Embeddable store locator widget, sold from a wider widget catalogue
Elfsight is the only locator in this comparison priced by how often the widget loads rather than by how many stores you have. Locations are unlimited on every plan, including the free one; monthly views are what you buy, and running out switches the widget off until the month resets. It also bundles the map, so there is no Google or Mapbox key to set up.
Last reviewed
Elfsight is the cheapest credible way to put a lot of pins on a map, and the bundled map key removes the setup step people actually get stuck on. We are the better buy when the store list belongs to retailers rather than to you, when shoppers need to know which store has a product, or when a locator that can switch itself off mid-month is not something you can ship.
What each product is designed to do, in its own terms. A capability named on one side is not a claim that the other lacks it, and neither column ranks the two: the table below is where they are compared row by row.
Size the plan for your busiest month rather than an average one. Running out of views takes the locator offline, not just over budget.
Both store locators as a shopper sees them, captured the same way: a 1280 by 800 browser window placed in Chicago, searching for Chicago. A demo holds whatever sample data its vendor chose, so where that changes what the picture shows, the caption says so. Each shot is trimmed to a common shape here; select one to see all of it.
StoreLocators · Captured October 15, 2026 from a live customer site, searching “Chicago, IL”.
Elfsight · Captured October 15, 2026 from the vendor’s own demo, searching “Chicago, IL”. Elfsight's demo ships three fixed sample stores, none of them near Chicago, so the nearest result is 584 miles away. That is the demo's data, not the product's reach.
These two are not priced on the same axis, so a straight comparison of the numbers is misleading in both directions.
Elfsight sells a monthly view budget with unlimited locations inside it. We sell retailer availability data, priced by retail locations, with shopper sessions unmetered. On a small owned store list with light traffic, Elfsight is cheaper by an order of magnitude and it is not close. On a long stockist list with real traffic, the comparison stops being about price.
Prices published
Three tiers on our Shopify App Store listing, scaling by retail locations: Launch up to 2,000 locations, Grow from 2,000 to 10,000, and Scale above 10,000, at $195, $395 and $995 per month.
Free trial documented. A 14-day free trial on every tier.
Sources,
Prices published
Eight tiers priced by monthly widget views, with locations unlimited on all of them. Free at 200 views and 1 widget, then Basic, Pro and Premium at 5,000, 50,000 and 150,000 views, then four Enterprise tiers to unlimited. Displayed prices are billed yearly: $5, $10 and $20 a month against struck-through prices of $6, $12 and $24, with Enterprise from $30 to $80 against $42 to $112.
Free trial documented. A permanent free plan rather than a trial: 200 views a month, one widget, no card required.
Sources,
Sixteen rows on one review date. The location-cap row is the one to read twice: Elfsight is the only product here where the number that limits you is not a number of stores.
