Joy Loyalty vs Rivo: 2026 Comparison

Most loyalty program comparisons focus on feature checklists and pricing tables. They miss the real question: which app actually fits your growth stage and technical reality? Both Joy Loyalty and Rivo are genuinely strong platforms—but they're solving different problems for different brands.

Joy Loyalty is built for merchants who want control without needing a development team. Rivo is architected for fast-growing brands that have (or want) technical resources and are willing to invest more upfront for deeper customization. The choice isn't about which is objectively "better." It's about alignment.

Introduction

For high-growth Shopify brands, loyalty programs are no longer a competitive advantage—they're table stakes.

It costs 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, which means every percentage point you move on retention directly impacts your bottom line. A well-designed loyalty program simultaneously increases customer lifetime value (LTV), reduces customer acquisition costs (CAC), and creates defensible competitive moats through community and emotional connection.

But choosing the right platform matters. Not every loyalty app serves high-growth brands the same way. Some prioritize ease of use over flexibility. Others require engineering resources to unlock their full potential. This guide cuts through the noise with a direct comparison of two platforms that have earned strong reputations among scaling ecommerce brands: Joy Loyalty and Rivo.

We'll move beyond feature lists to examine what each platform actually delivers for brands approaching seven figures in annual revenue, managing complex customer journeys, and balancing speed with sophistication.

Joy Loyalty: An Overview for High-Growth Brands

What Is Joy Loyalty?

Joy Loyalty serves primarily mid-market Shopify merchants—the $2-20M annual revenue range where brands are serious about retention but often lack dedicated development teams. It's particularly popular in beauty, fitness, and lifestyle verticals where emotional connections and personalization drive repeat purchases.

The platform philosophy is straightforward: merchants should be able to build sophisticated loyalty experiences without writing code or managing complex API integrations. This doesn't mean it's simplistic. It means the complexity is hidden behind thoughtful interface design.

Key Features for Scaling Businesses

Points & Rewards Architecture: Joy Loyalty supports unlimited points rewards across four earning channels—purchases, subscriptions, social interactions, and even Instagram comments. This breadth lets you reward behavior beyond transactions, which matters for brands building community-driven growth. Redemption options include discounts, free products, and exclusive access.

VIP Tiers & Membership Systems: The platform enables tiered loyalty structures (Bronze, Silver, Gold patterns) with differentiated member benefits. Real-world implementation includes exclusive shipping thresholds, early product access, and birthday rewards—all configurable without touching code.

Referral Programs: Built-in referral mechanics allow customers to earn points for successful referrals, turning your best customers into acquisition channels. This is particularly valuable for DTC brands where word-of-mouth compounds quickly.

Customization & Branding: Here's where Joy Loyalty distinguishes itself. The platform offers 30+ customizable touchpoints—meaning you're not limited to standard loyalty widgets. Merchants get a flexible loyalty page builder, brandable checkout blocks, and a developer toolkit for those who need to build custom endpoints. Critically, the Ultimate plan explicitly supports headless commerce (Hydrogen), which matters if you're experimenting with emerging sales channels.

Integrations: Joy connects with Shopify POS, Klaviyo, Omnisend, Gorgias, Judge.me, and Loox. For most high-growth brands, this covers the essential stack. The Shopify Flow integration means you can trigger loyalty actions based on customer behavior captured elsewhere in your ecosystem.

Pros of Joy Loyalty for High-Growth Brands

Predictive personalization and proactive AI assistance: Joy's algorithm learns from customer behavior and surfaces relevant reward opportunities at the moment they're most likely to drive engagement. This is particularly valuable for brands with diverse customer segments.

High merchant satisfaction rating for support: The platform offers 24/7 live chat with dedicated account managers—and the reviews consistently mention responsiveness and actual helpfulness rather than templated responses. For brands scaling rapidly, this matters more than you'd think.

Omnichannel experience for Shopify POS retailers: If you operate physical locations alongside your online store, Joy's POS integration ensures customers' points and tier status sync seamlessly across channels. This eliminates friction and increases perceived value.

