Image Voice vs AltText.ai

Nobody arrives on this page because AltText.ai wrote bad alt text.

They arrive for one of two reasons, and both of them are sitting in AltText.ai's own review page. The first is the meter. The second is worse: the number stopped meaning anything.

The two reasons people go looking

A merchant, in a two-star review on AltText.ai's listing, describing the second one:

we had some discrepancy issues between the "number of images without alt text" and the "number of images resolved" — those values never matched the number of actual issues found, or the number of issues actually resolved

That is the whole problem with coverage as a metric, written by somebody who paid to discover it. A tool that counts filled fields will tell you that you are done. It cannot tell you whether the field it filled says anything, because it never graded what was there — and neither does any other alt text app on the Shopify App Store, including this one until you run the audit.

The first reason is the meter. Another two-star review, and the developer's own reply underneath it:

concerned about inflated credit usage

you just ran out of credits faster than the plan allowed

And a third merchant, on the size of the job:

we will need several months to work through it

Several months, for a backlog that already exists, on a plan you are already paying for. That is not a complaint about quality. It is arithmetic.

The arithmetic

AltText.ai's Shopify plans, from its App Store listing, checked 4 September 2026:

A 3,000-image catalogue does not fit in the top plan in a single month. At $59 a month it takes two, and you are paying for the meter the whole time you wait.

Image Voice prices the backlog instead of the image. Keeper is $8.90 a month and Curator is $28.90, and both open with a First Sweep that writes the backlog up front, in days — not a monthly allowance you drip your own catalogue through. The monthly allowance after that only has to keep up with what you upload next.

Where AltText.ai is better, and it genuinely is

This is not a page about a bad app. AltText.ai is good, it is well reviewed, and on three counts it beats us outright:

• It has been judged. 4.5 stars across 142 reviews at the time of writing. Image Voice has none yet. If your shortlist rule is "nothing without a track record," that rule is a good rule and it excludes us.
• It carries the Built for Shopify badge. We do not. That badge is Shopify's assessment of performance, design and integration quality, and it is not nothing.
• 130+ languages. We write in seven — English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. If your store sells in Japanese, this comparison is already over and you should install theirs.

It also does analyse the image. AltText.ai's own description of its method is that its AI "automatically analyzes each image on your site," and the reviews back that up. Anyone telling you it just copies your product title into the alt field is selling you something.

We know the temptation, because it is the assumption we started from. We have opened catalogues where every description began "image of" and ended in a keyword pile — worse than empty, because it looks done. That is a real thing, and it is what Image Voice was built against. It is not what AltText.ai does, and a comparison page that pretended otherwise would be the same kind of dishonest as a coverage number that counts empty fields as done.

So what is actually different

One thing, and everything else follows from it.

AltText.ai writes alt text. Image Voice grades it first, then writes it.

The audit is free, forever, and it is the part that has no equivalent. It reads what is already in your alt fields — whatever wrote it, us, them, an SEO suite, or an intern in 2019 — and sorts it four ways: missing, junk, weak, good, with a vision-checked sample you read yourself. A typical result reads "62 of 100 covered images don't describe the image." That is a sentence a count cannot produce.

Three more differences, all downstream of it:

• Nothing reaches your store unapproved. Every description goes through a keyboard queue built for 200 decisions in one sitting — approve, edit, skip. Auto-pilot exists, and it is offered only once your own approval record justifies it.
• Thirty-day undo, on every plan including free. Full before → after trail.
• The quality is gated, not trusted. Writing is checked against a fixed golden set, so no update can quietly degrade what you approved, and a weekly re-scan keeps your number true.

What to do about it

Do not take our word for the difference. Take theirs.

Run the free audit on the alt text AltText.ai already wrote for you. It costs nothing, it needs no card, and nothing is written to your store. You will get a grade on their output within minutes, on your own products.

If the grade comes back good — and on a well-run AltText.ai install it may — then you have your answer, you have it for free, and we will be the ones telling you to stay where you are.

Competitor pricing, ratings and features above were taken from the AltText.ai App Store listing and alttext.ai on 4 September 2026, and may have changed since. Check the listing before you decide. AltText.ai is a trademark of its owner and this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.