| Feature |  |  |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing and proof | ||
| Contract terms | Month to month, cancel any timeStoreLocators: Contract termsNo long-term contract and no termination fee. Refunds within 30 days of the latest charge.Source10. StoreLocators: guarantee, refunds and cancellation | Month to month or annual, with a refund conflictElfsight: Contract termsSubscriptions auto-renew at the end of each billing cycle unless you turn renewal off, and cancelling runs to the end of the cycle rather than stopping immediately. The pricing FAQ offers a full refund for any reason within 14 days; the terms of service state fees are non-refundable except as provided in the terms or required by law. Billing runs through Paddle as merchant of record rather than Elfsight directly.Sources7. Elfsight: terms of service2. Elfsight: pricing |
| Pricing | $195–$995 per monthStoreLocators: PricingThree tiers on our Shopify App Store listing, scaling by retail locations: Launch up to 2,000, Grow from 2,000 to 10,000, Scale above 10,000.Source11. StoreLocators on the Shopify App Store | Published, but only the yearly-billed rateElfsight: PricingThe pricing page shows each paid plan as a monthly rate "Billed yearly", with a higher price struck through and a "17% off" tag (29% on Enterprise). Basic reads $5 a month from $6, Pro $10 from $12, Premium $20 from $24, and the four Enterprise tiers $30, $40, $60 and $80 from $42, $56, $84 and $112. There is no monthly toggle, so the page does not say what you would pay without committing to a year.Sources2. Elfsight: pricing3. Elfsight: Store Locator pricing |
| Merchant ratingSame storefront, so these compare. Read with the count. | 5.0StoreLocators: Merchant rating5.0 from 17 reviews on Shopify App Store.Source11. StoreLocators on the Shopify App Store | Not published by the vendorElfsight: Merchant ratingNo listing for the Store Locator widget.The Store Locator widget is not sold as a Shopify app: Elfsight’s own Shopify guide installs it by pasting a custom-HTML snippet, so there is no merchant rating on it to read. We could not confirm G2, Trustpilot or Capterra ratings, so none is shown. Search results show G2 rating Elfsight 4.8 from roughly 900 reviews, but that listing covers the whole widget catalogue rather than the Store Locator.One listing makes this look closer than it is. Elfsight publishes a Shopify app titled "Store Locator for Google Maps", filed under Shopify’s store-locator category and rated 3.8 from 9 reviews. Its own description calls it the Elfsight Google Maps app, and it is sold on a different footing: one flat $5.99-a-month unlimited plan with a 7-day trial, not the monthly-views ladder this page is about. So its score is recorded here rather than carried across to the widget being compared.Sources5. Elfsight: Store Locator for Shopify6. Elfsight: Store Locator for Google Maps on the Shopify App Store9. Elfsight on G2 |
| Evaluate without a sales call | YesFree trial, public app listingStoreLocators: Evaluate without a sales callSource11. StoreLocators on the Shopify App Store | YesFree plan, no card requiredElfsight: Evaluate without a sales callA permanent free plan rather than a countdown, which is better for evaluating. Read it as an evaluation tool rather than a running locator: 200 views a month is about seven a day.Source2. Elfsight: pricing |
| Retailer coverage | ||
| Adding a retailer you sell throughThe gap between the retailer list you are sold and the one you actually sell through. | On request, typically within days, at no additional cost | You add it yourselfElfsight: Adding a retailer you sell throughNo discovery mechanism or claim of one appears on the product page, the pricing page or in the help centre.Source1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget |
| Retailer coverageCoverage only counts where you actually sell. | 205 retailers, 110,516 locationsStoreLocators: Retailer coverageSource12. StoreLocators: free retailer store lists | Not published by the vendorElfsight: Retailer coverageNo retailer network.Elfsight supplies no store data and publishes no coverage figure, because every location is one you enter.Source1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget |
| Location capA cap you can grow past is a repricing event, not a feature. | Priced by retail locations, not cappedStoreLocators: Location capPlans scale by location count rather than cutting the map off at a number. | Locations unlimited, views are what run outElfsight: Location capNo plan states a location limit and the product page markets unlimited locations. The meter is monthly widget views: 200 on Free, 5,000 on Basic, 50,000 on Pro, 150,000 on Premium, up to unlimited on the top Enterprise tier. Exceeding it temporarily deactivates the widget. Elfsight’s own CSV guide also asks you to stay within a 1,000-location limit, which sits awkwardly beside the unlimited claim.Sources2. Elfsight: pricing1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget4. Elfsight help centre: importing locations from CSV |
| Data and freshness | ||
