Planable.io VS ViewForge

Planable.io's answer

KFC, Ecco, Mastercard, Soedexo, Peroni, Bolt, SMEG, Warner Music Group

Planable.io's answer

Marketing agencies and in-house social media teams managing content across multiple clients, brands, or locations. Typically 5 to 60 people, running 5 or more client workspaces across 10+ social channels. Common industries include digital marketing agencies, real estate, hospitality, retail chains, financial services, and B2B/SaaS brands.

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.

Planable.io's answer

Planable is built around collaboration first, publishing second. Every post lives in a visual workspace where teams, clients, and stakeholders see a realistic preview of how content will look on each platform; before anything goes live. Clients can approve posts directly without creating an account. Approval workflows are a first-class feature: optional, required, or multi-level. Internal comments stay hidden from clients. Content locks after approval. Posts auto-schedule on sign-off. Each client gets a separate workspace with its own pages, roles, and settings, so agencies can manage 10+ clients without mixing work.

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.

Planable.io's answer

Most social media tools are built for publishing. Planable is built for the review cycle that happens before publishing. The structured approval flow (combined with per-client workspaces, granular roles, internal vs. client visibility, and real platform previews) makes it the tool agencies reach for when spreadsheets and email chains stop working. It also covers the full content pipeline: planning, collaboration, scheduling, analytics, competitor tracking, social listening, and community management, all in one place.

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.

Planable.io's answer

Planable was founded in 2016 by Xenia Muntean, Nicolae Gudumac and Vlad Calus. Xenia was running a social media agency and spent more time managing content feedback over email than actually creating content. They built Planable to fix that: a single visual space where content gets created, reviewed, and approved without the chaos. The company joined Y Combinator in 2018 and has since grown to serve thousands of agencies and brands worldwide.

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