TL;DR
The question assumes a ladder: Basic shows you a little, Advanced adds attribution models, Plus adds the rest. That ladder used to exist. On Shopify's live pages today it does not. One analytics row on the pricing comparison, checked identically across Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus [1], and a help center sentence that says the main features come with any plan [2]. What does change by plan is API access, rate limits, checkout customization and staff seats, none of which decide whether a report appears in your admin. If your channel reports look thin, upgrading your plan will not thicken them.
Key Takeaways
- Shopify's pricing comparison shows one analytics row, "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics", included on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus alike [1].
- The help center is explicit: "Shopify Analytics' main features are available to merchants on any Shopify subscription plan" [2].
- The Channel Performance report documents no plan requirement, and its five attribution models (last non-direct click by default, last click, first click, any click, linear) are described without any tier condition [3].
- Marketing attribution data in that report starts on October 1, 2021, for all models [3]. That date, not your plan, is the floor on historical comparisons.
- The middle tier is called Grow now. Guides written against the old "Shopify plan" naming are the same guides that describe the old tiered-report ladder, which is a useful staleness signal.
- Where plans genuinely differ for tracking work: Basic has limited data access for custom apps built on Shopify APIs, Advanced and Plus get raised API rate limits, and full checkout customization is Plus only [1].
- What no plan includes is server-side delivery of your conversions to GA4, Meta, Google Ads or anywhere else. That gap is the same on Basic and on Plus.
Does any Shopify report require a specific plan?
No, and the evidence is in two places that merchants rarely open in the same sitting.
The first is the plan comparison table on Shopify's pricing page. Scroll to the comparison table and there is a single analytics row, named "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics", and it carries the identical included marker in the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus columns [1]. Not a graduated set of entries. One row, four checks.
The second is the help center's own Shopify analytics page, which puts it in a sentence: "Shopify Analytics' main features are available to merchants on any Shopify subscription plan" [2]. Custom reports and data explorations are documented on that page with no plan condition attached.
Then there is the Channel Performance documentation itself, which is where most of this traffic is really headed. The marketing performance page describes a report listing every marketing channel with sales, sessions, orders, average order value, cost, ROAS, CPA, click-through rate, impressions, clicks, conversion rate, and new versus returning customer type, plus five attribution models with last non-direct click as the default [3]. Read the whole page and there is no plan-availability statement on it. For how those models resolve a multi-touch path and why the same order can land on different channels under different models, we walked through the mechanics in how the Channel Performance report attributes.
One honest caveat, because a negative finding deserves one. "No plan restriction is documented" is not the same claim as "guaranteed identical on every plan forever". It is what Shopify's current pages say. If a report is genuinely missing from your admin, the cause worth chasing is a missing sales channel connection or an unfinished setup step, not a billing tier.
Where the plans actually differ in ways that touch tracking
Plan choice does change things. It changes different things than the search results suggest.
| Row on the plan comparison | Basic | Grow | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analytics and reports | Included | Included | Included | Included |
| Build custom apps using Shopify APIs | Limited data access | Full data access | Full data access | Full data access |
| API rate limits | Standard | Standard | Up to 2x on select APIs | Up to 10x on select APIs |
| Checkout customization | Limited | Limited | Limited | Full |
| Build headless storefronts | 1 | 1 | 1 | 25 |
| Third-party transaction fees | 2% | 1% | 0.6% | 0.2% |
Source for every cell: the live pricing comparison [1].
The first data row is the one that matters for anybody building their own reporting. Basic's "limited data access" for custom apps is a real constraint if you were planning to pull order data out through the Admin API into a warehouse. The rate-limit rows matter for the same reason at volume. The checkout customization row is the doorway to the tracking surfaces that genuinely are Plus-only, and we enumerated those separately in the Plus tracking surfaces standard plans do not have. That article is the tier-difference article. This one is the answer to the report-gating question, and the answer is that report gating is not where the difference lives.
Notice what is absent from the table: not one row about which reports you can open.
Why the question keeps getting asked
Two reasons, and both are Shopify's.
The first is naming. The middle tier was called "Shopify" for years and is called Grow now. Search queries still carry the old vocabulary, which means the guides that rank for them were written when the vocabulary was current, which was also when the report ladder was current. Old names travel with old mechanics.