The free plan accommodates up to 150 monthly orders, with paid tiers starting at $24.99/month. This pricing structure rewards early adoption and lets brands test before committing significant resources.

Cons of Joy Loyalty for High-Growth Brands

Lacks developer-friendly API on standard plans: Joy's developer toolkit exists, but it's not as extensive as Rivo's. If you need to build truly custom loyalty logic or pipe data into proprietary systems, you'll hit limitations quickly and may need to request custom development—which comes with additional costs.

Customization is more restrictive than Rivo: While Joy handles most standard loyalty needs beautifully, unusual requirements force you into either workarounds or support requests. For example, if you want to apply different earning rules based on inventory location or customer acquisition channel, you'll need to structure your program around Joy's existing logic rather than bending Joy to your logic.

Rivo: Powering Loyalty for Scaling Shopify Businesses

What Is Rivo?

Rivo positions itself as the platform for Shopify Plus merchants and high-velocity DTC brands with technical depth. Where Joy emphasizes merchant control, Rivo emphasizes developer control. The platform is built on Shopify's latest infrastructure, optimized for speed and extensibility rather than ease-of-use for non-technical teams.

Its audience is brands that have grown past the need for guided customization and have either hired technical talent or partnered with agencies that can maximize Rivo's capabilities. Think high-growth brands that are comfortable investing $500+/month because the ROI compounds quickly.

Key Features for Scaling Businesses

Points-Based Loyalty with Flexibility: Rivo's points system supports earning through purchases, sign-ups, orders, referrals, and social follows. Unlimited members means no artificial caps on your loyalty base—important as you scale.

Reward Types: Beyond simple discounts, Rivo allows percentage-based discounts, fixed discounts, free products, and even custom reward types through the API.

Advanced Mechanics: Punch cards, points expiry rules, and custom actions give you granular control over program behavior. For example, you can create scarcity-driven mechanics (points expire in 60 days) or milestone-based bonuses (every 5th purchase earns double).

Developer-First Architecture: This is Rivo's identity. Extensive API access, webhook support, and custom CSS capabilities mean you're not constrained by the UI. If the interface doesn't do what you need, you build it.

Unified System: Loyalty, referrals, and paid memberships coexist in one platform. This reduces data fragmentation and simplifies your tech stack compared to managing multiple apps.

Performance:

Built on Shopify's latest infrastructure, resulting in fast load times under 100ms

—meaningful when you're processing millions of requests monthly.

Pros of Rivo for High-Growth Brands

Built for speed with native Shopify checkout extensions: Rivo's checkout integration is lightning-fast, minimizing friction at the conversion moment. For brands where every millisecond matters, this compounds into real AOV improvements.

Mobile wallet integration for Apple and Google Wallet: Customers can save loyalty cards directly to their phones, increasing program engagement and making redemptions frictionless at the point of sale.

Advanced custom accounts and developer toolkit: Rivo's API-first approach means you can build loyalty logic that mirrors your unique business model rather than adapting your model to the app.

The free plan supports up to 200 monthly orders, with paid tiers starting at $49/month. The Plus plan ($499/month) unlocks full API access and advanced developer capabilities—a significant investment, but justified for enterprise-scale brands.

Cons of Rivo for High-Growth Brands

Exclusive focus on Shopify prevents multi-platform use: If you're considering expansion to other platforms (headless storefronts, B2B channels, or marketplace integrations beyond Shopify), Rivo's Shopify-only architecture becomes a constraint.

Reporting is less advanced than enterprise solutions: While Rivo captures the data, its built-in analytics don't match specialized BI tools or LoyaltyLion's segmentation depth. High-growth brands often need to export data and build custom dashboards—meaning additional tools and setup.

The support is responsive, but the expectation is that you have technical literacy or a dedicated developer who can troubleshoot API integration issues. This isn't a con if you have those resources, but it is a real friction point if you don't.

