The short version
These two cost almost the same and are aimed at different halves of the same problem. Wholesale Lock Manager is a mature, flat-priced lock built for trade catalogues, from a developer whose other app does wholesale pricing. Ours is built around what happens when somebody has to request access.
If you already run Wholesale Helper's pricing app, stop reading and use theirs. Two apps from one developer that were designed to sit together will beat a better app that was not, and no feature on our list is worth the seam you would be introducing between two vendors.
If you do not, the question is narrower than it looks. Both apps will hide a price and take away a buy button. What separates them is whether your trade buyers are people you can already name, and whether you want the catalogue to be findable at all.
Where Wholesale Lock Manager is genuinely better
The pricing problem it solves next door. This is the real argument and it is not close. Gating answers "who may buy this"; it does not answer "what does it cost them". If a trade buyer needs to see one price where a retail customer sees another, you need pricing software as well as a lock, and theirs is designed against theirs. Wholesale Pricing Discount B2B and their order form app are built by the same people to sit beside this one. Ours is not, and a lock plus a separate pricing app from a different vendor is more moving parts than any merchant should take on without a reason. We do not do wholesale pricing, we are not planning to, and pretending the gap is small would be dishonest.
Track record. On the App Store since January 2018, 4.9 stars across 207 reviews, 95 percent of them at five stars, and Built for Shopify. The recurring note in the good reviews is support that answers inside a day and an app that merchants describe as clean and flexible to work with. Six one-star reviews in eight years is a normal tail and worth reading rather than waving away. Same argument as anywhere else on this site: that is evidence, and we do not have it yet.
It can keep a store off a platform upgrade. One of their reviews puts it better than we could: the merchant did not think it made sense to move to Shopify Plus, and used this instead to get what they needed. That is a real and underrated thing for a lock to be worth, and it applies to ours too. Worth weighing against the monthly fee before you compare either app to the other.
Search visibility control. Their listing includes hiding products from site search and from Google. Ours deliberately does the opposite, and the whole design premise here is that the catalogue stays indexable while only buying is gated. That is the argument this product is built on and it has a real cost. If you actually want products out of search results, we are the wrong tool and they are the right one. A trade catalogue with negotiated pricing in it is a very reasonable thing to want out of Google, and merchants who want that should not be talked out of it by us.
Bot checkouts on free products. Their listing names protection for free products against bot checkouts, which is a specific problem a specific kind of store has, and nothing on our side addresses it.
Where we differ
Buyers who arrive unknown. Their model fits a trade list you already have: tag the accounts, lock the range, let the right people in. Ours fits the case where the trade buyer has never spoken to you. That is a request form with your own questions on it, a queue that records which page they asked from and what they had picked out, auto-approve rules that let through anything matching an email domain or a country without a human reading it, and a draft order at the end if the negotiation needs to be a negotiation.
The test is simple. If you can write down the names of the accounts that should get in, their model is the correct shape and everything above is overhead. If the accounts that should get in are mostly people who have not found you yet, that machinery is the product and a lock alone will not do it.
Tiers rather than in-or-out. Distributor, stockist and sample account, each seeing something different, with a Shopify customer tag written per tier so segments, discounts and Flow can act on the tier name. The highest tier somebody holds is the one that answers a lock, and renaming a tier never demotes anyone who already earned it. If your trade relationships are one grade rather than several, this is weight you are not using.
Launches, which is not what a trade catalogue needs. Locks that open and close on a schedule, a countdown on the locked page, codes that expire, a waitlist that tells somebody their position, and attribution on every redemption so a campaign can be counted. A wholesale catalogue is a standing fact about your business rather than an event, so most of this is irrelevant to the job their app is aimed at. It matters here only if the same store also runs drops, which is more common than it sounds.
Where each lock stops. Ours hides the price and the buy button on the storefront, 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 remain readable from a cache or a product feed after we hide it. Their listing does not describe checkout gating at all, so where our locks do reach that far this has become a difference between the two apps rather than a limit on both. Where a product must be genuinely unbuyable under all of the above, unpublish it in Shopify rather than trusting any lock to do it.
The flash. Ours hides the price in CSS written into the head before the theme paints. We have not tested theirs and are not going to publish a guess about somebody else's rendering. Install both and look, on a throttled connection with the cache cleared, because a price that appears for half a second before vanishing is the failure that actually costs you.
Money, exactly. Theirs is $9.99 a month, or $107.89 a year, which works out near $8.99 a month if you pay up front. Ours is $14.99 or $34.99 a month. On the entry comparison they are cheaper by $5 a month, or by $6 if you take their annual price, and that gap does not close as you grow, because both apps are flat. This is one of the few comparisons on this site where nobody's pricing model punishes a store for succeeding, so the money is a straightforward $60 to $72 a year and should probably not decide it.
The honest test
Both have a free way in, and they are not the same kind of free. Theirs is a Free Forever plan restricted to development and trial stores, so it will let you build the thing but not run it. Ours is a free plan on a live store with no card and no expiry, limited to one lock and five codes. Theirs also carries a 7-day trial of the paid tier, which is the way to see it working on real traffic.
Put both on the same theme against the same product. Then answer two questions in this order, because the first one settles most of these.
Do your trade buyers already exist in your customer list? If yes, theirs is enough, the integration with their pricing app is worth more than anything on our features page, and you should buy it. If no, and the job is recruiting trade buyers who have never heard of you, that is the case ours is built for and the one their listing does not describe.
Do you want this catalogue in Google? If you want it out, they do that and we refuse to. If you want it in, with prices hidden and a way for a stranger to ask, that is us, and it is the only reason this page exists.
Two defensible answers. Most stores know which one they are within a minute of being asked, and the apps are cheap enough that guessing wrong costs a month.
The wider category, including several apps neither of us mentions, is in the roundup, which is also where to look if the answer to both questions above turned out to be "neither of these".