Depict vs Tagalys: Merchandising, Search and Recommendations for Fashion and Lifestyle Brands

Depict and Tagalys, Side by Side

Tagalys is a visual merchandising platform for Shopify, built for fashion brands wanting programmatic control over collections, search and recommendations. It offers a Smart Ranking Engine, flexible pinning and, more recently, Looks (styled sets holding together across a collection page), Sequences for building visual aisles, and Markets-aware merchandising for brands selling across regions. Still, fashion brands comparing Depict and Tagalys often need capabilities beyond sequencing and pinning, furthering narrative-led merchandising and contextual product discovery.

For fashion ecommerce managers using or evaluating Tagalys, it’s worth understanding how it compares to Depict. Depict is a fashion and lifestyle alternative to Tagalys, working across Shopify, Centra, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and headless setups. It meets the same merchandising, search, and recommendation needs within a unified platform, with hybrid search that finds products by meaning and keyword matching alongside.

Key Differences: Depict vs Tagalys

While both platforms improve merchandising, search, and recommendations for fashion brands, they take different approaches:

Visual Merchandising Capabilities

For fashion and lifestyle brands, visual presentation of products is crucial to both brand identity and conversion rates. This is where both platforms take different approaches.

Depict’s Fashion and Lifestyle Approach

Depict gives merchandisers control to express brand identity as well as the automation to maintain optimization across every page. Its visual tools include:

• Content Cards. Add custom-size images, videos and text to showcase brand identity, with hover and default images per collection on Shopify.
• Pinned Products. Pin products to specific positions, maintaining editorial control without battling the algorithm.
• Repeated Products. On Shopify, show the same product twice in one collection, each time with different imagery.
• Product Image Selector. On Shopify, choose the image that best represents each product, as per the collection’s context.
• Smart Sorting. Set merchandising rules once, and apply everywhere. Boost bestsellers and bury out-of-stock items while pinned products keep their positions.

Tagalys' Programmatic Control

Tagalys centers its visual merchandising around rules and performance data:

• Trending Score. Each product is ranked by engagement, tag signals, and freshness; updated daily.
• Pin with Conditions. Pin any product to any position, with conditions to move it automatically when stock, size or season changes.
• Looks. Group 2-8 products into styled sets that stay together when moved on collection pages.
• Sequences. Create visual aisles by color, drop or narrative, as you would with a physical store.
• Markets. Localize sorting and pinning by Shopify Market without duplicating collections, on the API route according to their support table.

Search & Discovery Experience

Fashion and lifestyle shoppers often search with more descriptive and contextual language than a typical query. For example, ‘boho summer dress’, as opposed to a SKU or category name.

Depict: Understanding Shopper Language

Depict’s search is AI-powered, combining semantic understanding with keyword search and merchandising rules:

• Hybrid Search. Runs each query through AI, keyword matching, your merchandising rules and automated synonyms, so a shopper searching in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German or English finds the right products.
• Search Everything. One search for products, pages, guides and policies, so shoppers stop leaving for Google for things the site already answers.
• No Empty Search Pages. When nothing matches exactly, search shows the closest right products instead of "no results".
• Searchandising. Boost and bury in search results, with the same rules you use on collections, or a rule set of its own for search.

Tagalys’ Keyword and Dictionary Search

Tagalys’ search is built around control and tuning. The developer docs and support center we searched in July 2026 describe keyword and dictionary search with AI-assisted synonyms, and document no semantic or vector retrieval endpoint. Its main tools are:

• Predictive Search. Surfaces results as shoppers type, handling typos before they finish.
• Search Accuracy. Fixes inaccurate results at index-level, rather than per query.
• Pinned and Popular Search. Allows pinning specific results, popular queries or what is trending in search.
• Search Results. Enables refinement and customization for what appears for any given query.

Product Recommendations

Merchandising, search and recommendations are becoming increasingly synchronized rather than operating as three separate tools. A shopper’s view of a collection page should inform the products they are recommended, and vice versa. Both platforms treat recommendations as a core part of the stack, not just an add-on.

Depict: Style-Aware Recommendations

Depict builds each recommendation row from steps you put in order, such as bought together, then similar products, then best sellers. Rows have their own filters, pins and hides:

• Similar Products. AI reads every product’s images and description to find products that look and read alike, with no tagging.
• Complete the Look. Pairs Well With has AI describe what completes each product and finds it in your own catalog, so new products get pairings straight away. On Centra and headless, a row can also show the other pieces of a merchant’s own look.
• Bought Together and Viewed Together. Steps built from what shoppers buy and view together.
• Personalized Rows. Recommendations are worked out the moment the page loads, from what that shopper just looked at and what’s in their cart.

