How to See What Apps a Shopify Store Uses (Plus Limits)

If you want to see what apps a Shopify store uses, there are three ways to actually do it: a browser extension that scans the page for you, reading the page's own code by hand, or running the domain through an online detector. Each one reads the same thing, the code the storefront serves to visitors, and each one misses the same category of app: anything that runs on the backend or inside Shopify's checkout without leaving a trace in the page you can see.

That gap is the part most guides skip past. Below is how each method works, what it can and can't show you, and where the practice is actually useful beyond idle curiosity.

Three ways to check, in order of effort

1. Browser extension. Install a detector extension, load the store's homepage or a product page, and read the popup. This is the fastest method and needs no technical skill.
2. Manual inspection. Right-click, "View Page Source," and search for script tags and file paths that identify known apps. Opening the browser's Network tab while the page loads shows the same thing in more detail.
3. Online detector tool. Paste the store's URL into a site built to scan and report back, without installing anything or opening developer tools yourself.

All three are reading the same public HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that any visitor's browser downloads. None of them touch anything private. That's also why all three have the same blind spot, which the next sections cover.

Method 1: a browser extension

Extensions like Koala Inspector work by loading the page and pattern-matching its scripts against a list of known app signatures, the same way an ad blocker recognizes tracking pixels. You click the icon, it lists what it found, and you move to the next store.

This is the right tool for a quick look at one store. It's slower for checking many stores back to back, since you're opening each one in a tab and waiting for the extension to load.

Method 2: read the code yourself

View source and search for terms like klaviyo, judge.me, recharge, or loox in the script tags. Most Shopify apps that touch the storefront inject a script file with the app's name or a recognizable path somewhere in it, so a text search on the page source often turns up two or three apps in under a minute.

The Network tab in your browser's developer tools goes further, because it shows every file the page actually requests as it loads, including ones that get added by JavaScript after the initial page load and wouldn't show up in a plain view-source search. It's more thorough than reading the raw source, and it's also slower, since you're reading a list of requests instead of one static page.

This method depends on knowing what to look for. If you don't already recognize bold-brain as a Bold subscriptions app or pdp-buy-buttons as a specific theme app extension, a source scan just looks like noise.

Method 3: an online app detector

A detector site does the same pattern-matching as a browser extension, but runs it server-side against a domain you type in, so you don't need to install anything or even visit the store yourself. This is the version worth using if you're checking more than a handful of stores, because it's built for repeating the same lookup rather than for browsing.

StorePrism's app detector works this way: paste in a domain, and it returns the apps it can identify on that storefront's homepage, matched against a short, hand-maintained list of app signatures, without you needing to open a single dev tools panel. Finding an app proves it is present; finding none proves nothing, and the result says so. The specific benefit over doing it by hand is speed when you're checking several stores rather than one, since each lookup is a paste-and-read instead of a five-minute manual read of the page source.

What none of these methods show you

Here's the part worth sitting with before treating any app list as complete. Instant, a Shopify optimization vendor, cites 2025 figures from Chargeflow putting the average Shopify store's app count at 6 or more installed apps. Separately, StoreInspect reports that across a dataset of 211,000-plus stores it scanned, the average came out to 1.8 detected frontend apps.

Put those two numbers side by side and the gap is the real finding: a typical store runs something like 6 apps, but that frontend scan turned up something like 2. Detected counts move with how a scanner counts, too: StoreInspect's own later State of Shopify report, over a much larger sample of about 1.5 million stores, puts the average at 5.6 detected apps. Either way, a detected count is a floor under the real one, never the whole of it. StoreInspect's own tool, Store Inspector, is built to catch 72-plus known Shopify apps and 15-plus tracking pixels, and even so, the company estimates its detection covers roughly 70 to 80 percent of the apps a store might actually have installed, not all of them.

The apps that go missing from a scan are the ones that don't touch the visible storefront: backend inventory and fulfillment tools, fraud-screening apps, ERP connectors, and on Shopify Plus stores, checkout apps built with Checkout Extensibility or Functions rather than the older checkout.liquid. Those run inside Shopify's admin or checkout process, not in the page your browser loads, so no script tag ever shows up for a detector to catch.

