---
title: "Sami B2B Lock alternatives: Inner Circle vs Sami B2B Lock"
description: "The most-reviewed lock in the category against a new one: where 927 reviews are the whole argument, and the two places the apps are built for different jobs."
source: https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/sami-b2b-lock/
---

[Home](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/) [Compare](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/) Sami B2B Lock alternatives: Inner Circle vs Sami B2B Lock

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# Sami B2B Lock alternatives: Inner Circle vs Sami B2B Lock

The most-reviewed lock in the category against a new one: where 927 reviews are the whole argument, and the two places the apps are built for different jobs.

|  | Sami B2B Lock, Password Protect | Inner Circle |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price | $9.99 to $29.99 a month, or $99 to $299 a year | $14.99 or $34.99 a month, flat |
| Tied to your Shopify plan | Tiers carry Shopify plan names; the listing prices them as suggestions | No |
| Rating | 4.9 stars, 927 reviews | Too few reviews to mean anything yet |
| On the App Store since | 2023 | August 2026 |
| Built for Shopify | Yes | No |
| Free way to try it | 15-day trial; the free plan is one lock on development stores | Free plan, no card, no time limit, works on a live store |
| Hides locked content from Google | Yes, from the Basic tier upwards | No, keeping the shop indexed is the point |
| Request-and-approve queue | Not described on the listing | Yes, with auto-approve rules on Starter |
| Interest list to draft order | Not described on the listing | Yes, on Starter |
| Campaign attribution per code | Not described on the listing | Yes |

Sami B2B Lock, Password Protect is by Samita; every figure above was read off [its App Store listing](https://apps.shopify.com/b2b-wholesale-lock-hide-price) on 15 August 2026. Prices, ratings and features move, and nothing in this build can check somebody else's listing the way it checks ours. Where this table and the listing disagree, the listing is right, and please [tell us](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/contact/) so it gets fixed.

“Not described on the listing” means exactly that. It is not a claim the app cannot do something, only that we would not assert it without a source, and neither should a comparison written by a competitor.

## The short version

Sami is the most-reviewed app in this category by a wide margin: 927 of them at 4.9 stars, against our almost none. If you want the option that the largest number of merchants have already tried and stayed with, that is the entire argument and it is a good one.

Choose ours if buyers have to *ask* for access and the work is what happens after they do, or if you need locked products to stay in Google rather than disappear from it. Those are the two places these apps are built for different jobs, and everywhere else the honest answer is that they overlap.

That overlap is worth being blunt about. If your requirement is "hide the price until somebody logs in or types a passcode", both apps do it, one of them has 927 merchants vouching for it, and the rest of this page is detail you do not need.

## Where Sami is genuinely better

**Evidence, and a lot of it.** Nine hundred and twenty-seven reviews since June 2023 is the strongest track record on this list. It is worth pausing on the rate rather than the total: Locksmith has been collecting reviews since 2014 and has 286. Sami has more than three times that in a fifth of the time. Whatever you think of the app, a great many merchants installed it, kept it, and went back to write about it. We have days and a handful.

What the reviews say is consistent, and it is mostly about people rather than features: support described as responsive, patient and quick, merchants reporting the app still working two years on, and one reviewer noting hidden lock problems at the start that the team then resolved. That last one is the honest shape of a lock app. They are fiddly to get right on a real theme, and what matters is whether somebody answers when it is wrong.

**Price at the entry tier.** $9.99 a month against our $14.99, or $99 a year against paying us monthly. On a smaller store, if the feature lists both cover what you need, they are cheaper and that is the end of it.

**Hiding locked content from search engines.** From their paid tiers up, a locked price can be kept out of Google. Ours deliberately will not do this, and for some merchants that makes us the wrong app rather than the different one. If you are gating a trade catalogue that must not be publicly visible at all, you want their behaviour and not ours, and no argument on this site should talk you out of it.

**Built for Shopify.** They carry the badge and we do not yet. It is a real signal about performance and admin integration, and it is one we have to earn rather than argue our way around.

**Nothing to work out about the tiers.** Their three paid plans list the same features. You are priced against your Shopify plan rather than buying capability as you climb, so there is no matrix to read and no risk of discovering the thing you need is one tier up. Ours has two plans that genuinely differ, which is more honest about what you are paying for and also more to think about.

## Where we differ

**The asking direction.** Their listing describes keys: passwords, logins, secret URLs, customer tags and email addresses, with date and time limits on a lock. That is the right shape when you already know who your buyers are and the job is letting them in. Ours is built around the other direction, where a stranger arrives and has to ask.