Tagalys: Data-Driven Recommendations

Tagalys uses first-party behavioral and performance data to build their recommendations:

• Similar Products. Suggests alternatives when products are out of stock, aiding with sales recovery.
• Trending/Bestsellers. Surfaces high-performing products to increase cart value.
• New Arrivals. Highlights recently added products, in sync with the same trending data powering collection ranking.
• More Widgets. Their docs and pricing page also list bought also bought, viewed also viewed, recently viewed and personalized recommendations.

Ease of Implementation

Getting your merchandising solution running quickly matters, especially with seasonal collections and frequent inventory changes.

Depict Goes Live Within Hours, Not Weeks

• Live on Shopify, Centra and headless setups for Visual Merchandising, Search and Recommendations.
• On Shopify the install itself takes minutes, and the first useful collections take a few hours. Centra connects through a setup wizard, and headless through the API and SDKs.
• Intuitive UI merchandisers can use without technical expertise.
• Multi-market merchandising, and on Shopify multi-store, replicating your strategy across regions and storefronts. On Shopify both run on the Custom plan.

Tagalys: Server-Side, Rules-Based Setup

• Shopify and Shopify Plus integration with a no-code server-side route for collections on a stock theme, so pages arrive complete on first load, and an API route for the fuller feature set.
• Trending score automatically promoting top performers.
• Visual, rules-based interface for building and combining merchandising conditions
• Pin with Conditions, Looks and Sequences across collections. Markets merchandising runs on the API route, according to their support table.
• Size Merchandising to account for size availability across the product catalog

Customer Feedback

Here is what brands using Depict say.

"The future of search. Depict's new search is fully intuitive, personalised and intelligent, and our performance from search has increased." - Jamie Evans, Head of eCommerce at Jaded London

"Merchandising with Depict takes 75% less time compared to our previous tool." - Benjamin Östgårdh, Head of Ecommerce at Stiga

Tagalys customers point to responsiveness and ease to use:

"I appreciate the responsiveness and reactivity of the Tagalys team. The tool has great user-friendliness and has allowed us to boost sales with cross-sell features. We can pin our entire product catalog and control the entire website's merchandising."- Maria M., E-Merchandiser & Content Manager

Pricing Considerations

Depict’s published pricing starts at $190/month for Merchandising or Search and $110/month for Recommendations, or $152 and $88 billed annually, for stores with up to 50,000 monthly sessions (checked November 2026), with pricing scaling per tier as traffic increases. Bundling all three products adds a 10% discount in addition to the 20% annual billing discount offered. Every plan includes the full toolkit, with no features gated by tier. Custom pricing applies above 500,000 sessions and for multi-market or multi-store setups. Monthly plans can be canceled anytime, and merchandising is free for up to three collections.

Tagalys publishes starting prices per product, from $299 a month for collections, $259 for search and $279 for recommendations, based on monthly unique visitors (checked November 2026). Unique visitors and sessions are different measures, so compare at your own traffic. Each plan includes personalized onboarding and ongoing support with no long-term contract. A 28-day free trial is available to start.

Is Depict Right for Your Fashion or Lifestyle Brand?

Depict tends to be the stronger fit for fashion and lifestyle brands that:

• Want collection pages built with their own images, video and copy in the grid
• Value brand-led storytelling as well as performance metrics
• Want to save time on merchandising without losing creative control
• Want to embed rich media, such as video and varied imagery, onto collection pages
• Sell more than on Shopify, or want the room to expand beyond it without re-platforming
• Want AI-driven search built to understand shopper intent, not just keywords

Conclusion: Choosing Between Depict and Tagalys

For fashion and lifestyle brands building visually compelling shopping experiences, both Depict and Tagalys offer real value, with different strengths.

Depict leans into narrative-driven collection pages, hybrid search that finds products by meaning, recommendations that can react to the shopper, and native support for embedding video in the grid, across Shopify, Centra, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and headless setups.

Tagalys leans into programmatic, rules-based control: automated ranking, flexible pinning, styled Looks, performance-based recommendations and market-by-market merchandising for primarily Shopify and Shopify Plus brands.

If you prioritize AI-driven search, native content integration, or are looking for a platform that grows with you beyond Shopify, Depict is likely the better fit. If your priority is granular, rules-based control within a Shopify-only setup, Tagalys is worth looking closer at.

Ready to see how Depict can transform your fashion and lifestyle collections? Book a demo.