Wine app guide
Vivino built the biggest wine app in the world on ratings, label scanning, and a buy button. That is not a knock. It is the reason 60 million-plus people use it. The question worth asking is not whether Vivino is good. It is whether the job you need done today is still discovery, or whether it has quietly become managing the cellar you already built.
Cellared gives every bottle you own a drinking window, including unrated ones. Free on the App Store, unlimited bottles, no card required.
Download on the App StoreRatings and discovery. Vivino's crowd-sourced rating database is the largest of its kind. Point your phone at an unfamiliar bottle at a shop or a wine bar and you get a rating, a price range, and a tasting summary in seconds. For sizing up a wine you do not already know, nothing in this category matches that depth.
Label scanning tuned for the shelf. Vivino's label recognition is industry-leading and built for the moment of deciding what to buy, not for cataloging a cellar you already have.
A real marketplace. The discovery flow ends with a buy button and a mature supply chain behind it. If your wine journey starts with discovery and ends with delivery, Vivino is the integrated path, and none of the six alternatives below try to compete with that.
Cellar management is a side feature, not the product. Vivino added a digital cellar on top of a discovery app built for shopping. It works for a light inventory, but it was not designed as the operating system for 50, 200, or 800 bottles you are actively managing.
Drinking windows are crowd-aggregated, and gated. Vivino does show a drinking-window signal on some wine pages, and Premium subscribers get personal drinking-window tracking. It is a community-aggregated range, not a calculated per-bottle model, and it thins out fast for less common or older bottles the crowd has not weighed in on. It also will not proactively tell you a specific bottle you own just entered its peak.
No reasoning over what you actually own. Vivino can recommend a bottle to buy from its catalog. It cannot read your cellar and tell you which of your own Burgundies is at peak this month, or what to pull for lamb tonight from bottles already in the rack.
Social by default. Vivino is a social network: ratings, followers, a public activity feed. Collectors who want a quiet, private tracking tool without a profile to maintain usually feel this first.
| App | Best for | Why it fits | Tradeoff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cellared | iOS collectors who want the cellar they already own managed and timed, not more wine to discover. | Free tier calculates a drinking window for every bottle, including unrated ones, and imports a Vivino or CellarTracker export directly. | iOS only. No marketplace, and cellar-aware sommelier reasoning sits behind Pro, not the free tier. |
| CellarTracker | Collectors who want the deepest community tasting-note and pricing database in the category. | Over 13 million community and professional tasting notes across roughly 4.5 million wines, plus auction and community-driven pricing. | The interface still reads as web-first software wearing a mobile shell. |
| InVintory | Collectors who want a premium, high-touch 3D map of a physical cellar. | 3D bottle-position mapping, drinking windows, market valuation, and a chat assistant for food pairing, on iOS, Android, and web. | Free tier tracks unlimited bottles, but Premium ($14.95/mo or $149.99/yr) is the tier most of the marketed features assume. |
| CellarMate | Collectors who want a conversational, chat-first sommelier as the main way of working. | A GPT-4 chat assistant sits at the center of the app, alongside label and receipt scanning and drinking-window estimates. | Free and iOS only, but a newer, smaller product with a thinner long-term track record than CellarTracker or InVintory. |
| Delectable | Drinkers who want Vivino's scan-and-discover instinct with a more trade-leaning community. | Strong label recognition, a sommelier- and critic-skewed tasting community, and a clean personal tasting journal. | Development has visibly slowed, and it is not built as a cellar-inventory or drinking-window tool. |
| Oeni | Collectors who want one app to handle inventory, valuation, and food pairing at scale. | A 500,000-plus bottle reference database, aging-phase drinking-window guidance, and one of the deeper food-pairing libraries in the category (5,000-plus pairings). | Asks you to manage more surface area (financials, 3D layout, pairing) than someone who only wants to know what to open tonight. |
Cellared is the alternative for iOS collectors who want the job to be managing and timing a cellar they already have, not discovering new wine. The free tier tracks unlimited bottles and calculates a Cellared Ageability Index drinking window for every one of them, including bottles without a rating. Pro adds a sommelier that reasons over your actual inventory before answering and personalizes windows to your recorded taste.
Full comparison: Cellared vs Vivino →CellarTracker is the deepest wine database most collectors will ever need: over 13 million community and professional tasting notes across roughly 4.5 million wines, plus market pricing pulled from auctions and community sales. Its mobile app tracks unlimited bottles, scans labels and receipts, and surfaces members with similar tastes. If the reason you are looking past Vivino is community depth Vivino does not have, CellarTracker is the more direct move than a newer app.
Full comparison: Cellared vs CellarTracker →InVintory is the premium, high-touch option: a genuinely impressive 3D map of your physical cellar, drinking-window and market-valuation tracking, and a chat assistant for food pairing and picks from your collection. The free tier tracks unlimited bottles; Premium runs $14.95 a month or $149.99 a year with a 14-day trial, and it is available on iOS, Android, and the web.
