Shopify Analytics Plans Compared: What Each Tier Has

Shopify analytics plans differ mainly in report depth, not in the data collected. Every plan tracks your sales, orders and traffic. Lower tiers give you a dashboard and a limited set of standard reports. The Advanced plan, at $399/month on Shopify's monthly pricing, unlocks custom reports and the full report library.

That's the short version. The longer one matters because analytics is where Shopify's plan ladder gets confusing. Report names change, features move between tiers, and the real cost of "better reporting" often shows up in apps rather than in your plan price. This guide walks through what each tier includes, how attribution works, what custom reports can and can't do, and how to decide whether upgrading pays off.

One caution before you start: Shopify adjusts which reports belong to which plan fairly often. Treat the breakdown below as a map, then confirm the current details on Shopify's pricing page and in the Shopify Help Center before you commit. Prices below are the monthly-billing list prices shown on that page for 2026.

How Do Shopify Analytics Plans Differ?

Shopify analytics plans differ in which reports you can open and whether you can build your own. Basic gives you the Analytics overview and a starter set of reports. Grow adds more standard reports. Advanced adds custom reporting and the broadest report library. Plus builds on that for high-volume stores.

Here's the practical layout, using Shopify's current plan names (Basic, Grow, Advanced, Plus) and the base monthly pricing Shopify lists on its pricing page.

Plan	Approx. monthly price	Analytics you can expect
Basic	$39	Overview dashboard, live view, core sales and traffic reports, finance summaries
Grow	$105	Everything in Basic plus more standard reports, such as customer, retention and marketing views
Advanced	$399	Full report library plus custom reports built with the report editor
Plus	From $2,300 on a three-year term (higher on shorter terms)	Everything in Advanced, with higher limits and more control for large operations

Pricing drops if you pay annually, and Shopify changes tiers from time to time, so use the table as a guide to the ladder's shape, not a quote. For the full cost picture beyond analytics, our breakdown of what Shopify really costs in 2026 covers base fees, apps and transaction charges together.

What every plan includes

Regardless of tier, you get the same underlying data collection. Orders, sessions, products sold, customer records and basic traffic sources are all captured from day one. What changes is how much of it you can slice.

• Analytics overview: total sales, sessions, conversion rate and average order value for a date range.
• Live View: a real-time look at visitors, carts and orders happening now.
• Finance summaries: sales, taxes, payments and gross profit-style views for bookkeeping.
• Basic acquisition data: sessions by referrer and traffic source.

For a store doing a few orders a day, that's often enough. The trouble starts when you ask a sharper question, such as "which first-time customers came back within 60 days?" and the report is locked behind a higher tier.

What Grow adds in practice

Grow sits in the middle, and it's the tier people most often skip over. Shopify's report library includes standard reports such as Sales by product, Sales by discount, Sales by channel, Average order value over time, Sessions by landing page, and Customer cohort analysis. On Grow you get a wider slice of that list than on Basic, particularly on the customer and marketing side. Reports like Returning customer rate and Sales attributed to marketing are the sort of views that start appearing here. Exactly which report sits on which plan shifts, so check the Help Center list.

What Plus adds

Plus includes everything in Advanced. The difference is scale and control rather than a separate reporting toolset. Specifically, Plus adds:

• Higher limits: more room for staff accounts, API calls and data volume than lower tiers allow.
• Multiple stores under one organization: you can manage regional or brand storefronts together, though reporting across stores often still means a data warehouse or BI tool.
• Data access for outside systems: more flexibility to pipe orders and customer data into your own analytics stack.
• Dedicated support and launch help: useful when reporting feeds finance or operations teams.

For a single store, Plus is rarely about analytics. It starts to make sense when a data team needs the pipes, not just the reports.

Shopify Analytics Basic vs Advanced: Where the Gap Is

The gap between Shopify analytics Basic vs Advanced comes down to three things: how many reports you can open, whether you can customize them, and how deep the customer and marketing views go. Basic answers "how did we do?" Advanced answers "why, and for whom?"

Reports you get on Basic

On Basic you can see sales over time, orders, top products, sessions and a simple conversion funnel. That covers daily management. You can spot a bad week, see which product leads, and check whether traffic is rising.

What you can't easily do is compare cohorts, break down profit by product with cost data across many dimensions, or build a view that matches how your business actually thinks. If you sell on three channels and run discounts weekly, you'll feel that limit fast.