That means an interest list they can build without an account and which survives a reload, a form you design with your own questions, a queue that records which page the request came from and what they had picked out, auto-approve rules that let through anything matching a country or an email domain without a human, and an approval that either issues a code or turns what they wanted into a Shopify draft order you price by hand. Nothing on their listing describes a queue, so if recruiting buyers is the actual problem, that is the gap worth testing rather than taking our word for.

**What the lock is for.** Theirs is built to make things disappear, ours to make them wantable. Locked products here stay browsable and indexable, and the gate sits at the till rather than the front door, so a stranger can find the product, want it, and have somewhere to ask. That is a [deliberate choice](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/members-only-store-google-can-find/) with a real cost, and the cost is that we cannot hide anything from Google. Their "hide price on Google" line is a feature we will never ship, because shipping it would undo the reason to use us.

**The free plan.** Both apps list one, and they are not the same kind. Theirs is one lock, with the full feature set free on development stores, which is an unlimited trial rather than a free tier and will not carry a live shop. Ours is one lock and five codes on a live store, with no card and no clock. Neither is generous. Only one of them survives your store starting to take money, and that is the single strongest thing on this page in our favour.

**Pricing shape as you grow.** Their tiers are named after Shopify plans and the listing prices them as suggestions rather than requirements, so read that before you assume either the good or the bad reading of it. Ours is flat: Starter costs the same on Basic as it does on Plus. On Basic they are $5 a month cheaper than our Starter; on Advanced, $29.99 against our $14.99, we are half their price for the tier most stores actually need. Which comparison applies to you is most of the money question.

**Named tiers rather than in or out.** Distributor, stockist, sample account, each seeing something different, with a Shopify customer tag written on redemption so segments, discounts and Flow can act on the tier name. Renaming a tier never demotes anyone who earned it. If your gating is one grade of buyer, this is weight you are not using.

**Drops and campaigns.** Scheduled locks that open as well as close, a countdown on the locked page, a reminder signup that sends its own announcement, expiring codes, a waitlist with a position and referrals, member invites, and attribution per creator. Their listing describes date and time conditions on a lock, which is the first of those and not the rest. If you never run a launch, do not pay for any of it.

**Where our lock stops.** Ours governs the storefront: the price and the buy button go, and who holds access is decided on our server, so the page cannot be edited into granting it and no code or tier can be forged. It reaches the checkout as well: a direct cart link to a locked product is refused at the cart rather than paid for. Two limits on that worth knowing before you pay us. It covers locks that name their products and locks covering the whole store, not locks pointed at a collection or at conditions like a tag or a vendor. And if our check cannot run, Shopify completes the sale rather than hold up your customer. A price may still be readable from a cache or a product feed. If a product must be genuinely unbuyable under all of that rather than merely hidden, unpublish it in Shopify, which does that properly, and buy no lock from anyone for it.

## The honest test

Their free plan will not run on a live store, so the comparison you can actually run is their fifteen-day trial against our free plan. Put both on the same theme, lock the same product, and load it on a throttled connection with the cache cleared to see which one paints the price before the theme does.

Then send yourself through the access flow as a stranger, not as the person who configured it. Arrive from a search result rather than from your admin, on a different browser, and see how far you get before you know what to do next.

If the stranger has a code, both apps will serve you and theirs has nine hundred more reasons to be trusted. If the stranger has nothing and needs to ask, that is the twenty minutes where the two apps stop resembling each other.

One more thing worth weighing, because it is not a feature. Choosing a three-year-old app with 927 reviews over a two-week-old app is not caution, it is arithmetic, and a merchant who does it is behaving sensibly. The only good reason to pick us over that is that you need the thing their listing does not describe. If you do not, buy Sami.

The wider field, including apps neither of these pages covers, is in [the roundup](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/shopify-access-control-apps-compared/).

## Other comparisons

[Inner Circle vs Locksmith](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/locksmith/) [Inner Circle vs BSS B2B Lock](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/bss-b2b-lock/) [Inner Circle vs Wholesale Lock Manager](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/wholesale-lock-manager/) [Inner Circle vs Ymq B2B Lock](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/ymq-b2b-lock/) [Inner Circle vs Atelier](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/atelier/) [Inner Circle vs EQL](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/eql/) [Inner Circle vs Locket](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/compare/locket/) [All of them at once](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/guides/shopify-access-control-apps-compared/)

## Try it against whichever you are comparing

The free plan is one lock and five codes, with no time limit and no card. Enough to put both apps on the same theme and watch which one paints the price.

[Install on Shopify](https://apps.shopify.com/inner-circle) [Watch it work first](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/tutorial/) [Ask whether it fits your store](https://innercircle.monochrome.digital/contact/)