Side-by-Side Feature Comparison: Joy Loyalty vs Rivo

Points & Rewards Management

Joy Loyalty's strength here is simplicity paired with depth. You can set up a tiered earning structure in minutes: 1 point per dollar, 2x points on birthdays, bonus multipliers for referrals. The interface walks you through logic without requiring you to think in conditionals. This is ideal for brands where your marketing manager runs the loyalty program, not your CTO.

Rivo's strength is customization. If you want to earn different points based on which warehouse an order shipped from, or apply dynamic multipliers based on a customer's LTV tier, or integrate with your pricing engine to adjust earning rates by product margin—Rivo's API makes these possible. The tradeoff is that you're writing logic somewhere (whether in Rivo's API or your own systems) rather than clicking through a form.

For high-growth brands, the real question is: how unique is your earning structure? If you're running a standard tiered program with seasonal bonuses, Joy wins on speed-to-launch. If you're testing unconventional mechanics (surge pricing for loyalty points, for example), Rivo's flexibility becomes essential.

VIP Tiers & Memberships

Both platforms support tiered structures, but the implementation differs meaningfully.

Joy Loyalty provides a tier builder with predefined progression paths (based on spending, points accumulated, or engagement scores). You define the benefit package for each tier—exclusive discount codes, free shipping, priority support—and the platform handles eligibility tracking and progression notifications. This works beautifully for 80% of brands. Where it breaks down is if you need conditional tier logic: e.g., "customers reach Silver if they've spent $1,000 and made 5+ purchases in the last 90 days." Joy can do this, but you'll need support help to configure it.

Rivo's API means tier logic is code, not configuration. You define it once, in whatever complexity you need, and iterate as you learn. For brands running sophisticated customer segmentation (think athletic wear brand with separate tiers for competitive athletes vs. lifestyle customers), this flexibility is invaluable.

Referral Programs

Both platforms include referral mechanics as core features—they've learned that referrals are among the highest-ROI loyalty levers.

Joy Loyalty's referral program is tightly integrated with its points system. Referred customers earn points upon first purchase, referrers earn points for each successful referral. The setup is guided: choose your referral reward (discount, points, or free product), set sharing channels (email, social, link), and launch. The platform handles tracking and attribution. For most brands, this is sufficient and fast.

Rivo's referral system is similarly straightforward at the surface but more extensible underneath. You can build custom referral rewards, track referral chains (did someone referred by your customer also refer others?), and integrate referral data with external CRM systems. For brands building affiliate-style programs or testing unusual referral incentive structures, this depth matters.

One gap in both platforms' public documentation: explicit fraud prevention for referral programs. As you scale, fraudulent referrals (created accounts that never purchase, ring-fencing between friends) become a material revenue drain. Both platforms presumably have basic checks, but neither publicly details their approach. If referrals will be 20%+ of your program value, dig into this with support before committing.

Customization & Branding

This is the clearest differentiator between the two platforms.

Joy Loyalty's philosophy: merchants should own their brand experience without touching code. You get a loyalty page builder with template layouts, color controls, and copy customization. Widgets on your storefront are brandable. Email templates follow your brand guidelines. If you need something outside the platform's boundaries, you request it from support, and Joy often builds custom solutions (sometimes at additional cost, sometimes as a feature request that helps the whole platform).

This approach has a ceiling. You can't, for example, build a completely custom loyalty UX that lives in your own frontend if that UX relies on real-time points data from Joy. The platform owns the customer experience, which is freeing for some brands and limiting for others.

Rivo's philosophy: developers should own their brand experience completely. The API is your contract. You can build loyalty interfaces that feel native to your website, integrate with your design system, and behave exactly as your brand experience demands. The tradeoff is obvious: you need a developer to build this, and you own the maintenance burden.

For high-growth brands, this choice often depends on your hiring stage. Pre-Series-A with a small team? Joy's no-code approach wins. Post-Series-A with engineering resources? Rivo's API-first approach compounds advantage.

Key Integrations for a Growing Ecosystem

Both platforms integrate with Shopify POS, but the depth differs.

