Shopify Redirect Apps Compared: How Each One Finds a Broken URL

Most comparisons in this category sort by rating, or by whichever feature list is longer. Neither tells you much about your store. The question that decides it is simpler: how does the app find out a URL is broken?

Three ways an app finds a broken URL

A visitor hits the 404. The app records it. This is what most of these apps do, and it's genuinely useful. The catch is that nothing gets detected until somebody has already clicked a dead link.
The app scans your store. It crawls your pages, reports links that no longer resolve, and can check your redirects for chains and loops. Still only describes your site as it is now.
The app reads Google's record of what your URLs used to earn. Search Console keeps 16 months of clicks and impressions, including for URLs that now return nothing. It's the only one of the three that can tell you a URL was earning 400 visits a month before it broke and that nobody has clicked it since.

That difference only shows up at one moment: a migration, a theme change, or a catalog cleanup. Apps in the first two groups will find the damage eventually. An app in the third can tell you what it cost before you touch a redirect.

At a glance

Everything in these tables came off the live Shopify App Store listings on the date at the top of this page. No prices, on purpose. They move, and the listing is always the better source, ours included.

One caveat on the Search Console column: it repeats what each listing says, and listings are loose with that phrase. The FAQ below covers the difference between an app that connects and one that has you upload a file.

App	Finds broken URLs via	Rating, reviews	Reads Search Console	Free tier
SEOWILL, formerly SEOAnt	Visitor hits, plus a store scan	4.8, 183	Not listed	Yes, 10 new 404s
404/301 SC Easy URL Redirects	Visitor hits, on paid plans	4.7, 298	Listed under "Works with"	Yes, bulk 404 redirects, no 404 tracking
Nabu – 404/301 URL Redirects	Visitor hits	4.7, 54	Not listed	Yes, unlimited 404 tracking and unlimited redirects
Redirect Hero	Visitor hits	5.0, 160	Listed under "Works with"	No
Redirect Ninja	Search Console history, plus visitor hits	4.8, 64	Reads 16 months of history through a read-only API connection; the full lost-traffic report sits on its Migration Recovery plan	Yes, unlimited 404 tracking

Bulk work

App	Wildcards	Bulk import
SEOWILL	Pro	Free to upload, Pro to import and export
SC Easy	Pro	Free, redirects only
Nabu	3 free, unlimited on Advanced	Free
Redirect Hero	Pro+	Pro+
Redirect Ninja	Pro and up	Yes, any plan

A migration breaks URLs in patterns. Old product paths, category paths, region prefixes, blog posts that moved somewhere new. Writing a wildcard for each of those shapes is the tedious part, so we built 15 templates that already know them, including the structures BigCommerce and Squarespace leave behind. You pick the pattern and check it against your store.

Monitoring and automation

App	Alerts and reports	AI, and what it does	Redirects for active pages	Also worth knowing
SEOWILL	Daily report (Free)	—	—	Live target URL suggestion (Free); Shopify Flow (no tier stated)
SC Easy	404 alerts (Pro); statistics and analysis (Free)	Matches each 404 to a replacement page, with a confidence score you control (Pro+)	Yes (Pro+)	Subdomain redirects (Pro+)
Nabu	Dashboard metrics (Free)	Builds a regex or pattern rule from a plain-English description (Advanced). Matching a destination per URL is not described.	—	Country redirects (Advanced); two-way sync with Shopify redirects (no tier stated)
Redirect Hero	—	—	Yes (Pro+)	—
Redirect Ninja	404 alerts and email summaries (Free)	Matches each broken URL to the best live page, prioritised by the traffic it used to get (Business)	—	Internal link scanning (Business)

"AI" is doing two different jobs in this table.

Three listings claim it, and they aren't the same capability. Easy Redirects and Redirect Ninja both match an individual broken URL to a replacement page, with a confidence score you set. Nabu's is a rule writer: describe the pattern you want in plain English and it builds the regex. That's genuinely useful for a bulk restructure, and it's a different job from deciding, one URL at a time, where 1,800 broken links should go. Read what the AI does before you compare the label.

Where each one is the better buy, including against us

Redirect Hero. Cheapest entry of the five, 5.0 from 160 reviews, and it does the basic job well. If your problem is a handful of broken links, it's the sensible buy.
SEOWILL. The second-longest track record here, a store scan on the free plan, and daily reports. If you want a scanner that reports rather than an automator, this is it.
SC Easy. 298 reviews and on the store since 2017, the longest track record here, plus thirty-one languages to our six. Its pattern rules and bulk active-page uploads are more mature than ours. If you want the safest bet and you sell in more than a handful of languages, pick it.
Nabu. The only one here with country redirects and author-written regex, plus a generous free tier. If you need either of those, this is your app.
Redirect Ninja. Reads 16 months of Search Console history through a read-only connection, ranks your broken URLs by what they used to earn, then matches each to the best live page. Matches above your confidence line apply themselves. If your URLs broke all at once in a migration, that's the list to start with.

Frequently asked questions

Which Shopify redirect app should I use after a migration?

The one that can tell you which URLs you lost, not just which ones are dead right now. A migration breaks URLs nobody has clicked since the move, and those are usually the ones that used to rank.

What's the difference between an app that "works with Search Console" and one that reads it?

A listing that names Search Console can mean a live, read-only API connection, or it can mean you export a CSV of 404s and upload it by hand.

Is a free redirect app enough?

For a handful of broken links, yes. Shopify's own redirect tool in the admin costs nothing. For a migration, read what each free tier actually counts: SEOWILL caps you at 10 new 404s, ours and Nabu's are unlimited on 404 tracking, SC Easy gives bulk redirects but no tracking until you pay, and Redirect Hero has no free plan at all. A store with 3,000 broken URLs is on a paid plan on day one with three of the five.

Do redirects keep working if I uninstall the app?

Usually yes, and that's the platform rather than the app. A redirect created through Shopify's own API is a row in your admin's URL redirect list, so it stays after the app goes, and it isn't a reason to pick one over another.

Why are there no prices on this page?

Because they change, and a stale price is worse than no price. Every app here publishes its plans on its listing, and the date on this page tells you when we last looked.

Why is Redirect Ninja in the table at all?

Because leaving ourselves out would make the comparison less useful, and putting ourselves first would make it less believable. Every app above gets the same treatment.

Is this page kept up to date?

Every cell was read from the relevant listing on the date at the top of this page, and the date is stated so you can check it.