Shopify advanced plan analytics: what opens up

Shopify advanced plan analytics adds the full library of reports plus the ability to create custom ones. Typical additions include customer cohort analysis, Sales by discount, Sales by channel, and marketing reports that connect campaigns to orders.

The headline feature is custom reports. You pick the metrics and dimensions, set filters, and save the result so it's one click next week. That's a real upgrade if you look at the same slice of data every Monday.

Shopify reports by plan: a quick comparison

Report type	Basic	Grow	Advanced
Sales over time, orders, top products	Yes	Yes	Yes
Traffic and referrer sessions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Finance summaries	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sales by discount, Sales by channel	No	Yes	Yes
Returning customer rate, marketing reports	No	Yes	Yes
Customer cohort analysis	No	No	Yes
Custom reports	No	No	Yes

This matrix reflects how Shopify's report library is generally tiered, but Shopify moves individual reports between plans. If one report is the reason you'd upgrade, check Shopify's Help Center list for that report first.

Shopify Attribution Features: What You Can and Can't Trust

Shopify attribution features show which channels, campaigns and links led to a sale, but they rely mostly on last-click logic and on UTM tags you set up yourself. They're useful for direction. They're not a full picture of the customer journey.

What Shopify attribution actually shows

Inside the analytics area you can break down sessions and sales by referrer, by UTM source, medium and campaign, and by marketing channel when you've connected apps like Meta or Google. That gives you answers such as "email drove a fifth of orders last month," as an illustration.

The quality of that answer depends entirely on your tagging. A newsletter link without UTM parameters lands in "direct" or "unknown," and your email numbers look worse than they are. Build a simple naming habit: one source, one medium, one campaign name, written the same way every time.

Where attribution breaks down

Three limits show up in almost every store:

• Last-click bias: the final touch gets the credit, so brand search and email look great while the TikTok video that started the journey looks weak.
• Privacy restrictions: browser tracking limits and ad-blockers mean some sessions never get tied to a source.
• Ad platform mismatch: Meta and Google report their own conversions with their own attribution windows, so totals rarely match Shopify's.

Advanced doesn't fix those problems. It gives you more ways to cut the same imperfect data. If attribution is your main reason to upgrade, you'll likely still need a dedicated tool or an analytics setup like Google Analytics running alongside.

Shopify Custom Reports: How They Work and Who Needs Them

Shopify custom reports let you build and save your own views from Shopify's data. You choose metrics (like net sales or orders), dimensions (like product, channel or customer type), filters and date ranges. They're available on Advanced and Plus, not on lower tiers.

How to build a custom report

1. Open Analytics and then Reports in your Shopify admin.
2. Start from an existing report that's close to what you want, or create a new one.
3. Choose your metrics and dimensions, such as sales by product type by channel.
4. Add filters, for example excluding draft orders or limiting to one market.
5. Set the date range and comparison period.
6. Save the report so you can reopen it with one click.

Menu names and the report editor change as Shopify updates its admin, so follow the current on-screen labels if they differ from the steps above.

Who gets real value from custom reports

Custom reports pay off when you check the same questions on a schedule and your questions don't match Shopify's prebuilt ones. Examples:

• A store with ten product lines that wants margin by line, every week.
• A merchant selling in several countries who needs sales by market with returns netted out.
• A brand running heavy discounting that wants to see which codes bring repeat buyers and which only attract one-time bargain hunters.

If you mostly glance at total sales and top products, you won't use them. A saved report you never open still costs you the gap between plans: $399 for Advanced minus $39 for Basic is $360 a month on monthly billing. Do that math honestly before upgrading.

Is Shopify Advanced Worth It for Analytics?

For analytics alone, usually no. The jump from Basic's $39 to Advanced's $399 per month is $360 more every month, or $4,320 a year, according to Shopify's listed monthly pricing. Advanced pays off when you have the revenue, team and reporting questions to use the extra depth.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical store with $40,000 in monthly sales and a 3% gap between its best and worst discount codes' repeat-purchase value. Say a custom report on discounts by customer type lets the owner cut the weakest codes and lift monthly revenue by 2%. That's $800 a month, which covers the $360 plan gap with room to spare, before counting any processing-rate savings. Now take a store doing $8,000 a month: the same 2% lift is $160, less than half the $360 gap. The upgrade only wins if the insight you'd act on is worth more than the price difference. These figures are illustrative assumptions, so swap in your own.

