OnlyFlights VS ViewForge

OnlyFlights's answer

You should choose OnlyFlights over other apps because it’s fast, private, and stress-free. Unlike some flight apps, it doesn’t ask you to create an account or show you annoying ads. It gives you just what you need - like real-time flight updates, delay alerts, and a clean travel log - without any extra clutter. Plus, it’s really affordable if you want to track more than two flights. Perfect for travelers who want a simple tool that just works.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

OnlyFlights's answer

OnlyFlights is unique because it’s super simple and easy to use. You don’t need to sign up or deal with ads, and it doesn’t track your data. It focuses only on flight tracking, with clean design and useful features like live flight alerts, a countdown to your next flight, and a travel history log. It’s made for people who just want to track flights without any extra noise.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

OnlyFlights's answer

The primary audience for OnlyFlights is travelers who want a simple and reliable way to track their flights. This includes frequent flyers, casual travelers, flight crews, and even people picking someone up from the airport. These travelers care about staying updated but don’t want to deal with ads, sign-ups, or complicated apps.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

OnlyFlights's answer

The story behind OnlyFlights started with Kate and Alex, the creators of the Time2Pack app. At first, they added a flight tracking feature inside Time2Pack, just to help travelers stay more organized. But soon, users began asking for a separate app that focused only on flight tracking. So, after getting lots of feedback, they decided to build OnlyFlights as a standalone app - simple, focused, and designed just for tracking flights without distractions.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import