Joy Loyalty's POS integration handles the core omnichannel use case: in-store customers see their online points balance, earn points on in-store purchases, and can redeem both. For most Shopify stores with one or two physical locations, this is more than sufficient.

Rivo's POS integration allows the same, but the API means you can extend it. For example, you could sync in-store customer attributes (location where they shop, product categories purchased) back to your CDP or email platform—creating richer segmentation. This is particularly valuable for high-volume retail brands operating multiple locations.

On email integrations, both connect to Klaviyo and Omnisend. Joy Loyalty's integrations are primarily event-based (send email when customer reaches new tier, for example). Rivo's are similar but more granular—you can query specific data via API and build custom workflows. For brands running sophisticated email segmentation (using points earned divided by points possible as an engagement score, for example), Rivo's depth enables more advanced use cases.

Both apps highlight Shopify POS integration, with deep focus on building a seamless omnichannel loyalty experience.

Ease of Use & Setup

Joy Loyalty's interface is genuinely clean. The first-time setup feels guided rather than overwhelming. You answer a series of questions about your business model, and the platform recommends a starting structure. From there, customization is available without being mandatory. Most brands are operational within a day or two.

Rivo's interface is also clean, but the assumption is different. Setup assumes you know what you want your loyalty program to do. If you're just exploring, the UI will surface options (points, tiers, referrals) but won't tell you how to sequence them. The real power unlocks when you need to integrate the API—at which point ease of use depends entirely on your technical resources. A developer will find Rivo's tooling exceptional. A marketer without technical support will find it frustrating.

Scalability & Performance

Joy Loyalty's infrastructure is reliable and adequate for most mid-market brands. The platform performs well at the $2-20M revenue scale where it's positioned. Real scaling limits appear in the multiple-millions-of-monthly-orders range, but the platform is honest about this and will recommend Rivo or enterprise alternatives if you approach those thresholds.

Rivo's infrastructure is designed for scale from the ground up.

Built on Shopify's latest infrastructure, the platform achieves fast load times under 100ms. This matters less for loyalty page visits (typically low volume) and more for checkout extensions and API calls. If you're processing millions of transactions monthly with millions of active loyalty members, Rivo's performance characteristics become a practical advantage, not a marketing claim.

Customer Support & Account Management

Both platforms offer 24/7 support and dedicated account managers on higher-tier plans. The reviews are genuinely strong for both.

Joy Loyalty's support leans toward helpfulness and patience—the feedback consistently mentions representatives who actually solve problems rather than pointing to documentation. For brands where someone on the team is learning loyalty programs for the first time, this matters.

Rivo's support is equally responsive, but the assumption is that you (or your technical partner) will understand the terminology and be capable of troubleshooting integration issues. If you have a developer on staff, this is ideal. If you don't, support interactions can feel more technical than helpful.

Pricing Reality Check: Joy Loyalty vs Rivo

Free Plans: What You Actually Get

Joy Loyalty's free plan allows up to 150 monthly orders. At this tier, you get the core loyalty experience: basic points and rewards, one VIP tier, referral program basics. What's notably not included: the advanced integrations (Klaviyo API syncing beyond basic events), dedicated account management, or the developer toolkit. This is a legitimate product, not a crippled trial. Many small brands run their entire loyalty program on the free plan indefinitely.

Rivo's free plan accommodates up to 200 monthly orders—a higher ceiling. You get points, basic referrals, and the standard set of integrations. Advanced features like points expiry rules or custom CSS require a paid plan. Critically, API access is restricted on the free tier; you can't build custom integrations until you move to Plus.

For brands with <$100K in annual revenue, Joy's free plan is often sufficient. For brands growing fast and expecting to exceed the monthly order threshold soon, Rivo's higher free ceiling buys a few extra months before you must pay.

Paid Tiers: The Real Investment

Joy Loyalty's first paid tier ($24.99/month) roughly triples the functionality of the free plan. You unlock higher order limits, advanced VIP features, and dedicated onboarding. The next step up is typically $49-99/month depending on your order volume.