Full comparison: Cellared vs InVintory →CellarMate (cellarmate.ai) puts a GPT-4 conversational sommelier at the center of the app: chat naturally about your collection, scan labels or receipts in bulk, and get drinking-window estimates based on professional reviews and historical data. It is free and iOS only, with social profiles and personalized deal notifications layered on top of inventory tracking. It is newer and smaller than CellarTracker or InVintory, with a thinner public track record.
Full comparison: Cellared vs CellarMate →Delectable is the closest thing to Vivino's DNA built for a more serious, trade-leaning crowd: scan a label, get tasting notes and recommendations from a community that skews toward working sommeliers and critics, and log tastings in a clean, well-regarded journal. Its companion service, Banquet, connects discovery to buying. Development has visibly slowed, and it is not built as a cellar-management tool, so collectors who need inventory or drinking windows should look elsewhere.
Oeni is a full cellar manager built around a large reference database (500,000-plus bottles), aging-phase analysis for when to open a bottle, and one of the deeper food-pairing libraries in the category (5,000-plus pairings). It also tracks cellar valuation and capital gains and offers 3D cellar visualization, on iOS, Android, and the web, with 2 million-plus downloads. It asks you to manage more surface area than a collector who only wants to know what to open tonight.
Full comparison: Cellared vs Oeni →You want a drinking window on every bottle you own, not a crowd rating.
Choose an app that calculates a per-bottle window as a core feature, not a premium add-on layered onto a discovery app.
You want advice built from bottles you already own.
Look for cellar-aware recommendations and food pairing that reads your actual inventory, not a generic engine tuned to sell you more wine.
You want a private, non-social way to track a cellar.
Vivino is a social network by default. Cellared and most cellar-first apps keep your inventory and notes private, with no public profile to maintain.
You still buy a lot of unfamiliar bottles out in the world.
Keep Vivino, or add Delectable, for label scanning and crowd ratings at the shelf or the wine list. Nothing about a cellar app replaces that.
You have a large physical cellar and lose track of bottle positions.
InVintory and Oeni both invest heavily in 3D cellar visualization; that is a real workflow improvement if physical location is your actual problem.
None of this requires deleting anything. Most of the apps above, Vivino included, let you get your cellar data out as an export or a wine list rather than locking it in. Cellared imports CellarTracker exports (old and new formats), Vivino exports, and generic CSV/XLSX files with column mapping. Import typically completes within a few minutes, in the app, so moving a copy of an existing collection into a new app is not the multi-hour retyping project it used to be.
A reasonable way to evaluate any Vivino alternative on this list: keep Vivino installed, import a copy of your cellar into the app you are testing, and give it two weeks. Whichever one you actually reach for when you are deciding what to open tonight is the one doing the job you needed done.
Cellared is one option among the six above, not the answer for everyone. Its real strengths: a calculated drinking window on every bottle on the free tier, including bottles with no rating attached; unlimited bottles with no card required to start; a sommelier and food pairing that reason over your actual cellar on Pro; and an import that typically pulls in a CellarTracker or Vivino export within a few minutes.
Its real gaps, stated plainly: it is iOS only, with no Android or web version, so households split across platforms need a different app or a household workaround. There is no marketplace to buy wine inside the app, and no built-in way to shop for a bottle you do not already own. There is no public community ratings or tasting-note database to browse before you buy, which is the thing Vivino and CellarTracker both do better than Cellared ever will. None of that is hidden or softened here. If discovery, shopping, or a public ratings feed is the actual job, Cellared is the wrong tool and one of the other five is the better fit.
It depends on the job. For iOS collectors who want a calculated drinking window on every bottle and recommendations built from their own cellar, Cellared is a strong Vivino alternative. For the deepest community tasting-note database, CellarTracker remains the more direct move.
Yes, into Cellared. Cellared imports CellarTracker exports (old and new formats), Vivino exports, and generic CSV/XLSX files with column mapping. Import typically completes within a few minutes, in the app, so you can bring an existing Vivino collection across without retyping it.
Vivino shows a drinking-window indicator on some wine pages, and Premium subscribers get personal drinking-window tracking in the app's digital cellar. It is a crowd-aggregated signal layered on top of a discovery product, not a calculated per-bottle model, and it will not exist for less common bottles the community has not weighed in on.
Not necessarily. Many collectors keep Vivino for scanning, crowd ratings, and buying wine out in the world, and add a cellar-management app for the bottles they already own. The two jobs are different enough that running both is common.
Cellared has a free tier with unlimited bottles and no credit card required, and it calculates a drinking window for every bottle on that tier, including unrated ones. Vivino is free with advertising; Vivino Premium is a separate paid tier, similar to Cellared's Pro and Collector tiers.
CellarTracker and Delectable both lean on community and critic data the way Vivino does. Cellared, InVintory, CellarMate, and Oeni are built around managing a cellar you already own rather than a public ratings database.
Try the cellar app
Free to start. Unlimited bottles. No credit card required.
Download on the App StoreCellared calculates a per-bottle drinking window from the Cellared Ageability Index, a documented methodology using up to ten scored inputs. If enabled, Cellared can notify you as bottles approach, enter, and move beyond their peak window.