MBA vs Addly
A cheap, polished, Built for Shopify frequently-bought-together and bundle widget driven by a black-box AI over your last 3 months of orders.
When MBA wins
You want explainable, profit-aware co-purchase math you can audit, the same recommendations exposed to AI agents over REST and MCP, multi-platform reach, B2B-aware mining on OroCommerce, and flat pricing that doesn't tax your revenue.
When Addly wins
You run one Shopify store, you want a polished, cheap, Built for Shopify FBT slider and a deep bundle-type library (mystery box, build-a-box, subscription box) live this afternoon, and you don't care how the AI picks.
Feature comparison
Color-striped rows favor MBA, Addly, or are even. We mark each so you can scan for the trade-offs that matter to you.
| Feature | MBA | Addly |
|---|---|---|
| Headline price (small Shopify store) | Free $0 tier on every platform. Plus is $99/mo flat (or ~$79/mo on annual). Flat, no GMV or revenue share. | Genuinely usable free tier up to $500 attributed rev/mo, then $9.99-$24.99/mo with unlimited offers. Much cheaper to start for a small Shopify merchant. |
| Bundle-type UI library | Real catalog bundles/kits with SKU, pricing strategy, AI copy, and draft-to-live lifecycle, plus cart kit-completion. Fewer ready-made novelty bundle layouts out of the box. | Very broad, mature library: fixed, multipack, mix-and-match, variant, build-a-box, gift/mystery/sample/subscription/wholesale boxes, with a polished drag-and-drop editor. |
| Shopify-native polish and trust | Built for Shopify certification is pending App Store submission; minimal public reviews today. Strong on the other four platforms that already ship. | Built for Shopify certified, fast clean embedded UX, 4.7 stars across ~114 reviews, strong support reputation. Proven on Shopify today. |
| Source of recommendations | Co-purchase rules mined from your own order history via selectable engines (sql_pairs, fp_growth default, seasonal_cohort, return_aware, hui, ai_catalog cold-start), plus a co_occurrence fallback. Mining runs locally inside the install on Magento/WooCommerce. | AI mines the store's last 3 months of orders for frequently-bought-together and add-to-cart pairs, with a combined AI + manual mode. Same co-purchase idea, processed by their hosted engine. |
| Explainability of the math | Every rule exposes support, confidence, and lift in the admin, with synthetic-vs-observed badging and a choice of mining engine. Merchandisers can inspect, override, or suppress any rule. | Black box: no exposed support/confidence/lift, no engine choice, no audit trail. Vendor markets it as set-it-and-forget-it. |
| Profit / margin awareness | The hui (high-utility) engine ranks by margin contribution, with Opportunities ranking (Top, High-Margin, Emerging, Underperforming Attach). | Ranks by raw co-purchase frequency only. No margin or profit weighting. |
| Agent / MCP / API access | 19 agent-callable MCP tools (18 off Shopify) usable from any MCP host (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Agent SDK), plus a public REST recommendations/substitutions API and ACP agentic-commerce endpoints. | None. It is a storefront widget with no public recommendations API, no MCP server, and no agentic-commerce surface. |
| Platform reach | Five storefronts on one API contract: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, and OroCommerce (Oro as a thin hosted client that proxies mining to the hosted backend). | Shopify only. No BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, OroCommerce, or headless story. |
| B2B depth | B2B-aware mining on OroCommerce, out-of-stock substitutions with reason codes, and bundle-inventory forecast data through the REST API and MCP. | Wholesale-bundle widgets only. No RFQ/quote bundles, reorder prediction, contract pricing. |
| Pricing fairness at scale | Flat $0/$99 (free tier plus Plus at $99/mo). Does not scale with GMV, AOV, or attributed revenue. | Caps are on app-attributed revenue, so high-AOV and high-revenue stores blow through tiers quickly; several reviews call the tier structure unfair. |
Pricing snapshot
MarketBasketAnalysis
Flat, transparent plan pricing: Free ($0) and Plus $99/mo flat (or ~$79/mo on annual). One paid plan, everything in it. These are product plans, not per-platform prices, and the same plans apply across every platform. Metered on capability and compute, never on GMV. No revenue share, no add-ons.
See plansAddly
Usage-scaled subscription keyed to the app's own attributed monthly revenue. Free $0 (up to $500 attributed rev/mo), then $9.99 (up to $1,000), $13.99 (up to $2,500), $24.99 (up to $5,000), with higher tiers above. Every tier includes unlimited offers/bundles; the cap is on how much app-attributed revenue you can run before you must upgrade, so high-AOV stores climb tiers fast.
Visit AddlyThe honest verdict
For a single small or SMB Shopify store that just wants a pretty, cheap frequently-bought-together slider and a deep bundle-type library live today, Addly is an easy yes: Built for Shopify certified, $9.99-$24.99/mo, and a strong support and review reputation MBA can't match on Shopify yet.
Addly's recommender is a black box: no support/confidence/lift, no engine choice, no margin awareness. MBA exposes the math on every rule and adds a profit-aware HUI engine, which matters most when a merchandiser has to defend or override what gets recommended.
Addly stops at the storefront widget. MBA is the intelligence layer underneath: the same recommendations are agent-callable via 19 MCP tools (18 off Shopify) and a public REST API across five platforms, where Addly is Shopify-only with zero agent surfaces.
Addly's attributed-revenue caps tax your success, especially for high-AOV stores, while MBA's flat $0/$99 (free tier plus Plus) doesn't move with revenue. Run the math against your AOV before assuming the cheap headline price stays cheap.
If your strategy is one Shopify store and a polished bundle widget, pick Addly. If it's explainable, profit-aware, agent-ready recommendation intelligence spanning multiple storefronts and real B2B, pick MBA.
Want the full buyer's deep-dive?
This page is the per-vendor short version. For the long version, read “MBA vs Bloomreach” (8 pages on the enterprise-vs-mid-market trade-off) or “MBA vs the widget cluster” (4 pages of pricing math vs Glood, Rebuy, and PickyStory).
Try MBA on your own store
14-day money-back guarantee on all paid platforms. WP.org free tier on WooCommerce. No credit card required for the free path.