Rivo's first paid tier ($49/month) is double Joy's starting price. You get higher order limits and advanced features. The Plus plan ($499/month) is where the serious customization happens—full API access, developer support, and advanced features like custom actions and extensive integrations.

Here's the pricing reality: if you're a $2-5M brand with a single product line and straightforward repeat purchase model, Joy's $25-50/month tier is almost certainly sufficient. If you're a $10M+ brand with complex customer journeys or unique loyalty mechanics, Rivo's $500/month investment often pays for itself through operational efficiencies and customization speed.

Hidden Costs for High-Growth Brands

Neither platform's pricing page explicitly details what happens at scale. For Joy Loyalty, custom development requests—building something outside the platform's standard UI—can cost $1,000-5,000+ depending on complexity. For Rivo, you're hiring developers to build integrations and loyalty experiences, which costs more but is often more efficient than working with Joy's support on custom work.

Additionally, both platforms assume you're using their recommended tech stack. If you need to integrate with a less common CRM, analytics tool, or backend system, you'll likely need custom work—adding 20-30% to your total loyalty program cost.

Decision Framework: Which Loyalty App is Right for Your High-Growth Brand?

Choose Joy Loyalty If:

• You're a mid-market Shopify brand ($2-20M annual revenue) in beauty, fitness, or lifestyle where emotional connections drive retention.
• Your in-house team includes marketers but not dedicated developers. You need a platform that rewards your best people for thoughtful strategy, not technical execution.
• You're comfortable with slightly fewer customization options in exchange for faster time-to-launch and lower risk of technical debt.
• Your loyalty program revenue impact is meaningful but not transformative—you're optimizing 10-20% of total revenue through loyalty mechanics, not building the entire business around it.
• You want excellent customer support and are willing to call a human being when something unexpected happens (which Joy actually encourages).

Explore strategies to significantly increase customer lifetime value (LTV)

through Joy's flexible points system and tier structure.

Choose Rivo If:

• You're a Shopify Plus merchant or high-growth DTC brand ($15M+ annual revenue or growing 100%+ year-over-year) with dedicated technical resources.
• Your growth strategy depends on rapid experimentation with loyalty mechanics—testing new referral incentive structures, dynamic earning rules, or unusual reward types—and you need a platform that supports iteration without friction.
• You own multiple sales channels or a complex tech stack. Rivo's API-first approach means you can integrate loyalty data into your CDP, warehouse, or custom backend systems efficiently.
• You're comfortable with higher initial investment ($500+/month) because you can clearly see how customization unlocks revenue or efficiency gains.
• Your competitive advantage depends on loyalty program differentiation—you're not running a standard loyalty program, you're building a moat.

Consider a Comparison Against Other Options

Check a detailed comparison against another popular solution like Smile.io

to ensure you've evaluated the full landscape. Similarly, if you're enterprise-scale,

take a closer look at how Rivo stacks up against another enterprise-level competitor, LoyaltyLion.

Beyond the Basics: Unique Angles for High-Growth

Strategic Analytics for Growth

Both platforms track basic metrics: enrollment, redemption rates, revenue per member. But

learning how to interpret loyalty analytics and key metrics that drive revenue

is where high-growth brands separate themselves.

Joy Loyalty's analytics dashboard shows member cohorts (customers who enrolled in March vs. June) and their behavior over time. This lets you understand whether your program is improving retention for new customers specifically, or if it's mostly re-engaging customers who were already loyal.

Rivo's API means you can export detailed event data and build custom dashboards in tools like Looker or Tableau. For brands with sophisticated analytics infrastructure, this enables questions like: "What's the optimal point-earning rate for customers in our top 20% LTV segment?"—the kind of query that drives millions in incremental revenue.

Optimizing Programs with A/B Testing

Joy Loyalty's built-in A/B testing is limited but usable. You can test different email messaging around your loyalty program (via Klaviyo integrations) or run seasonal bonus experiments. The platform doesn't natively support testing different point structures, but you can coordinate small-scale experiments with support.

