Stocky alternatives: pick by the job you lost, not the feature grid

The right way to choose among Stocky alternatives is to name the job you actually lost, because you did not lose all of Stocky — you lost the two or three screens you opened every week. Stores that shop by feature grid end up paying $199 a month for a planning suite they use to look up a supplier's phone number, or complaining that a $9 app has no forecasting when forecasting was never the reason they opened Stocky.

Shopify retired Stocky on August 31, 2026, after delisting it in February 2026. The replacement market that grew up in the months since is wide and uneven, and the pricing in this guide is as listed at the time of writing (November 2026) — verify on the listing before you commit. What follows sorts the market by five jobs, states where each option is the weaker choice, and ends with the table you can actually shop from.

First: audit what you used it for

Before any comparison, spend twenty minutes on your own export. Stocky's built-in reports and the full data archive tell you which jobs were real for your store:

• How many purchase orders in the last twelve months? If the answer is two, you do not need purchasing software; you need a better ordering habit.
• How many stocktakes, and how complete were they? If you never finished a full count, counting tools will not fix the reason.
• Did you ever edit reorder levels? An untouched default is a sign you were reordering by feel, and a planning app will simply hold a more sophisticated version of a guess.
• Did you ever look at the dead-stock or aging reports? If yes, you have a clearance job — and you probably still do, on the same stock.

That audit kills two purchases out of three, in most stores.

Job 1: Clearance — getting unsellable stock out

This is the job that has no native replacement at all. Shopify's admin will tell you what you own and what it cost; it will not tell you that 41 variants have been sitting for seven months, and it will not age them by velocity.

The specialist here is ClearStock, the app we make: velocity and days-of-cover per variant, five statuses from moving through stuck to dead (plus oversold), rule-based discounts with a cap you set, exclusions so bestsellers never enter a rule, an aging report with CSV export, and automatic price restoration when a product starts selling again. Free to 100 products, then $9.99, $29, and $49 by product count. What it does not do: forecasting, purchase orders, marketplace sync, or stock counts — and it writes prices, which some merchants are rightly unwilling to allow software to do.

Where ClearStock is the weaker choice: if your stock is deliberately seasonal and about to come back into season, marking it down is the wrong move; and if your dead stock is a distribution problem (wrong channel, wrong bundle) rather than a price problem, discounting just trains customers to wait.

The non-app alternative is genuinely viable and free: an aging export, a markdown ladder (20%, 35%, 50% by week, with a stop rule), and a bundle or donation exit. It costs you an afternoon a quarter and a calendar reminder you have to honour.

Job 2: Reorder decisions — what to buy, how much, by when

Three price bands, three honest trade-offs:

• Native Shopify plus a spreadsheet. Free, transparent, and it works up to a few hundred SKUs if you honour a weekly review. It fails by drift, not by arithmetic — the sheet stops getting refreshed, and the first symptom is a stockout discovered by a customer email.
• Budget planners (~$5–$60). Stockie and Tallyfold-style tools in this band do real reorder math, and the mid tiers add per-location forecasting with lead times. The trap is the tier wall: at the time of writing, Stockie's purchase orders and landed costs sit on its top tier, not the $4.99 headline.
• Revenue-gated planners (from ~$49, scaling with GMV). Prediko and Fabrikatör are built for funded brands at $1M+ GMV, with bundle handling, BOMs, and integrations. Below that size you are paying for headroom you will not use, and above it they are the serious options.

Concede the obvious: if you need real demand forecasting with seasonal curves and bundle decomposition, nothing in the budget band will satisfy you. The cheap tools are cheaper because they model less.

Job 3: Purchasing and receiving — POs, partials, suppliers

Most ex-Stocky stores overbuy here. Native Shopify now creates purchase orders with supplier records, line costs, payment terms, and receiving through linked transfers; it tracks in-transit quantities and keeps an adjustment history. For a store with a handful of POs a month, that is genuinely sufficient, and it is free.

Buy a purchasing-first app when you need what native lacks: unlimited supplier records with real delivery performance, landed costs at receiving, supplier returns, bills of materials, and accounting sync. One documented gap in native is that you cannot email a PO from the admin — you download a PDF and send it yourself.

Where the specialist is worse: extra software means an extra place where quantities disagree. A purchasing app that writes inventory independently of Shopify can create the exact drift you switched away from Stocky to escape.

Job 4: Counting — accuracy as a routine

Counting is the job most likely to be solved without buying anything: native Shopify has structured stock counts with planning, parallel counting, and manager approval before quantities change, plus Quick count in POS for spot checks. If your problem is that you never count, a barcode app will not fix it; if your problem is that counting 2,000 SKUs takes a weekend, the barcode-first tools will.

Buy a barcode-counting tool when you have enough SKUs that manual entry is the bottleneck, and check one thing before you do: whether the app writes counts back to Shopify or asks you to reconcile them in its own dashboard. Reconciliation you do not finish is worse than a count you never started.

Job 5: Multichannel sync — a different product entirely

If you sell on Amazon, Etsy, or Walmart, your replacement is a sync tool first. Stocky was Shopify-only, and no planning app fixes two channels selling the same unit. Sync specialists in this band quote on order volume or orders per year rather than SKU count, and their pricing climbs with growth. Buy sync as a separate line item, not as the top tier of a planner.

The shopping table

Two mistakes worth naming

Buying a suite for one job. The feature count on a $199 planner is a list of jobs you do not have. You will use one screen and resent the invoice. If your audit turned up one job, buy one tool.

Buying for the org chart you want. Multi-location logic, role permissions, and approval chains are worth paying for when you have the staff to use them. A three-person store that buys role-based workflows pays for the illusion of a bigger company.

The one thing to check on any trial

Ask each candidate how it treats days when a SKU was out of stock. Days with zero sales are not zero demand, and any tool that averages them into velocity will systematically under-order your bestsellers — the precise failure Stocky users complained about most. If the answer is "the model handles it," ask to see the number for one SKU you know went dark for two weeks. The answer separates the tools faster than any feature comparison.

Common questions

What is the best Stocky alternative? There is no single best — there is a best fit per job. Clearance: ClearStock. Reorder decisions: a budget planner for small catalogs, a revenue-tiered planner above $1M GMV. Purchasing: native Shopify for most stores. Counting: native counts, then a barcode-first app. Multichannel: a sync specialist.

Is there a free alternative to Stocky? Yes: native Shopify covers purchase orders, transfers, stock counts with approval, and supplier records at no cost, and ClearStock's free plan covers clearance for up to 100 products. What free tiers do not cover is forecasting depth, multichannel sync, and full-catalog planning.

Which alternatives import Stocky data? Several apps advertise Stocky migration, and the depth varies — some take supplier records and reorder levels from the full export archive, others take only products and quantities. Ask for the exact field list before you install, and read the export guide to know what exists to import.

Do I need an alternative at all? If you have under ~200 SKUs, one location, and steady demand, native Shopify plus a weekly review covers purchasing and counting. You need a replacement when the missing piece is a decision — reorder timing, clearance, or sync.

Next step

Write down the one Stocky screen you opened most often, then buy only for that. If it was the dead-stock report, ClearStock's free plan covers 100 products and will tell you within an hour whether your slow stock is a pricing problem. If it was the purchase order screen, start with the Stocky replacement sequence — export, recreate what is in flight, and only then choose — and use the full app comparison by job when you are ready to shortlist.