Wine cellar apps compared: spreadsheet, Vivino, CellarTracker, Vinsieme
The choice is not between feature lists but between four different questions these tools set out to answer.
Recording a collection is a decision with a long half-life. Past two hundred bottles, nobody switches tools willingly. Which makes it all the more unhelpful that the usual comparison — ticks in a feature list — misses the point. The four common approaches differ less in scope than in the question they are built to answer.
The core question decides
Two entirely different problems both go by the name "wine app". One is: which wine should I buy? The other is: where is my bottle, and when do I drink it? The first is a recommendation problem and needs many people, many ratings and a route to the trade. The second is a records problem and needs locations, dates and reliability. Tools that solve one rarely solve the other as a side effect.
The spreadsheet
The underrated starting point. A spreadsheet costs nothing, belongs entirely to you, exports to any format and imposes no limit on columns. Below roughly fifty bottles it is hard to beat.
Its weakness is not capability but ergonomics. Every row has to be typed by hand, usually at a desk, while the bottles are in the cellar. That is exactly where discipline collapses: purchases get recorded, removals do not, and within six months the inventory is wrong. If you stay with a spreadsheet, at least keep the fields you will otherwise miss later — above all the storage location (see setting up a wine cellar).
Rating and discovery apps
Applications such as Vivino are built to help before the purchase. You photograph a label on a merchant's shelf and get an assessment within seconds, drawn from a very large number of ratings. That is a genuine achievement, and it cannot be replicated with a small dataset: the value comes from the size of the community.
The same orientation explains the limits. A cellar function is usually present in such apps, it is simply not the centre of gravity. The inventory is a list, not a space — "which slot is it in?" is not the question the app was designed around. Then there is the funding model: discovery and commerce belong together, so these services generally run on advertising or commission and analyse usage data accordingly. If you use the service to buy, you get fair value in return. If you use it only to keep records, you pay with data for a service you do not need.
Collector databases
CellarTracker represents a category of its own: a database grown over many years for collectors, with extensive user tasting notes and inventory management designed for large and complicated cellars. Anyone holding several hundred bottles, with vintage depth and an interest in other people's notes on precisely their wine, will find a tool that rarely runs out of room.
The price is demand on the user. The interface comes out of a web tradition and is optimised for completeness, not for one-handed capture in a cold cellar. For eighty bottles it is a very large tool for a small job.
Vinsieme
Vinsieme answers only the second question. The label is photographed and read out by machine, the bottle is given a place in a rack plan you have traced yourself, and the drinking window sits with the wine rather than in your memory. The inventory lives on the device, so looking up and taking out work without a signal — in a cellar that is not an edge case. A full export is provided for, there is no advertising and no tracking, and using it costs nothing.
The scope is correspondingly narrow: no recommendation engine, no commerce, no discovery. That is not modesty but the decision everything else follows from.
The criteria side by side
Statements about other products are deliberately cautious; tariffs and feature sets change, and anyone making a decision should check the two points that matter most — export and cost — for themselves before entering a single bottle.
| Criterion | Spreadsheet | Rating apps | Collector databases | Vinsieme |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core question | What do I own? | Which wine should I buy? | What do I own, and what do others say about it? | Where is my bottle, and when do I drink it? |
| Storage location and rack plan | A text field you maintain yourself | Usually not the focus | Location fields are standard, shown as a list | Graphical rack plan with individual slots |
| Offline use | Yes, with a local file | Usually limited | Mostly built around a connection | Inventory sits on the device |
| Export and data ownership | Complete | Depends on provider and tier — check first | Export is customarily provided | Full export provided |
| Cost | None to minimal | Basic use usually free, extras by tier | Basic use usually free, voluntary or tiered contributions | None |
| Advertising and tracking | None | Common, given ad or commerce funding | Restrained | None |
Where Vinsieme is the worse choice
Three cases in which one of the other tools is the right answer.
- You work on an iPhone and want an App Store app. There is no iOS version. The web app can be added to the home screen, but that is a substitute, not parity.
- You want to know whether a wine is good before you buy it. That requires a large rating community. Vinsieme has none and will not acquire one — this use case belongs to a discovery app.
- You want to buy, sell or track market values. There is no marketplace and no trade integration. If you hold a collection as an investment, a collector database or a trading platform serves you better.
A short decision guide
- Under fifty bottles, all in one place, no problem finding anything: spreadsheet. Honestly.
- Buying decisions in the shop are the real problem: a discovery app. The cellar is a by-product there, which is fine as long as the collection stays small.
- Several hundred bottles, vintage depth, an interest in other people's notes: a collector database.
- Fifty to a few hundred bottles, and the recurring question is "where is it and is it ready": cellar software with real storage locations. That is the gap Vinsieme is built for.
There is, incidentally, nothing contradictory about using two tools: a discovery app when buying, cellar software for what has already been bought. Separate questions are allowed separate answers. And if the collection is not in a cellar but spread around a flat, that changes nothing about the split — only about the storage itself (storing wine without a cellar).
Your cellar, in your pocket
Vinsieme is a free wine cellar app: photograph the label, give the bottle a slot in your rack plan, keep drinking windows in view. No ads, no tracking, works offline.