Judge.me alternative: what you gain and what you give up

Judge.me and Formgong side by side

Each Judge.me cell comes from Judge.me's own pages or its Shopify App Store listing, read on 20 October 2026. Each Formgong cell comes from our own code, last checked on 21 October 2026. The table has no prices; plans change, and the linked pages carry them.

What merchants say in 1 and 2 star reviews

Judge.me's listing showed 48,768 reviews on 20 October 2026, and 191 of them give 1 or 2 stars: fewer than 1 in 250. We read the 20 newest. They cover many topics, from setup effort and emails that did not go out to imports and billing, and no single complaint dominates. Five of them:

“a simple task which takes 1 minute in any other app, it takes 1 day”

“It has been over a month and no reminders have been sent.”

Judge.me replied a week later that it had found a technical issue that kept some reminder emails from being scheduled, and passed it to its developers.

“casi la totalidad de las reseñas importadas han dejado de ser válidas para Google Shopping” (almost all imported reviews stopped counting for Google Shopping)

We would not have done better on that one. The Google product reviews feed in our Shopify app leaves imported reviews out too, on purpose: it lists only reviews the store collected itself.

“Importation of Reviews is tedious.”

“Merchants have almost no control over reviews.”

These are single merchants' accounts, and we could not check them. The full reviews, and Judge.me's replies, are on the linked pages.

When to stay with Judge.me

• Your store is on Shopify and you want review emails to go out by themselves. Judge.me's free plan includes unlimited review requests after fulfilment or delivery. Formgong sends order emails only for WooCommerce so far; on Shopify you send your review link yourself.
• You are on Shopify and want a verified buyer label. Judge.me treats reviews that came from its own review requests as verified buyers. Formgong does that only for WooCommerce orders; it does not see Shopify orders yet.
• You sync reviews with other channels. Judge.me's free plan syncs with the Shop app, Etsy and Amazon, and the paid plan adds Google Shopping, Meta and TikTok Shop.
• You rely on its integrations. The paid plan lists more than 130, Klaviyo and Gorgias among them. Formgong sends its review emails through Klaviyo, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark or Brevo if you connect one, but has no Gorgias connector.
• You want a long track record. Judge.me has been on the App Store since 2015 and holds 5.0 stars from 48,768 reviews. Formgong Reviews is new and is not on the App Store yet.

For most Shopify stores Judge.me is a strong choice, and a working setup is no reason to move.

Where Formgong fits, and what it does not do

• Your store is not on Shopify. Judge.me closed WooCommerce, Square and Squarespace on 31 October 2025, Duda on 31 December 2025, BigCommerce on 12 January 2026 and PrestaShop on 31 January 2026, and says access to the data ends after those dates. Formgong runs on any site where you can paste one div and one script tag.
• You sell on WooCommerce and want review emails back. With our WordPress plugin, a WooCommerce store emails each buyer after a completed order: one form for every product in the order, reviews sent from it marked Verified buyer, and one reminder for the products still without a review. A refund or cancellation stops a waiting email.
• You want the last word on every review. Nothing goes public until you approve it, unless you choose to publish everything, or bare star ratings, at once. Hiding any review, good or bad, asks for a reason from a fixed list such as spam or personal data.
• You want photo and video reviews without a paid plan. Each review on the free plan can carry up to 5 photos and a video.

The widget filters by star rating and sorts by date or rating, and the same script shows stars under products in your lists and a small rating badge on any page.

What Formgong does not do: on Shopify it sends no review emails after an order and shows no verified buyer label (both work on WooCommerce), and it has no Etsy or Amazon sync. Review emails can go out through your own Klaviyo, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark or Brevo account; with Klaviyo, Formgong records an event and your Klaviyo flow sends the email. Judge.me's pricing page lists AI snippets, summaries and responses, Google Shopping and social media, referrals and coupons, all integrations and full customization on its paid Awesome plan; its listing adds AI translations there. On Formgong, the AI summary, translation, mood tags and AI moderation are on the paid plan too.

Until 31 December 2026: an account that connects reviews gets every paid reviews feature free for 6 months: the AI summary, mood tags, translation, AI moderation and no Formgong link under the widget. Your reviews and settings stay when the 6 months end.

How to move your reviews from Judge.me

Export from Judge.me

1. In your Judge.me admin, go to Reviews.
2. Open the Export dropdown in the top-right corner and choose Export published reviews. Repeat for hidden reviews if you want them.
3. Up to 25 reviews download at once. For more, Judge.me emails a download link to the address in your admin notification settings, and the link expires in about 3 hours.

Judge.me's export guide says export is on the free plan, and that videos and the verified status are not in the file. Download videos separately from the Reviews dashboard if you want to keep them.

Then import it into Formgong

1. Create a free Formgong account, open Reviews and add your site.
2. On the site's page, click Import reviews. Choose the CSV, pick the language the reviews are written in, and click Import. Formgong recognises a Judge.me file by its reviewer_name and product_handle columns. Importing is on the free plan, with no limit on the number of reviews.
3. Read the result. It counts the reviews that came in, the ones already imported before, and the rows skipped for a missing rating or an unreadable date. If the file marks a review as spam, rejected or hidden, it arrives hidden.
4. Nothing is public yet. Click Publish N imported reviews, approve them one by one, or click Undo this import. On the free plan, reviews you have not published are deleted after 30 days, so decide within a month.
5. Put the widget on your pages (code below). Then switch the old app off, so it stops sending review emails and the page does not show two widgets.

What comes across: the star rating, the title and text, the reviewer's name, the original date, the product and your public reply. What does not: reviewer emails, photos and videos, verified badges, helpful votes and custom questions. One file can hold 5,000 rows and 5 MB, so split a bigger export. You can run 20 imports a day, and importing the same file twice adds nothing.

Our Shopify app has been in Shopify's App Store review since 14 October 2026 and was still not listed on 20 October. Until it is, the widget goes into a Custom Liquid section, where {{ product.handle }} matches the product handle in your file. Off Shopify, paste the same two lines and set data-product yourself. You can export your Formgong reviews to CSV at any time, too.

<!-- Shopify: a Custom Liquid section on the product template -->
<div data-formgong-reviews="fk_your_access_key" data-product="{{ product.handle }}"></div>
<script src="https://formgong.com/reviews.js" defer></script>

<!-- Any other site: set data-product to the product handle from your export -->
<div data-formgong-reviews="fk_your_access_key" data-product="blue-teapot"></div>
<script src="https://formgong.com/reviews.js" defer></script>

One account for the rest of the site

The same free account covers the rest of a small shop's site. A contact form that emails you every message, an AI help chat that answers visitors from your own pages, and free website templates with the form already connected. Reviews, forms and the chat live in one dashboard, so there is one login and one support address.

Tell us what we got wrong

If you moved from Judge.me to Formgong, or tried and went back, we want to know what broke. If a fact on this page is out of date, or the import skipped rows it should have kept, write to support@formgong.com. We read every message and correct this page when we are wrong.