Kaktus Sales Pop Up vs ROCKET Sales Pop Up: which sales popup app fits your Shopify store?

Sales pop-ups are one of the oldest tricks on Shopify: a small card slides in at the bottom of the screen and says that someone in Lyon or Leeds just bought the product you are looking at. Hundreds of apps do it, and the big names get all the blog coverage. Two smaller apps rarely get compared, even though they answer the same need in very different ways: SALES POP UP: Fomo+Social Proof by Kaktus (we call it Kaktus Sales Pop Up below) and ROCKET Sales Pop Up & FOMO by Codeinero.

Both sit in the Pop-ups category of the Shopify App Store, both show recent purchase notifications, and both have a small but real review base. Everything below was checked on their App Store listings, review pages and developer pages on October 20, 2026. Where a listing does not mention a feature, we say so rather than guessing.

Who is behind each app

Kaktus Sales Pop Up

Kaktus is a developer based in Chisinau, Moldova, with a large catalog: its partner page lists 66 apps, from a contact form builder to a pre-order app with almost 400 reviews and a slide cart. Most of them are free or free to install. The sales pop-up app is recent: it launched on the App Store on November 22, 2024, and already has 81 reviews with a 4.9 rating (77 five-star, 3 four-star, 1 three-star).

The positioning is narrow and clear. The app does social proof pop-ups and nothing else: recent purchases, cart pop-ups, announcements and custom pop-ups. The listing promises a setup of about two minutes with no code. The price is the headline: the app is listed as free, with no paid tier shown.

ROCKET Sales Pop Up & FOMO

Codeinero is the team behind the STKY sticky add to cart app, which we covered in STKY vs Buy Me. ROCKET is much older than Kaktus: it launched on October 7, 2015, and has 139 reviews with a 4.3 rating. Around 91% of those reviews are five stars and about 4% are one star, which explains why the average sits lower than the Kaktus score.

ROCKET is a small urgency toolkit rather than a single pop-up. The sales notifications come with a limited-time offer pop-up, a stock counter, a countdown timer, email capture pop-ups and animated cart and checkout buttons. The Advanced plan unlocks more than 30 other store widgets. It is paid: $5 a month for Basic and $9 a month for Advanced, both with a 14-day free trial.

One detail worth knowing: Codeinero's own website still shows a copyright date of 2023 and describes a product called Sales Rocket with older pricing ($9.99 to $49.99 a month). That pricing does not match the current App Store listing, so we rely only on the App Store figures here.

Criterion by criterion

The core sales notification

On the basic job, the two apps are even. Kaktus shows real-time recent purchase notifications, and one recent reviewer points out that the pop-ups are built from the store's real orders. ROCKET's listing describes "real-time notifications of recent purchases" in the same way.

Kaktus goes a little further in pop-up types. Its listing names sales pop-ups, cart pop-ups, announcements and custom pop-ups, plus a photos content type. ROCKET does not list a cart pop-up or a free-form announcement card. What it lists instead is a limited-time offer pop-up with coupons, which is a promotion tool more than a social proof tool.

One limitation came up in a Kaktus review from May 2026: the order update interval was capped at 3 days, the pop-up showed the oldest order first, and CSS typed into the Appearance section did not persist. Kaktus replied that improvements were planned. If your store sells a few orders a week, a 3-day window can leave the pop-up with little to show, so test it on your own volume during setup.

Urgency widgets beyond the pop-up

This is where ROCKET clearly wins. Its Basic plan already includes a stock counter, a countdown timer, limited-time offer pop-ups and email capture pop-ups. The Advanced plan adds more than 30 other widgets, and the listing names animated cart and checkout buttons. The integrations section mentions Cart Reserved, In Cart Upsell and Page Speed Optimization, which are Codeinero's own modules.

Kaktus has none of these inside the sales pop-up app. Kaktus does publish separate apps for some of them (a free shipping bar, trust badges, a slide cart), but each is a separate install. If you want low stock alerts and a timer next to your social proof, ROCKET covers it in one app. Our guide on low stock alerts and the article on countdown timers in 2026 explain when those widgets help and when they hurt trust.