| Where the store data comes fromThe whole difference. Everything else follows. | Automatic discovery across 205 integrated retailer feedsStoreLocators: Where the store data comes fromNo spreadsheet to maintain. Retailers that stock you are found in their own feeds and appear without you entering them. | Locations you enter, or a CSV importElfsight: Where the store data comes fromLocations can be added by address or business name, with details auto-fetched from Google Maps, or in bulk from CSV. The import schema is documented in detail, covering name, address, phone, email, website, photo, logo, description, badge, time zone, per-day hours and call-to-action buttons, and an import replaces the locations already in the widget. No feed, sync or spreadsheet connector appears anywhere in the product or the help centre.Sources4. Elfsight help centre: importing locations from CSV1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget |
| Refresh cadenceA locator that sends a shopper to a store that dropped the line costs more trust than it wins. | Retailer feeds, refreshed daily | Whenever you edit or re-importElfsight: Refresh cadenceThere is no scheduled refresh because there is nothing to refresh from. The map is exactly as current as the last time somebody updated it.Source4. Elfsight help centre: importing locations from CSV |
| Product-level availabilityWhether the map answers "who has this product" or only "where are the shops". | YesPer product, per variant, per store, filtered to in-stockStoreLocators: Product-level availabilityRetailer-reported rather than a live poll of a physical shelf, which is the honest description of what this category actually has. | NoNo product field at allElfsight: Product-level availabilityThe location card carries address, website, email, phone, business hours, open status, description, logo and photo. There is no inventory or product field to fill in, so a shopper cannot filter by what a store carries.Source1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget |
| Implementation | ||
| Install path | Shopify app section, or a script tag anywhere elseStoreLocators: Install pathSource11. StoreLocators on the Shopify App Store | Paste a snippet, on 23 listed platformsElfsight: Install pathOn Shopify specifically this is a manual custom-HTML embed on a page rather than a native app or a theme app block, which matters if your theme is managed by someone else.Sources1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget5. Elfsight: Store Locator for Shopify |
| Developer requiredWhether this ships this week or waits for engineering time. | NoNot required | NoNot requiredElfsight: Developer requiredFree installation help is listed on every plan, including Free, though the pricing FAQ describes it as available with paid plans.Source2. Elfsight: pricing |
| Time to launch | Under 5 minutes on ShopifyStoreLocators: Time to launchSource11. StoreLocators on the Shopify App Store | 1 minute to start, per ElfsightElfsight: Time to launchTheir claim. Building the location list is the part that takes real time, and that is unbounded.Source1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget |
| Who pays for the mapA locator billed per map load has a second invoice attached to it, from Google or Mapbox rather than the vendor. | YesIncludedStoreLocators: Who pays for the mapThe map is part of the subscription. There is no separate Google or Mapbox bill, and shopper sessions are not metered. | YesIncluded, no API keyElfsight: Who pays for the mapStated on both the product page and the Shopify guide. This is a genuine advantage over most widgets in this class, where the Google Maps key and the billing account behind it are the customer’s to set up and to pay for.Sources1. Elfsight: Store Locator widget5. Elfsight: Store Locator for Shopify |
| Features | ||
| Wholesale self-submissionIndependent stockists rarely appear in any feed. Letting them add themselves is the only way to catch them. | YesSubmit Your Location block | Not verified by usElfsight: Wholesale self-submissionNo stockist or dealer self-submission intake appears on the product page, the pricing page or in the Store Locator help collection, which lists only the CSV import article. Not every help-centre path resolves, so we cannot rule out that something exists undocumented.Source4. Elfsight help centre: importing locations from CSV |
| Support | ||
| Support model | Every message reaches  Our Customer Success & Onboarding Specialist | Tiered: bug fixes only on Free, up to an account managerElfsight: Support modelFree gets bug fixes only, Basic basic support, Pro priority, Premium priority plus live chat, and Enterprise an account manager. No response-time commitment is published at any tier.Source2. Elfsight: pricing |
“The Store Locator widget does not require you to provide any API keys.”
“Exceeding this monthly limit will temporarily deactivate your app.”
Those two quotes are the whole trade. The first is a real advantage over almost every widget in this set, where the Google or Mapbox key and the billing account behind it are the customer’s problem. The second is what you are buying instead: the plan is a view budget, and the widget goes dark when it runs out.,
Worth doing the arithmetic before assuming the free plan is a free locator. Two hundred views a month is roughly seven a day. A store-locator page linked from a site’s main navigation will clear that in an afternoon.
