names.

Do you need an app for low stock alerts?

No. Shopify Flow is a free app available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans, and Shopify's own documentation names it as a way to get notified when inventory is low. What a paid alert app sells you is the setup and the per-product control, not the notification itself. As of September 2026 the dedicated alert apps started at around $6 a month.

What's the difference between a low stock alert and a reorder point?

A low stock alert fires when stock crosses a fixed number that somebody typed in. A reorder point is calculated from how fast the product actually sells and how long the supplier actually takes, so it moves when either of those changes. An alert app notifies you about the number you chose; it does not check whether that number is still the right one.

Can Shopify Flow send low stock alerts for free?

Flow is free on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. Its trigger reference lists triggers for a product variant going out of stock, coming back in stock, and having its inventory quantity changed, but there is no trigger for inventory falling below a threshold you define. Threshold logic has to be built as a condition step after the quantity-changed trigger, so test that step on one product before you build the workflow across your catalogue.