CellarPals vs CellarTracker

CellarTracker is for the collector who reads the crowd. Two decades of community reviews means that when you look up a bottle, someone has almost certainly already drunk it and written down what they thought and when they think you should. Nothing else in this category has that, and it costs nothing to use.

CellarPals is for the collector who wants to know what they own and where it is. Wine and spirits in one place, added by photographing the label, laid out on a map of the actual racks and bins, with the drinking windows on top. It is a tool for the cellar rather than a library of opinions about wine.

Plenty of people will reasonably use both. If that is you, the migration section below matters more than the feature table.

Three things, and none of them are close.

• The tasting notes. More than thirteen million of them. That is the product, and it is unbuyable: it is twenty years of people writing down what they drank. When you want to know whether a 2016 is ready, community consensus beats any algorithm, ours included.
• The price. It is free, funded by donations. CellarPals is not. If your collection is small and you mainly want somewhere to record it, paying for that is a hard sell and we will not make it.
• The database. Two decades of wine records means the bottle you are looking for is probably already there, correctly, with the vintage variants.

One correction we would rather make ourselves: CellarTracker also has an AI assistant now, CellarChat. Our Sommelier is a comparable feature, not an invention of ours, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

• Spirits. The structural one. CellarTracker is wine-only by design. If half your shelf is whisky, rum or mezcal, it has nowhere to go. CellarPals keeps both in one cellar and separates them in reports, because a $40 bottle of bourbon and a $400 Burgundy do not belong in the same average.
• Getting a bottle in. Photograph the label. The wine is identified, the fields are filled, and you correct what it got wrong instead of typing all of it.
• Knowing where it physically is. Not a text field reading “Rack B” but a map of your racks, shelves, bins and diamonds, with the bottle placed in a specific slot at a specific depth. Finding a bottle in a full cellar is the problem this category is supposed to solve and mostly does not.
• The interface. This is the gap that CellarTracker’s own users name most often, and the gap a competitor built an entire company on. CellarPals is built mobile-first, on all three platforms, with the same cellar on each.
• Hosting. A printed drinks menu for guests, and bin labels printed straight to a label printer.

This is the part people actually worry about, so: the door swings both ways, and it was built that way deliberately.

In. Export your collection from CellarTracker as CSV and import it directly. CellarPals maps the wine name, vintage, type, location, drink-from and drink-to years, bottle size, purchase price and store. You get a preview of exactly what will be created before anything is written, so a bad file is something you cancel rather than something you undo.

Out. CellarPals exports a CellarTracker-compatible CSV, not just its own format. If you decide against us in month three, your cellar goes home in the shape CellarTracker expects. That export covers wines only, for the obvious reason that CellarTracker has nowhere to put the spirits.

We would rather tell you the exit exists than have you discover it does not. A cellar you cannot leave with is not really yours.

Can I move my CellarTracker data into CellarPals?

Yes. CellarPals imports a CellarTracker CSV export directly, mapping wine, vintage, type, location, drink-from and drink-to years, size, purchase price and store. You see a preview of what will be created before anything is written.

Can I get my data back out again?

Yes, and back into CellarTracker's own format specifically. CellarPals exports a CellarTracker-compatible CSV as well as JSON and its own CSV. That export covers wines only, because CellarTracker has no concept of spirits to receive them.

Is CellarTracker still free?

Yes. CellarTracker runs on a donation model and costs nothing to use. CellarPals is $12.99 a month or $119.99 a year after a 14-day trial. If price is the deciding factor, CellarTracker wins it outright and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Does CellarPals have community tasting notes?

No. CellarTracker has more than 13 million community reviews built up over 20 years, and that is a genuine advantage no new app can match. CellarPals keeps your own notes and your own passport. If reading the crowd's verdict on a bottle is why you open the app, CellarTracker is the better tool for that.

Does CellarPals handle spirits?

Yes, and this is the clearest structural difference. CellarTracker is wine-only. CellarPals tracks wine and spirits in one cellar, kept separate in reports where mixing them would be misleading.

The pricing page has the whole plan on it. If spirits are the reason you are reading this, that difference is the one worth testing first. And if you are also weighing a discovery app, CellarPals and Vivino is a genuinely different comparison.