Elfsight maps what you enter or upload. We discover retailers that stock you across integrated feeds, refreshed daily, so a store that started carrying your line appears without anyone adding a row or re-uploading a file. On an owned store list that is worth nothing. On a stockist list it is the whole job.
Elfsight’s location card has no product or inventory field, so the map answers where the shops are and stops there. Ours carries per-product, per-variant, per-store availability from retailer feeds, refreshed daily, which is the question a shopper holding a specific SKU is actually asking.
Elfsight bills a monthly view budget, and exceeding it temporarily deactivates the widget. A campaign that works, a press mention, or a good week can take the locator down on a plan that was comfortable last month. Ours is a flat subscription with shopper sessions and map loads unmetered, so traffic is a good outcome rather than a billing event.,
Elfsight markets unlimited locations while its own import guide asks you to stay within a thousand. We publish store lists running to tens of thousands of locations, and plans scale by retail locations rather than cutting the map off. If your stockist list is long, that difference shows up on day one.,
Taken from that table rather than written out again, so the two cannot disagree. A row shows up here when we publish an answer and they publish none, or when both answer and ours covers more of the feature. Rows where both sides publish a figure, a price or a rating, stay out: those differ by their content.
Every other product in this comparison asks how many stores you have. Elfsight asks how many times the widget loads. That inversion decides whether it is the cheapest thing here or an awkward fit, and which one depends entirely on your traffic rather than your store count.
The ladder runs 200 views a month on Free, 5,000 on Basic, 50,000 on Pro, 150,000 on Premium, then 300,000, 600,000, 1,200,000 and unlimited across the four Enterprise tiers. Two hundred views is roughly seven a day, which a store-locator page linked from a site’s main navigation will clear in an afternoon. Five thousand is around 165 a day.
The consequence is the part worth planning for: "Exceeding this monthly limit will temporarily deactivate your app." A locator that goes dark is worse than a locator that looks dated, and it goes dark precisely when the page is doing well. Anyone running seasonal campaigns should size the plan for the peak month, not the average one.
Elfsight’s pricing page is harder to read accurately than most, and it is worth being precise about what the numbers on it mean.
Each paid plan shows a monthly-equivalent rate with a higher price struck through, plus "Billed yearly", a "You save" figure and a percentage-off tag: 17% on Basic, Pro and Premium and 29% on Enterprise. So $5 for Basic is the yearly-billed rate and $6 is the struck-through one. There is no monthly toggle, and what Elfsight charges for a single month, billed monthly, is not displayed on the page we fetched, which is why this page does not quote one.,
There is also a second ladder running alongside the single-widget plans: the 96 Apps Pack, covering the whole Elfsight catalogue with view limits per app, at $15, $30 and $60 a month billed yearly (struck from $18, $36 and $72) and $90 to $240 on its Enterprise tiers. It only makes sense if you run other Elfsight widgets too. On branding, the Free plan lists "Elfsight Branding" and every paid single-app plan is listed as "100% Ad Free"; the pricing page does not mention white label as such.
The product page markets unlimited locations and no plan in the ladder contradicts it. The CSV import guide asks you to keep the file within a 1,000-location limit so everything runs smoothly. Both are Elfsight’s own words, on the same product, and this page carries both rather than picking the flattering one.,
The reconciliation is probably that the plans genuinely do not cap location count and the import tooling has a practical ceiling. That distinction is academic if your list is 300 stores. If it is 3,000, it is the first thing to test, and it should be tested on the free plan before any money changes hands.