The second is sharper. Shopify's own reports and analytics hub page still contains the sentence "The types of analytics and reports that you can view for a store depend on your Shopify subscription plan" [4], while the analytics page one click away says the main features come with any plan [2] and the pricing table checks the same row four times [1]. That hub sentence is the last visible trace of the pre-flattening world, and it is almost certainly what Google keeps surfacing as a snippet when somebody asks which plan they need.
So if you arrived here half-convinced you were missing reports because you are on Basic, you were reading a true sentence from a page that has not caught up. That is a fair thing to be confused by.
What actually limits attribution quality, at every tier
Here is the part that survives the plan question entirely.
Shopify's reports show what Shopify's own attribution saw. The Channel Performance report identifies channels through UTM parameters on inbound links and through integrated marketing apps such as Google and Meta [3]. Traffic that arrives without UTM parameters, from an app that is not integrated, or in a session where the visitor's browser or consent choice prevented the storefront from recording the touch, does not get a channel. It becomes direct, or it becomes nothing. No plan upgrade changes any of that, because none of those failures happen on Shopify's billing side.
The historical floor is the same for everyone too: marketing attribution data in that report is available from October 1, 2021 onward [3], regardless of when your store opened or what you pay per month.
And the discrepancy pattern that sends most merchants looking for a plan explanation in the first place, where Shopify, GA4 and the ad platforms all report different numbers for the same day, is a measurement problem with named causes on every side of it. We triage it end to end in the analytics discrepancies guide, and none of the causes in it are plan-related. If you want the model-by-model version of why the same order can be credited to two different channels, how Shopify attribution works covers first click, last click and the direct bucket.
The one capability no Shopify plan includes at any price is server-side delivery of your conversions to the platforms you buy media on. Shopify reports on Shopify. It does not send a purchase to Meta's Conversions API for you, or upload a click conversion to Google Ads, or forward an order to GA4 from your server after a browser event was blocked. That is the layer where completeness is won or lost, and it sits outside the plan ladder entirely.
FAQ
Do I need Shopify Advanced to see the Channel Performance report?
No. Shopify's marketing performance documentation describes the report and its five attribution models with no plan requirement stated anywhere on the page [3], and the analytics help page says the main features of Shopify Analytics are available on any subscription plan [2].
Which Shopify plan gives me all five attribution models?
All of them, as far as Shopify's current documentation shows. Last non-direct click, last click, first click, any click and linear are documented as report settings rather than as plan entitlements [3].
Does Shopify Plus give better attribution data?
Plus gives full checkout customization, higher API rate limits and the expansion-store and headless allowances [1]. Those change what you can build and instrument. They do not change the attribution logic Shopify applies to a session, and the Channel Performance report behaves the same way.
Why does Shopify's help center say reports depend on my plan?
Because the reports and analytics hub page still carries that sentence [4] while the analytics page and the pricing comparison contradict it [1][2]. Treat the specific pages as current and the hub sentence as legacy text.
My channel reports look empty. Is that my plan?
Almost certainly not. Check whether inbound links carry UTM parameters, whether your marketing apps are connected as sales channels, and whether the window you are looking at starts before October 1, 2021 [3].
If the gap you are actually trying to close is completeness rather than access, WeltPixel Conversion Tracking sends server-side purchase events from the Shopify order record to nine integrations [5], on any Shopify plan, so the conversions your platforms count stop depending on whether a browser event survived the trip. Note the naming collision while you are shopping: the app's own Plus plan is an app subscription tier and has nothing to do with Shopify Plus.
Whichever way you go on that, the plan question has a settled answer. The reports are already yours.
Sources
- Shopify, plan comparison table on the pricing page (analytics row "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics"; custom app data access; API rate limits; checkout customization; headless storefronts; third-party transaction fees), shopify.com/pricing, accessed September 7, 2026
- Shopify Help Center, "Shopify analytics" ("Shopify Analytics' main features are available to merchants on any Shopify subscription plan"), help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/shopify-reports/custom-reports, accessed September 7, 2026
- Shopify Help Center, "Marketing performance" (Channel Performance report metrics; five attribution models with last non-direct click as default; attribution data available from October 1, 2021), help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/analyze-marketing/marketing-performance, accessed September 7, 2026
- Shopify Help Center, "Reports and analytics" hub ("The types of analytics and reports that you can view for a store depend on your Shopify subscription plan"), help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics, accessed September 7, 2026
- WeltPixel Conversion Tracking, Shopify App Store listing, apps.shopify.com/weltpixel-conversion-tracking, accessed September 7, 2026