A sourced comparison
Handled Locator vs Stockist.
Stockist is the closest product to Handled in shape: a hosted store locator you embed on a site you already own, sold self-serve at published prices, with your own map provider key behind it.
These two products make the same core bet, so the honest headline is not that one wins. Stockist is cheaper at the entry tier and asks for your map key exactly as we do, which removes the argument we usually get to make. What differs is how much of the locator is configurable, what a location is allowed to be, and whether there is an API.
Handled wrote this page, and Handled is one of the two products on it. Treat it as a vendor comparison, not a review. Every figure in the other column is what that vendor published on its own site on the date below, and a vendor can change its pricing and features the day after we read them.
Stockist pages read on September 7, 2026. Check the current version before you buy either product.
Side by side, with nothing in the Stockist column we did not read on their site.
| Decision point | Handled Locator | Stockist |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $19 a month, published. A 7-day trial with no card, and no free plan after it. | Basic $10, Plus $20 and Premium $40 a month, or $96, $192 and $384 a year. A 14-day free trial. Cheaper than us at every published tier. |
| Locations included | 200 on Starter, 2,000 on Pro, 10,000 on Business. Above that is a scoped agreement, not a self-serve plan. | 100 on Basic, 500 on Plus, 2,000 on Premium. The site adds that it can support up to 100,000 stores per map, on request rather than self-serve. |
| Who bills you for the map | You create your own Mapbox or Google Maps key. That provider meters and bills your map traffic directly, and Handled adds no margin to it. It is one extra setup step and it is the reason our sticker price is not the whole cost story either. | The same arrangement: the site states it supports unlimited traffic using your own Mapbox or Google Maps key. This is not a difference between us, whatever a comparison table elsewhere may imply. |
| Getting your locations in | CSV import with column detection, geocoding and de-duplication, plus a Google Sheets sync that previews creates, updates, conflicts and missing rows before the first apply. Export back to CSV at any time. | Spreadsheet bulk import and export, and Google Sheets sync, both listed as included on every plan. |
| Categories and custom fields | Categories, tags and your own custom fields, with filters that match any or all selections, show counts, and can sit inline or in a dropdown. An open-now filter reads each location's real opening hours. | Custom fields and filters are listed as included on every plan. The depth of the filter behaviour is not described on the page, so compare it in a trial rather than from the bullet. |
| What a location can be | A location can be a street address, a service area with a coverage radius drawn on the map, or an online stockist shown in its own tab and as the fallback when nothing is nearby. Featured locations can be promoted above the rest within a radius you set. | The published feature list describes stores on a map. It does not mention service areas with a coverage radius or online-only stockists, so ask before assuming either. |
| Design control | 85+ settings covering search, results, filters, hours, maps, markers, layout, links and formatting, every visible string editable, and your own CSS when the settings run out. The widget renders in a shadow root so it cannot collide with your stylesheet. | Brand consistency is listed as an included feature. The page does not enumerate the settings, so the fair way to compare is to configure the same locator in both trials. |
| API | A REST Location API to create, read, update and archive locations, a Query API for building your own front end, and account-scoped keys that can be issued read-only. Keys are a Pro and Business capability, not a Starter one. Also documented browser events for analytics. | The word API appears on the site only in the phrase about using your own map key. If a programmatic feed matters to you, ask Stockist directly rather than reading our page for the answer. |
| Locators per account | One. An account styles and serves a single locator, because the embed snippet carries an account id and no configuration id. If you need two different locators on one site, this is the wrong product today. | Pricing is described per map, which suggests more than one is possible. We have not verified how that is licensed, so confirm it with Stockist if you need several. |
Sources: Stockist homepage and pricing. Figures are as published on Stockist’s own site and may change without notice. Handled figures come from the same constants our checkout charges against.
What we left out, and why.
A missing row is the honest outcome when a vendor has not published something. Filling it in from memory is how comparison pages become fiction, so these are named instead.
- Seats and user permissions. Stockist's pricing does not publish a seat count, so there is no honest row to write.
- Analytics. Not described on the pages we read.
- Uptime, support response times and data-processing terms, for either product.
What Handled does not do.
The same list we publish on our own features page, unedited. If one of these decides your purchase, we would rather you found it here than three weeks into a trial.
A page per location
The locator is embedded in your site rather than generating indexable pages of its own.
Managed CRM or ERP synchronization
Handled does not currently maintain a live CRM or ERP connection, emit webhooks, or run automatic bidirectional synchronization. Use the REST and Query APIs from a scheduled job in your own system when you need one.
Scheduled banners and promotions
No rules engine for showing a message in a region during a date range.
More than one locator per account
One account styles and serves one locator. There is no per-page variant showing a filtered subset of your locations, because the embed snippet carries no configuration id.
Translated location details
The locator's own controls can be held in several languages and matched to each visitor. Your location data cannot: a store's name, description and custom fields are stored once and read the same to everyone. Platforms that do translate the data give each language its own copy of every location and its own locator, which is the gap above as much as this one.
County, state and drawn territory areas
A territory is a list of postcodes, which is how most dealer agreements are written anyway, and a service area is a radius the map draws. A county or a state cannot be picked by name in the dashboard: the rule can be stored and the engine resolves it, but there is no region picker to author one and no boundary data is loaded outside the United States, so a rule naming a British county or a Canadian region covers nothing. There is no drawing a shape on a map at all.
Leads delivered into your own systems
The locator can take an enquiry and route it to the dealer whose territory covers the address, email them, and list it under Leads. What it will not do is put that lead anywhere else: there is no webhook when one arrives, no CRM or ERP push, and no dealer login. A dealer works from the email and its one-enquiry status link, and your team works from the dashboard. There is no leads endpoint on the API either, so if the record has to live in the system your sales team already uses, this does not put it there.
Best for us
Choose Handled when
- Some of your locations are areas or online stockists rather than street addresses.
- You want to hand a developer a documented REST and Query API with scoped keys.
- You want the locator to match a design system rather than accept an accent colour.
- You want assisted setup: one brand match and one revision are included on a paid plan.
Best for them
Choose Stockist when
- Price is the deciding factor. Stockist is cheaper at every tier it publishes, and a 100-location brand pays less there.
- You want the simplest possible product and none of the configuration surface is worth paying for.
- You need well past 10,000 locations on one map and would rather talk to a vendor that already advertises that scale.
- You are already running Stockist and it is working. Migrating a working locator to save a feature you are not using is a bad trade.
Try both against the same brief.
Load the same locations, filters, fields and brand direction into each product. The one your team can keep useful six months after launch is the right answer, and no table settles that.