Design, rules and targeting

Kaktus lists an editor, templates, custom code, custom fonts, campaigns, triggers and rules, targeting, and APIs and webhooks. Merchants in recent reviews mention how much they could customize. For a free app, that is a long list.

ROCKET's listing does not detail its design editor, targeting rules or campaign scheduling. That does not mean the options do not exist inside the app, but they are not documented on the listing, so we cannot score them as present. Several ROCKET reviews say that support made custom changes for them, including a custom-coded shipping bar tweak, which suggests a more hands-on model: you ask, the team adjusts.

Analytics

Kaktus lists engagement tracking and conversion tracking. ROCKET does not list any analytics on its App Store page. If you want to see whether the pop-up actually moves sales, Kaktus gives you a starting point without leaving the app. For a stricter test, the method in our article on Shopify heatmaps helps you see whether visitors even notice the card.

Pricing

Kaktus is free. The listing shows no paid tier and no usage cap. The developer's business model seems to rely on its large catalog of free apps, but the listing does not explain it, so keep an eye on the pricing section in case it changes.

ROCKET costs $5 or $9 a month, billed in US dollars every 30 days, with unlimited sessions, views and orders on both plans and a 14-day trial. Even the Advanced plan stays under $110 a year. If you would otherwise pay for a separate timer app and a separate stock counter, ROCKET can end up cheaper than stacking free apps that each add their own script. Our article on free vs paid Shopify apps goes deeper on that trade-off.

Languages and support

The Kaktus admin is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal). ROCKET is in English only. Both developers get regular praise for support: Kaktus replies to almost every review, and several ROCKET reviewers since 2024 describe instant or same-day answers.

Track record and risk

ROCKET has more than ten years of history. That is reassuring, but its reviews also hold the two most serious complaints in this comparison: a 2017 report of a 24-hour outage, and a September 2026 review saying the app generated an unexpected $100 discount code, with the merchant unhappy about how support handled it. These are single accounts and not verified, but they are on the record.

Kaktus has less than two years of history and no serious incident in its visible reviews. The trade-off is simple: a longer, bumpier track record against a shorter, cleaner one.

Speed

Neither listing publishes performance data. Any pop-up app loads a script on the storefront, and ROCKET's Advanced plan can load several widgets at once if you turn them all on. Activate only what you use, and read our guide on app bloat and site speed before stacking several apps.

Three stores, three choices

A new store selling handmade candles

Twenty orders a month, a tight budget, and a need to look busy. Kaktus is the obvious first try: free, live in a few minutes, and the targeting rules let you limit pop-ups to product pages. The one thing to test is the 3-day order window, which can leave few orders to display at this volume.

A supplement brand running weekly flash sales

This store needs a timer, a stock counter and a coupon pop-up as much as social proof. ROCKET's $5 Basic plan covers all four in one app, which is simpler than installing three free tools. Pair it with the advice in our guide to flash sales without killing margin.

A fashion store with Spanish-speaking staff

The team that manages the store prefers Spanish. Kaktus offers a Spanish admin, ROCKET does not. If the team also wants conversion tracking and webhooks to send events elsewhere, Kaktus is the better fit.

Switching from one to the other

Moving between these two apps is light work, because a sales pop-up does not store long-term data you need to keep. From ROCKET to Kaktus, list which ROCKET widgets you actually use. If you rely on the stock counter or countdown timer, you will need a replacement before you uninstall, because Kaktus does not include them. Then cancel the ROCKET subscription in your Shopify admin so billing stops.

From Kaktus to ROCKET, start the 14-day trial, rebuild your pop-up look in ROCKET, and only then uninstall Kaktus. In both cases, check your theme afterwards for leftover app embeds, and run both apps side by side for no more than a day: two sales pop-ups on the same page look fake and cancel the trust effect.

For a wider view of the category, our list of the best urgency and scarcity apps covers the bigger names, and the VR Urgency vs Countdown Timer Bar Samita comparison looks at two other small urgency apps.