The Ecomm Analyst

Better Reports is one of the stronger custom reporting apps on Shopify. It reaches data Shopify’s native reports will not touch, including tags, metafields, and line-item properties, and the report builder behaves a lot like a pivot table once you get used to it. The complaint I hear is almost never about capability. It is about the pricing model.

Better Reports charges according to your Shopify plan rather than your usage. That means $19.90 a month on Basic, $39.90 on Grow, $149.90 on Advanced, and $299.90 on Plus, with a 14-day trial. The jump from Grow to Advanced is the one that stings, because upgrading your Shopify plan for reasons that have nothing to do with reporting quadruples your reporting bill overnight. Multi-store setups are billed per store, with discounts available on request.

If that model does not suit you, here is what else is worth looking at.

1. Report Pundit

Report Pundit is the most direct substitute. Similar breadth of data access, a large library of prebuilt reports, custom report building, scheduled email delivery, Google Sheets export, and multi-store and multi-currency support. It also offers a custom report service where their team builds the report for you, which is genuinely useful if you know the number you want but not how to express it.

Pricing is tiered by Shopify plan in the same way, but the tiers sit lower and there is a free option for very small stores. Check their pricing page for current numbers rather than trusting a comparison table, including their own.

2. Mipler

Mipler covers much the same ground with a cleaner interface and generally sits below Better Reports on price. It handles the standard sales, inventory, customer, and tax reporting, exports to Sheets and email on a schedule, and supports custom fields. It is a reasonable pick if Better Reports feels like more machinery than you need and you mostly want scheduled operational reports landing in the right inboxes.

Where it is weaker is the deep custom work. If your reports depend on unusual metafield logic or heavily nested calculations, test it against a real report before you switch.

3. Shopify’s built-in reports

Worth saying out loud because people skip past it. If you are on Advanced or Plus, you are already paying for a fairly capable reporting layer, including custom reports and filtering. A meaningful number of stores buy a reporting app to produce something the native reports could have produced, then pay for both.

Before you buy anything, list the five reports you actually open every week and try to build them natively. If four of them work, your problem is smaller and cheaper than you thought.

4. ThoughtMetric

ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, is not a general purpose report builder and will not replace Better Reports for inventory or tax reporting. It belongs on this list because a large share of the custom reports operators build are really attribution reports in disguise. Revenue by channel, ad spend against orders, which campaigns produced which customers.

Those are the reports that break hardest in a spreadsheet builder, because Shopify does not hold the ad data and the platforms all claim the same orders. ThoughtMetric handles that reconciliation directly, at $99 a month based on pageviews or $83 a month billed annually, with all features available on every tier and a 14-day trial. If half your custom reports are channel performance reports, that half is better solved here.

5. Metabase

Metabase is the build-it-yourself route. Point it at a database holding your Shopify data and you can construct anything you want with SQL or the visual query builder, with no per-report or per-dashboard charges. The open source edition is free if you self-host, and the managed Starter plan runs $100 a month including five users, with additional users at $6 each.

The catch is that Metabase does not connect to Shopify on its own. You need somewhere to land the data and something to move it there, which means a warehouse and a pipeline. That is real work and real ongoing cost. Worth it if you have several data sources to combine, hard to justify if you just want a better sales report.

Picking between these

If you like Better Reports and only object to the price, Report Pundit or Mipler will get you most of the way for less. If you are on Plus and paying $299.90, work out whether the native reports plus one focused tool covers you, because that combination is often cheaper and easier to maintain.

Split the list of reports you actually need into store operations and marketing performance. Operational reporting belongs in a Shopify reporting app. Marketing performance reporting rarely works there, no matter how good the builder is. For more on that second category, see Report Pundit alternatives for Shopify custom reporting.