heysteff vs. Judge.me: where the question reaches your customer.

Judge.me publishes its collection channels on its own features page: email, SMS, links and QR codes, an on-store form, and push notifications through an integration with PushOwl. The word WhatsApp doesn't appear on its pricing page, its features page or its Shopify App Store listing. We're not saying it's impossible to add with a third-party app (they list SMS and push integrations a merchant can combine), only that it isn't a channel they publish.

heysteff's reviews were built the other way around: the request goes out over WhatsApp, with Meta's official API or your own number, and if the store doesn't have a number yet it can go out through heysteff's shared number. Email doesn't disappear from the picture (heysteff's web plans handle Gmail as just another channel), but the review request goes where people reply the same day.

This isn't an aesthetic preference. An email request competes with the entire inbox; a WhatsApp request lands in the same place where the customer wrote to the store to ask about their order. If your business already sells and coordinates deliveries over WhatsApp, asking for the review by email means switching channels right when you're asking for a favor.

With Judge.me the customer receives the order and lands on a review form: stars, text, a photo or video if they want. It's a short, proven path, and for anyone who just wants review volume it works well.

In heysteff there's no form. The review is built in the chat with a fixed script: it asks for the rating, waits for the answer, asks for the comment and then for the photo or video. Each step genuinely waits (if the customer only half answers, whatever is there gets saved instead of the review being discarded), and the AI agent stays paused while the capture runs so it doesn't talk over the script.

Using a script rather than the agent improvising was a decision made after watching it fail: a free-running model recycled comments from the history, skipped the photo and told the customer it had saved an image that never arrived. The script doesn't make things up because it doesn't write the review, it only collects it.

Judge.me publishes coupons and referrals on its Awesome plan at 15 dollars a month, to incentivize reviews in general. They don't publish that the coupon can be made conditional on the review including a photo or video.

heysteff promises the discount when it asks for the photo and delivers it only to whoever answers that request with a photo or a video. The code can be a fixed one the store chooses or a unique one minted in Shopify on the spot, and it goes out attached to the thank-you message, not in a separate email. If the rating was low, the script never asks for a photo and therefore never offers the reward: nobody can claim something that was never promised.

Both let you moderate before publishing. The difference is what you can do next. Judge.me publishes AI-assisted review replies on its paid plan, which means replying on the product page, in front of everyone.

heysteff also lets you reply privately over the same WhatsApp where the customer left the review, and it alerts the team by email when a low rating comes in, with the customer's full text and the time left in WhatsApp's 24-hour window. A one-star review is often a delivery or sizing problem that can still be fixed; the value is in getting there before it turns into a return.

In several ways, and they're worth spelling out in full. The first is price: its permanent free plan already includes unlimited product and store reviews, unlimited photos and videos, the display widgets and Google rich snippets. Its paid plan costs 15 dollars a month, and they themselves write that this is the most you can ever pay them. heysteff's Shopify app has no fixed fee on its Free plan, but charges for usage from the first request: 0.10 dollars per request on Free, 0.04 on Starter (19 dollars a month), 0.03 on Growth (59) and 0.025 on Pro (99).

The second is display. Judge.me publishes sixteen widgets, video and testimonial carousels, an all-reviews page, questions and answers, badges, a verified trust badge, AI review summaries and support for 38 languages. heysteff has a display widget with structured data, but not that catalog.

The third is import and syndication: they bring in reviews from Yotpo, Loox, Amazon, Etsy, AliExpress and spreadsheets, and sync them to Google Shopping, Meta, TikTok Shop and the Shop app. If you're arriving with years of reviews in another tool, that migration path is already built over there.

And the fourth is track record: they've been around since 2015, have the Built for Shopify badge, more than 47,000 reviews with a 5.0 average, 24/7 chat and email support, and published SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. If your buying criteria are maturity and backing, that's a real advantage and we won't argue with it.

Beyond the channel, there are three. The first is that the reviews module lives inside a customer support platform: the same conversation where the review is captured can be used to answer questions with the AI agent or recover an abandoned cart, and with heysteff's web plans also to take payments or book appointments. Judge.me is a reviews app and doesn't try to be anything else.

The second is asking past orders for reviews. heysteff goes through your Shopify history and requests the missing ones, matching by contact and by order so it never asks the same person twice or asks about a product they already reviewed. The window reaches as far back as Shopify returns orders without the extended permission: 60 days.

The third is that heysteff's reviews module doesn't depend on Shopify. If you sell outside Shopify, with heysteff's web plans you can still capture reviews through the API or over WhatsApp, and publish them wherever you want.

Also useful: learn about heysteff's Shopify app in detail, or compare heysteff with Leadsales, Mercately and ManyChat.