So the honest way to state a scan's result is narrow: it tells you which storefront-facing apps a scan found on a given day, not the store's full app list. If a scan turns up zero review apps, that doesn't prove the store has no reviews app, since some review widgets load through the theme's own app blocks in ways that vary by theme. And if a scan finds a script for an app the store isn't currently paying for, that happens too, since uninstalled apps don't always clean up every trace immediately.

Checking a store's theme at the same time

While you're looking at a storefront's code, the theme is usually visible in the same source you're already reading: Shopify storefronts normally declare the published theme in a small script on the page, and its name often shows up in asset paths too. It's a separate question from app detection, since a theme and its apps are tracked differently, but the two often get checked together during the same look at a store. StorePrism's theme detector reads that declaration specifically, if the theme is what you're after rather than the app list.

Using an app scan for competitor and pitch research

Most guides frame app detection as one-off curiosity: what's that store running, out of interest. The more common real use, based on the questions merchants and agencies actually ask in places like the Shopify Community, is comparing your own stack to a competitor's, or building a case before a sales pitch.

If you're an agency scanning prospects before outreach, a single scan of one store answers "what does this store run." The useful version of the question, at scale, is checking a list of prospects and noting which ones are missing an app category you sell, for example a store with three marketing apps installed and no visible email flow tool. That's a specific, checkable gap you can lead a pitch with, rather than a guess.

The same idea applies to vetting a store before a Plus migration or an audit. A frontend scan won't show you backend or checkout-extension apps, so treat it as a starting list to confirm with the merchant directly, not a substitute for asking them what they run. Given that a scan only reliably catches a portion of the real stack, as the numbers above show, pairing the app list with a look at what the store is likely earning gives a fuller picture of whether it's worth the outreach. StorePrism's revenue estimator is the other half of sizing up a prospect before you spend time on a pitch. It works from a different public signal, a store's inventory read on a schedule, and once it has watched a store long enough it gives a floor on what the store demonstrably sold alongside a monthly projection. Until then, it says it is still gathering data.

Is checking a store's apps this way legal

Everything covered above reads files a store's own server sends to any visitor's browser when the page loads. It's the same information your own browser downloads to display the page, not anything behind a login or a private database. The caution that comes up in Shopify's community discussions is around scraping at volume in ways that violate a site's terms of service, or building a business on top of someone else's data without permission, not around looking at a single store's public page source.

FAQ

What is the best free way to check what apps a Shopify store uses? A browser extension or an online detector both work without a paid plan, and both read the same public page code. The extension is easier for one store at a time; a detector site is easier when you're checking several stores in a row.

How do I see what theme a Shopify store uses? The theme shows up in the same page source you'd check for apps, usually in the theme declaration Shopify puts in the page and in asset names. StorePrism's theme detector reads that declaration if that's the only thing you need.

Can I see apps that don't show up on the storefront? Not with any of the methods above. Backend tools, fraud and inventory apps, and checkout-extension apps on Shopify Plus stores don't load into the page a visitor's browser sees, so a frontend scan has no way to catch them.

Does a Shopify app detector work on every store? It works on most live, public Shopify storefronts, since it's reading the same page any visitor loads; a store that turns the request away can't be read at all. What it can identify is limited to apps with a recognizable frontend footprint, which based on the industry figures above is a real but partial slice of a store's actual app list.

Where to go from here

A scan tells you what a store's storefront was serving on the day you looked, nothing more permanent than that. Stores add and drop apps often enough that a list from three months ago isn't a reliable description of a store today. Treat any result as a snapshot, confirm anything that matters for a real decision, and check again before you act on it.

If the next step after checking a store's app list is sizing up whether that store is worth your attention at all, StorePrism's revenue estimator is a reasonable place to look next, along with the rest of StorePrism's free tools if theme or catalogue questions come up along the way.