One related gap: there is no documented API for location data. Elfsight does publish an Embed SDK, but it is for platforms that want to embed the Elfsight widget catalogue, and its methods cover listing apps and opening, editing, removing and displaying widgets rather than loading locations. So the CSV file is not just the easiest way to load a large list, it is the only documented one, and there is nothing to automate the upload with.,
Straightforward, with one wrinkle. There is no API for location data, and while the product page mentions CSV export, the help centre documents only the import. So the file you imported is the safest copy of your data. If you built the list inside the widget instead, check whether an export is offered in your editor before you cancel.
The point of the move is that retailer locations stop being rows anyone owns, and the locator stops having a monthly budget attached to how many people visit it.
Prices run from a permanent free plan up to Enterprise tiers, and the number that changes between them is monthly widget views rather than store count: 200 views on Free, 5,000 on Basic, 50,000 on Pro, 150,000 on Premium, then 300,000, 600,000, 1,200,000 and unlimited. The displayed rates are billed yearly, currently $5, $10 and $20 a month for Basic, Pro and Premium against struck-through prices of $6, $12 and $24, with Enterprise from $30 to $80. What Elfsight charges billed monthly is not shown on the pricing page. There is also a 96 Apps Pack covering the whole widget catalogue from $15 a month billed yearly.,
There is a genuinely permanent free plan with no card required, one widget, unlimited locations and Elfsight branding shown. The limit is 200 views a month, which is about seven a day, and exceeding it temporarily deactivates the widget. Treat it as a proper evaluation tool rather than a locator you can run a business on, and use it specifically to test whether your full location list imports cleanly before paying anything.
No, and this is one of its real advantages. Elfsight states plainly that the Store Locator widget does not require you to provide any API keys, and repeats it on the Shopify guide. Most widgets in this bracket make the Google Maps key and the billing account behind it the customer’s responsibility, which is where locator projects most often stall. With Elfsight there is no cloud console step and no second invoice from Google.,
No plan states a location limit and the product page markets unlimited locations. Elfsight’s own CSV import guide asks you to stay within a 1,000-location limit so everything runs smoothly, and there is no documented API to load them another way. Both statements come from Elfsight. If your list is a few hundred stores the tension is academic; if it runs into the thousands, test the import on the free plan first.,
No. The location card carries address, website, email, phone, business hours, open status, description, logo and photo, and there is no product or inventory field to populate. So the widget answers where the shops are, and a shopper who wants to know which nearby store has a specific item has to phone them. That is the line between a locator widget and a where-to-buy platform.
If the problem is the view limit, other widgets in this class price by location count instead, which makes the bill predictable but usually costs more up front. If the problem is that the store list belongs to retailers rather than to you, or that shoppers want to know which store has a product, that is what StoreLocators does instead: retailer feeds refreshed daily rather than a file you upload, per-product and per-store availability, and the map inside the subscription with sessions unmetered. It costs many times more, which on a short owned store list is not worth paying.
Researched and written by Anthony La Corte.
Last reviewed
Every Elfsight claim on this page was taken from elfsight.com, its pricing pages, its terms of service, its Shopify guide or its help centre. Each was last checked on 15 October 2026. The sources are listed below with the exact URL we read.,,
Every claim was checked twice against the vendor’s own pages before publishing.,,
No customer rating appears in the table, deliberately. We could not confirm G2, Trustpilot or Capterra ratings for the Store Locator, so none is shown; G2’s listing for Elfsight as a whole covers the full widget catalogue. Elfsight does list 43 apps on the Shopify App Store, and the single one filed under Shopify’s store-locator category is titled "Store Locator for Google Maps", but its own description calls it the Elfsight Google Maps app and it is sold as one flat $5.99-a-month plan rather than on the monthly-views ladder described here. Its 3.8 from 9 reviews belongs to that product, so it is recorded in the sources and not carried into the table. Claims about StoreLocators come from our own public pages and are not separately cited.,,
Every claim on this page cites the source it came from, with the date we checked it. Sources are named but not linked; search for the title to find the page.
Connect your online shoppers to in-stock products at retail stores nearby. In five minutes. With zero maintenance.
