Assisty is the app I point people at most often when Proviand is the wrong fit. It is good, it is established, and it is not missing features. The question worth asking is not which app has more, it is whether you want a reporting platform or a buying decision.
Written 19 August 2026. Every claim about Assisty here was checked against its live Shopify App Store listing that day. Listings change, so treat the dated facts as dated and check them yourself before you decide.
Starting here, because anything else would be dishonest.
Assisty launched on 3 June 2021. As of 19 August 2026 it holds 4.8 stars from 343 reviews, with 93 percent of those at five stars. Five years of production use and 343 merchants willing to write something down is a real track record, and it is the single largest thing Proviand cannot match. Proviand launched this summer and has no reviews at all.
The listing advertises 300+ inventory reports, AI demand forecasting, multi-location replenishment, stock counts, adjustments and transfers, purchase orders, and a Shopify Flow integration. Shopify's own summary of the reviews highlights the analytics depth, the interface, and the support team, specifically the onboarding sessions and how responsive they are. The reviews back that up: people name the support staff who helped them.
That is not a competitor I am going to tell you is broken. It is a mature product with happy customers.
Inventory apps split into two shapes, and the split matters more than any feature list.
A reporting platform gives you the data and the tools to interrogate it. Custom reports, filters, cohorts, sell-through by whatever dimension you like. It assumes there is a person who wants to look, and who will get better at looking over time. The value grows the more you use it.
A buying decision gives you one screen with a list of products and quantities, and an explanation for each number. It assumes you have fifteen minutes on a Tuesday and you would rather not think about inventory again until next Tuesday.
Assisty is the first. Proviand is the second, deliberately, and that is the whole difference. Everything below is downstream of it.
Assisty's own listing leads with 300+ reports. That number is the pitch, and for the right store it should be.
Proviand has one buying table and four reports: ABC, sell-through, dead stock, and inventory status. There is no report builder. If you want to slice sell-through by supplier and season and compare it to last year, Proviand will not do that, and adding it is not on the roadmap.
The cost of a large surface is real, and merchants say so in the reviews. One five-star review from 17 July 2026, from a store that had used Stocky for five years, puts it plainly: "App has an initial learning curve, but makes good sense once you understand." That is a satisfied customer describing a ramp. Whether a ramp is a cost or an investment depends entirely on how much time you have.
Assisty's support team offers onboarding sessions, and reviewers keep mentioning them as a highlight. Read that both ways: the sessions are genuinely good, and a product that benefits from a booked demo is a product with something to explain.
Proviand's target is that you install it and the buying table is already correct, because everything it needs is in your Shopify order history. No setup call, no configuration project. You add supplier lead times when you want the reorder points to get sharper, and until you do it uses a sensible default.
Every number shows its work, which is the other half of getting to trust quickly. Click any recommendation and you get the demand it measured, the lead time it used, the safety stock it added, and what is already on its way.
Both apps email you. Assisty's listing lists email notifications, low stock alerts, restock notifications and threshold alerts, so this is not a gap on their side and I am not going to pretend it is.
The difference is what arrives and when. Proviand sends one digest every morning with the whole position: what to reorder, what is about to run out, what is sitting dead. It is on the free plan, and it is designed so that on most days you read the email and do nothing, and that counts as the app working. Alerts tell you when a threshold trips. A digest tells you where you stand whether anything tripped or not.
If you would rather open a dashboard when you feel like checking, this difference is worth nothing to you.
Assisty's tiers are keyed to which Shopify plan you are on, which makes a straight feature-for-price comparison harder than it looks. As shown on the listing on 19 August 2026: free to install with six months of sales history, $19 a month for stores on Basic Shopify, $59 a month for stores on Advanced Shopify, and $199 a month for Shopify Plus stores. Purchase Orders and Receiving are listed in the feature list of that $199 tier, alongside AI and ML demand forecasting and the advanced buying table. If you are on a lower Shopify plan, ask Assisty directly what your tier includes before you assume either way.
Proviand is priced on your SKU count instead: free forever up to 50 SKUs with forecasts and the digest, $29 a month for purchase orders and up to 2,000 SKUs, $49 for 10,000 SKUs and ten locations, $99 for unlimited. Purchase orders start at $29 because sending an order is the point of the whole thing, not a premium tier.
Both bill through Shopify, so both land on your Shopify invoice.
Beyond the list above: Proviand is new. It has been in production since this summer, it has no review history, and it is built and maintained by one person, which is a risk worth counting. It does not do stock transfers, warehouse counts, or multi-channel inventory. It has no custom report builder and will not get one. If your buying process needs approvals with multiple people signing off, it does not do that either.
Proviand fits a store where one person, usually the owner, decides what to buy, wants that decision to take fifteen minutes, and wants to understand every number in it. Outside that shape, Assisty is very likely the better answer.
Both apps read your Shopify order history. Neither one holds the data your forecasts are built on, which means there is nothing to migrate to get a forecast: install, and the recommendations appear from sales you already made. Uninstall, and the history stays where it always was, in Shopify.
The only thing that is genuinely yours inside either app is purchase order history and supplier records. Proviand imports those from Stocky CSV exports, and Assisty's listing advertises automatic Stocky migration too.
So the decision costs less than it feels like it does. Run Proviand's free plan for two weeks next to whatever you use now, look at the buying table on a morning you actually need to place an order, and see which one you would rather act on. If the answer is Assisty, you have lost nothing but two weeks of a free plan, and you now know why.
Not sure which shape your store is? Email [email protected] and describe how you buy today. If Assisty is the better fit I will say so.