Rivo's API means you can build sophisticated A/B tests at the cohort level. Offer 1.5x point multipliers to a segment of new customers and measure their LTV vs. a control group. You're responsible for designing and implementing the test, but you have full flexibility.

Ensuring Consistent Experience at Scale

Joy Loyalty's POS integration ensures that a customer's points and tier status sync across web and store. The UX is consistent because the platform owns all customer touchpoints. As you scale to 10+ locations or international operations, this consistency is valuable.

Rivo's omnichannel experience depends on how carefully you integrate it. The API allows seamless syncing, but you're responsible for ensuring your frontend, mobile app, and POS all display loyalty information correctly. For brands with the engineering resources to maintain this, the flexibility is worth the complexity.

Deep Dive into Developer Capabilities

Joy Loyalty's developer toolkit (available on Ultimate plan) includes webhooks and custom endpoints. You can trigger external actions when customers earn points or advance tiers. This is functional but not deep—you can't, for example, write custom validation logic that prevents certain redemptions or modifies earning rules in real-time.

Rivo's Plus plan includes an extensive GraphQL API covering all loyalty operations. You can query member data, modify earning rules, trigger custom actions, and build integrations that treat Rivo as a data source rather than a standalone system. For brands running complex loyalty mechanics, this is the difference between "the system does what we want" and "we built a loyalty system that happens to use Rivo as infrastructure."

Future-Proofing Your Loyalty Program

Explore our complete guide to setting up a Shopify referral program

to ensure your chosen platform's referral capabilities align with your roadmap.

Joy Loyalty is actively developing AI-driven personalization features—the platform is moving toward proactive recommendations ("your next purchase is eligible for 3x points"). This is valuable for brands where customers need motivation to transact more frequently. As AI becomes table stakes, Joy is positioning itself to be table stakes too.

Rivo's evolution is toward deeper API capabilities and developer tools. The platform bets that high-growth brands will increasingly want to own their loyalty logic rather than depend on vendor-provided UI. This is a reasonable bet, but it's a bet on where the market goes, not where it is today.

For brands worried about AI-driven personalization, Joy has a head start. For brands worried about ownership and flexibility as requirements change, Rivo's trajectory is safer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can both apps integrate with Shopify POS for omnichannel loyalty?

Yes, both Joy Loyalty and Rivo support Shopify POS integration, ensuring customers earn and redeem points across online and in-store channels. Joy's integration is particularly noted for seamless omnichannel sync. Rivo's integration is robust but may require additional API configuration for advanced use cases like location-based earning rules.

Which app is better for international expansion?

Joy Loyalty explicitly mentions multilingual support in its documentation, making it slightly easier for brands launching in new markets without extensive customization. Rivo supports international use but assumes you'll handle localization through your own frontend if you're using the API. If you're expanding to non-English markets quickly, Joy has a slight advantage.

Do Joy Loyalty or Rivo offer options for subscription box loyalty programs?

Both platforms support subscription-based earning (Joy explicitly mentions "subscriptions" as an earning channel). For subscription box brands wanting to build retention through points earned on recurring orders plus bonus mechanics for multi-month commitments, either platform works. Rivo's API gives you more flexibility to build custom mechanics around subscription milestones.

How do the platforms handle fraud in referral programs?

Both platforms have built-in checks for obviously fraudulent referrals (duplicate emails, impossible geolocation patterns), but neither publicly details their specific approach. If referral fraud is a concern—say, you're offering $50+ per referral—ask both platforms' support teams about their detection and prevention mechanisms before committing.

TLDR

Joy Loyalty excels for mid-market Shopify brands ($2-20M revenue) prioritizing merchant-friendly customization, excellent support, and fast launch at an accessible price ($24.99/month entry). Rivo is built for high-growth and Shopify Plus brands with dedicated technical resources, offering extensive API access, developer toolkits, and performance optimizations (sub-100ms load times) at higher cost ($49-499/month). Choose Joy if you want guided customization without code; choose Rivo if you need deep API control and can justify engineering investment.