CellarPals vs Vivino

Vivino is a marketplace with a scanner in front of it, and an extremely good one. Point a camera at anything, anywhere, and the crowd’s verdict and a price come back in seconds. That is a genuinely hard problem solved well, and it is why sixty million people use it.

But the moment it serves is before you own the bottle. Once the wine is home and on a shelf, Vivino has largely finished its job. Its cellar feature exists, but inventory is not what the product is organised around — there is no map of your racks, no bin placement, no planning across a whole collection, and no spirits at all.

CellarPals starts where that stops. Its questions are: what do I own, where is it physically, what is ready to drink now, and what am I about to lose by waiting too long.

There is a moment a lot of people recognise. You have been scanning for a couple of years, you have several hundred entries, and you realise the list is no longer a record of what you tried. It is a record of what you bought, and you have genuinely lost track of what is in the house.

That is the graduation this page is for. Not because Vivino did anything wrong, but because discovering wine and keeping wine are different activities, and the second one starts needing racks, bins and drinking windows.

A shopping history and an archive are also different things. A history is optimised to sell you the next bottle. The passport is optimised to remember the last one — including the bottles you drank at someone else’s table and will never own, which do not belong in an inventory but absolutely belong in a record of what you have tasted.

• Discovery. Taste-matched recommendations across a catalogue far larger than your cellar. CellarPals only ever recommends from bottles you already own — that is the point of it, and it is also a limit.
• Buying. Vivino will sell you the wine. CellarPals will not, and has no plans to.
• Crowd ratings on any bottle. Scan something in a shop you have never seen before and get a number. CellarPals identifies a label to catalogue it, not to rate it against sixty million strangers.
• Price. Vivino’s core product is free.

• Knowing where a bottle physically is. A map of the actual racks and bins, with each bottle in a specific slot at a specific depth.
• Drinking windows across the whole cellar. Not per-bottle trivia, but a view of what is ready now and what you are at risk of leaving too long.
• Spirits. Whisky, rum, mezcal and the rest, in the same cellar as the wine.
• Hosting. A printed drinks menu for guests, and bin labels printed straight to a label printer.
• Getting your data out. Full export in three formats, whenever you want it.

Is CellarPals a replacement for Vivino?

Not really, and most people keep both. Vivino answers 'is this bottle any good and what does it cost', usually while you are standing in a shop. CellarPals answers 'what do I own, where is it, and what should I open tonight'. They overlap on scanning a label and almost nowhere else.

Does Vivino not already track my collection?

It has a cellar feature, but inventory is not what Vivino is built around — it is a marketplace with a scanner in front of it. There is no map of your racks, no bin placement, no drinking-window planning across the whole collection, and no spirits.

Can I bring my Vivino scan history across?

Not directly today. Vivino does not offer a general-purpose export the way CellarTracker does. If you have a CSV from anywhere, CellarPals can import it — but a Vivino history is not something we can pull for you.

What about the bottles I have tried but never owned?

That is the passport, and it is the closest thing CellarPals has to what a Vivino history feels like. A bottle you drank at a restaurant or at a friend's table gets recorded as a memory with your notes, without pretending it is sitting in your cellar.

Pricing is one plan with everything in it. If you are also looking at the long-standing cellar tools, CellarPals vs CellarTracker is the more direct comparison — and the one where the migration question actually has an answer.