A simple decision test

Upgrade to Advanced for analytics if you can answer yes to at least three of these:

• You review reports weekly and a prebuilt report doesn't match your question.
• Someone on your team (or you) owns reporting and will actually build custom views.
• You sell across multiple channels or markets and need them compared side by side.
• Your monthly revenue is high enough that $360 extra is a small fraction of it. Advanced also lowers payment processing rates, which can offset part of the cost; our guide to Shopify payment gateway charges by plan shows the current rates.
• You've already tried a free tool like Google Analytics and hit a wall that Shopify's data can solve.

If you answered yes to fewer than three, stay on your current plan and fill gaps cheaply. A free analytics tool, a spreadsheet exported weekly, and clean UTM tagging cover most small-store needs.

The hidden cost: analytics apps

Many merchants who skip Advanced end up buying reporting apps instead. Subscriptions vary widely by app and order volume, and many listings in the Shopify App Store fall somewhere between about $10 and $200 a month, so check current listings before budgeting. They stack on top of everything else you pay. Shopify's own ecosystem is a big part of why stores accumulate costs; we unpack that in our guide to Shopify app costs, and in how to reduce Shopify app costs without losing features.

Before you add a paid reporting app, check whether a prebuilt report on your current plan, or a spreadsheet, answers the question. Most "we need better analytics" problems turn out to be "we need to look at one metric consistently."

What to Do If Your Plan's Reports Fall Short

If your plan's reports don't answer your questions, you have four routes: upgrade, add an app, export data, or move to a platform where reporting comes included. Pick based on how often the gap actually costs you a decision.

Cheap fixes first

• Export to a spreadsheet: orders, customers and products can be exported and pivoted in minutes. Do it weekly on a fixed day.
• Standardize UTM tags: one naming convention across email, social and ads makes Shopify's attribution reports far more reliable.
• Use a free analytics layer: Google Analytics covers behavior flow and channel analysis that Shopify's lower tiers handle thinly.
• Track five numbers only: conversion rate, average order value, repeat purchase rate, return rate and gross margin. Those five beat thirty vanity charts.

When the platform itself is the problem

Some merchants find that analytics is one of several features gated behind either a pricier plan or a paid app: abandoned cart recovery, reviews, loyalty and reporting all land on the monthly bill separately. If that pattern sounds familiar, compare the full stack, not just the plan. Our Rovela vs Shopify comparison shows how the two approaches differ on cost and setup.

Choosing Your Shopify Analytics Plans Without Overpaying

The best analytics setup is the cheapest one that lets you make your next three decisions with confidence. For most stores under a few hundred thousand dollars in annual sales, that's the plan you already have, clean tagging and a weekly export.

Use this rule of thumb. If you're asking "how are we doing?", Basic or Grow is plenty. If you're asking "which customers, channels and products make us money, and how does that change month to month?", Advanced starts to make sense. If you're asking for full cross-channel attribution, no Shopify plan solves it alone.

Whatever you choose, write down the three questions you want analytics to answer before you pay for anything. It's the fastest way to avoid buying features you won't use.

Common questions

Does Shopify Basic include analytics? Yes. Basic includes the analytics overview, live view and a starter set of reports. It doesn't include custom reports.

Which Shopify plan has custom reports? Custom reports are tied to the Advanced and Plus plans, per Shopify's plan comparison. Confirm on the pricing page as plans evolve.

Can I see the same data on every plan? The underlying data is collected on every plan. The difference is how many reports you can open and whether you can customize them.

Will upgrading fix my attribution? Not by itself. Attribution quality depends on your UTM tagging, tracking limits and ad platform settings more than on your plan.

Conclusion: Match the Plan to the Questions You Ask

Shopify analytics plans are a ladder of depth. Basic covers daily management, Grow widens the standard reports, and Advanced adds custom reports and the full library. For most small stores, the $360 monthly jump isn't justified by analytics alone. Tag your campaigns properly, export weekly, and upgrade only when you can name the reports you'd build on day one.

If you're tired of plan tiers and add-ons deciding which numbers you're allowed to see, that's a platform question, not just a plan question. Rovela is built by operators with experience running stores at scale, and it includes dashboards, analytics and 100+ features in one flat subscription, with no per-app billing. You can compare it on the Rovela pricing page or see how a store gets built on the Rovela homepage.