The short version
Locksmith is the app to beat in this category and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It has been on the App Store since 2014, it carries Built for Shopify status, and it has more merchants who have stayed than we have merchants.
Choose it if your access rules are intricate, or if you want the safety of an app with a decade of edge cases already found. Choose ours if buyers have to ask for access and the work is what happens after they do, or if your Shopify plan makes per-plan pricing expensive.
Two things are worth knowing before any of the detail, because both of them run against us. Locksmith reaches the checkout from any rule it can express, and adds bot protection there; ours reaches it from some kinds of lock and not others, with nothing aimed at bots. And its prices are offered as suggestions rather than as a rate card, which makes the money argument further down softer than any table can show it. A comparison that put those two in a footnote would be selling you something.
Where Locksmith is genuinely better
Expressiveness. Locksmith's conditions cover customer account tags, email addresses, passcodes, secret links, geographic location, purchase history, date and time, and where none of those fit, custom Liquid or their API. If you can describe your rule, you can probably build it, and the ceiling is your own patience rather than the app's vocabulary. Ours is smaller on purpose: a lock points at a product, a hand-picked set, a collection or the whole store, and it opens to a code, a request, or both. There will be rules Locksmith can express that ours cannot, and "purchase history" is the clearest of them. If your gate is "customers who have spent over a certain amount", we have no way to say that and they do.
It reaches the checkout from anything it can express. Locksmith offers validation at the checkout itself, including bot protection there, and it does that from the same wide vocabulary of conditions. Ours reaches the checkout too now — a direct cart link to a locked product is refused at the cart rather than paid for — but from a narrower set of locks: those naming their products, and those covering the whole store. A lock pointed at a collection, or at conditions like a tag or a vendor, still stops at the storefront. Neither app helps if our check cannot run, because we complete the sale rather than hold up your customer, and a price can still be read from a cache, a search result or a product feed after we have hidden it. If your rule is one of the ones we cannot yet carry to the till, or bots are the threat, this is the clearest reason on the page to buy Locksmith instead; if a product must be unbuyable with absolute certainty, unpublish it in Shopify and buy neither app for it.
Maturity. Twelve years of storefronts means twelve years of themes that broke in unusual ways and were fixed. That is not a feature anyone can ship; it accrues, and the only way to get it is to have been there. We have days. Every theme that fights our lock is a theme nobody has met yet, and on their side it is probably a theme somebody met in 2019.
Evidence. 286 reviews at 4.7, with 92 percent of them at five stars, against our almost none. The recurring theme in the good ones is not a feature, it is the support: prompt answers, and a team that treats an awkward request as ordinary. Around four percent are one-star, which is a normal tail for an app this old and worth reading rather than dismissing. If you are choosing between two apps and one of them has a decade of record you can read, that is a rational reason to pick it, and we would not argue with a merchant who did.
"Pay what feels good." The four listed tiers are suggestions tied to your Shopify plan, and Lightward attaches a note inviting you to ask for something different. We have not tested what happens when a merchant asks, so we are not going to characterise it, but a published invitation to negotiate is unusual and it belongs on this page. It also means the arithmetic below describes the list price and not necessarily your price. Ask them before you believe our table.
Where we differ
The asking direction. Locksmith's model is keys: access follows something the visitor already holds, whether that is a tag, a passcode or a link you sent them. That is the right shape when you already know who your buyers are. Ours is built around the other case, where a stranger arrives, wants in, and has to ask. That is an interest list they can build without an account, a form you design with your own questions on it, a queue that records which page they came from and what they had picked out, auto-approve rules that let the obvious ones through without a human reading them, and an approval that either issues a code or turns what they wanted into a Shopify draft order you price by hand.
If your list already exists, none of that is worth paying for and Locksmith's keys are the whole requirement. If your problem is that the list does not exist yet, it is the entire product and no amount of condition-building substitutes for it.
Pricing shape, and where it crosses. Locksmith is priced against your Shopify plan: $12 a month on Basic, $29 on Grow, $99 on Advanced, $199 on Plus. Ours is $14.99 or $34.99, flat, whatever you are paying Shopify.
On Basic they are cheaper than our Starter by $2.99 a month. On Grow they are cheaper than our Growth plan by $5.99. On Advanced the comparison inverts: $99 against $34.99, so about $768 a year. On Plus it is $199 against $34.99, which is roughly $1,968 a year, and nothing about how you use either app has changed to produce that. It is simply what the two pricing models do as a store grows.
Two honest qualifications. The first is the invitation above: their listed price is not necessarily their price, and a merchant on Plus who asks may not pay $199. The second is that a store on Advanced or Plus is a store with real revenue, and $99 a month is not the deciding number for most of them. The pricing argument is real and it is rarely the argument that should decide this.
Where the free plan sits. Locksmith's free way in is a 15-day trial, which is generous and which ends. Ours is a plan rather than a trial: one lock and five codes, on a live store, with no card and no expiry. Those suit different decisions, and neither is straightforwardly better. A trial is better for evaluating everything at once, because for fifteen days you have the whole app. A free plan is better if the gate you actually need is one lock and you would rather not have a renewal date attached to it. Ours is also the only way to run a real gate on a live store indefinitely without paying anyone, which is worth saying plainly because it is the strongest thing we have to say here.
Launches rather than standing rules. Locksmith is built for a rule that is true for a long time: these customers see this catalogue. Ours has a second half aimed at things that happen on a date. Locks that open and close on a schedule with no republish and no theme edit, a countdown on the locked page, a reminder signup that sends its own announcement when the drop opens, codes that expire so an early-access window really closes, a waitlist that tells someone their position and moves them up when they refer a friend, and attribution on every redemption so a creator campaign can be counted rather than estimated.
If you run launches, that is the difference. If your access rules are a standing fact about your business, it is machinery you will never open, and paying for it would be silly.
What each app is willing to do to Google. Ours keeps locked products browsable and indexable on purpose, because a stranger cannot ask for access to a page they were never shown. That is the argument the whole product is built on, and its cost is the leakage described above. Locksmith gives you the tools to control what a locked visitor sees; what it does with search engines is not something their listing states in those terms, so we are not going to characterise it for them. Read their documentation on that point rather than our summary of it, because it is the kind of claim a competitor gets wrong.
The honest test
Both apps have a free way in, so the comparison does not have to be theoretical and should not be.
Install both on the same theme. Lock the same product with each. Load it on a throttled connection with the cache cleared, and watch whether the price ever paints before it disappears, because that flash is the failure mode that matters and it is theme-specific. Then send yourself through the access flow the way a stranger meets it, not the way the person who configured it does. Use a different browser, arrive from a Google result rather than from your admin, and notice how far you get before you know what to do next.
Then run one more test, because it is the one that used to separate these two apps. Put a locked product in a cart link and open it. Both of us can now be configured to stop you. The question that remains is which rules carry that far: try it with a lock pointed at a collection or a tag, where Locksmith holds and we do not yet. If your gate is that shape, you have your answer and it is not us.
Twenty minutes of that will tell you more than any comparison page written by either vendor, this one included. If the answer comes back Locksmith, buy Locksmith. It is a good app, it has earned its position, and there is no version of this page where pretending otherwise would have served you.
There is a longer version of this argument across the whole category in the roundup, which covers several apps neither of these pages mentions.