Shea › Shea vs Type4Hair
Shea vs Type4Hair: which app for type 4 hair?
Short answer: both are built for coily hair and both are rated 4.8 on the App Store, so this is not a good-versus-bad comparison. The two differences that will decide it for most people are price and coverage. Type4Hair sells its premium tier as a $39.99 a year auto-renewing subscription, per its own App Store listing. Shea Premium is a one-time purchase. And Type4Hair describes itself as built for Type 4 hair (4A to 4C), while Shea covers type 4 and type 3, so 4C through 3A.
If you have type 4 hair and you are choosing between the two, you are choosing between two apps that genuinely understand coily hair. That is rarer than it should be, and it is worth saying plainly. What follows is drawn from both apps' public App Store and Google Play listings, checked on 12 August 2026, so you can go and verify any of it yourself.
the comparison
| Type4Hair | Shea | |
|---|---|---|
| hair types | Type 4: 4A to 4C | type 4 and type 3: 4C, 4B, 4A, 3C, 3B, 3A |
| premium pricing | $39.99 per year, auto-renewing | one-time purchase, no renewal |
| free tier | free with in-app purchases | the whole Circle, wash day planning, growth logs, 5 products on your shelf and 5 full ingredient scans every month |
| community | a forum | the Circle, moderated, 400+ posts and comments in the last 7 days |
| growth tracking | monthly timeline with photo comparisons | length logs and progress photos |
| ingredient scanner | yes, Premium only when we tested a free account in August 2026 | yes, 5 full scans a month on the free tier, matched against a curated ingredient catalogue and scored against your own porosity and texture |
| App Store rating | 4.8 from 480 | 4.8 from 339 |
the price difference is the big one
A yearly subscription and a one-time purchase feel similar in the first month and not at all similar in the third year. At $39.99 a year, Type4Hair's premium tier costs about $120 over three years, and it keeps going. Shea Premium is bought once.
Neither model is wrong. A subscription funds continuous development, and plenty of good apps use one. But hair is a decade-long thing, not a three-month project, so it is worth knowing which one you are signing up for before you commit.
what Type4Hair does well
It is a genuinely type-4-first app, which already puts it ahead of most of the category. Its structure is a 365 day growth plan: a fixed year-long programme with a daily ritual, step-by-step instructions and reminders for wash day and trims. Its own listing sums up the philosophy as focusing on retention over unrealistic timelines, which is the right instinct for coily hair.
If what you want is a single structured plan to follow for a year without deciding anything yourself, that is a real strength and you should weigh it.
Worth knowing before you download: according to its own upgrade screen, Type4 Premium is what unlocks the full hair growth routine and the 365 day routine calendar, along with unlimited tips and tutorials. So the structured plan that is the reason to choose it is the paid part.
someone always answers 🫶🏾
where Shea is different: you get answered
Most hair apps now have some kind of community tab. The question is not whether one exists, it is whether you get a reply when you post at 1am about your edges.
In Shea's Circle, 79% of posts get a reply from another member, and there were 400+ posts and comments in the last seven days across a membership of 5,000+ Black women with 4C, 4B, 4A, 3C, 3B and 3A hair. That is the number worth asking any app for, because a community with nobody answering is just a lonelier version of a notes app.
It is also moderated, so it stays a place people actually want to post in.
how it feels to use
This is the part nobody puts in a feature table, and it is usually what decides whether an app is still on your phone in a month.
Shea is built around one question: what is the next thing for your hair. The home screen answers it, the Circle sits in the middle of the app, and the rest stays out of the way until you go looking for it. The look is deliberately soft and warm rather than clinical, and it is the thing members mention most often unprompted, alongside the community.
The alternative approach, which plenty of hair apps take, is to surface everything at once: challenges, recipes, tutorials, calendars, scanners and guides, all on one screen. There is nothing wrong with that if you like a toolbox, and some people genuinely prefer it. But if you have ever downloaded a hair app, felt busy for a week and then quietly stopped opening it, the number of decisions on the first screen is usually why.
you can try the real thing before paying
Shea's free tier is not a demo. You get the entire Circle, wash day planning with reminders, growth logs and progress photos, five products on your shelf, and five full ingredient scans every month, with the same scoring against your own hair that Premium gets. Premium raises limits; it does not unlock the point of the app.
That matters when you are comparing apps, because the only way to know whether a hair app suits you is to run a real wash day and scan a real bottle in a real shop. If the thing you are choosing the app for sits behind the upgrade screen, you are buying on a screenshot.
For context, when we set up a free Type4Hair account and tested it in August 2026, the product scanner was not usable until we paid, and its own upgrade screen lists the full hair growth routine and the 365 day calendar as Premium features. Apps change their limits often, so check the current version before you decide.
how Shea reads a label
Shea uses text recognition to read the printed ingredient list off the pack, and that is the only part of the scan that leaves your phone. The reading is then matched against Shea's own curated catalogue of thousands of ingredients, each one tagged with what it actually does to hair, and scored against the porosity, density and texture in your profile.
That matters for one specific reason: no part of the advice is written by an AI. Shea has no chatbot and nothing that invents an opinion about a product. A flag comes from a known ingredient with a known role, so if it says a product leans protein-heavy, that is because of the ingredients in it, not because a model phrased it that way. The trade-off is that a product Shea has never seen has to be added to the catalogue first, which happens automatically the first time a member scans it.
it is not only 4C
Type4Hair is, by its own description, for Type 4 hair. Shea covers type 4 and type 3, which matters more often than it sounds. Plenty of people have 4C at the back and 3C at the front, or want one app that works for them and their daughter or sister. If everyone in your house is squarely 4A to 4C, this will not matter to you at all.
what Shea gives you
which should you pick?
Pick Type4Hair if you want one fixed 365 day programme to follow and a subscription does not bother you.
Pick Shea if you want other Black women answering your questions, if you would rather pay once than every year, or if anyone you are sharing it with has type 3 hair.
Both are free to download, so the honest answer is to try both and keep the one you still open in a month.
frequently asked
Type4Hair details taken from its App Store and Google Play listings and from its own in-app upgrade screen, plus hands-on testing of a free account, all checked 12 August 2026. Pricing and features can change; check the current listing before deciding. Shea's Circle figures are from Shea's own data for the seven days to 12 August 2026.