A personal wine memory app
Comparison
A Vivino alternative for people who just want their own wine journal back
Vivino is a very good answer to “is this bottle any good?” It is a large community, a label scanner, and a wine shop in one app. But a lot of people arrive at it asking a different question — “what was that wine I loved, and where did I get it?” — and end up carrying a rating database, a marketplace, and an install they did not need. This page is an honest comparison of the two jobs.
The short answer
Keep Vivino if the value you get is other people’s opinions: you are standing in front of an unfamiliar bottle and you want to know whether it is worth buying, or you like buying wine inside the app.
Look for an alternative if the wine you keep losing is one you already drank. No amount of crowd data will tell you which Malbec you had at your anniversary dinner in March, what it cost, or which shop carries it. That is a private-memory problem, and it needs a private journal, not a database.
Vivino vs iLovedThatWine, side by side
Vivino’s details below were read from its App Store listing on September 7, 2026. App listings change; check the current listing if a detail matters to your decision.
| Vivino | iLovedThatWine | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is built around | A shared database of ratings and reviews from a very large community, plus an in-app wine shop. | A private record of the bottles you personally liked. No feed, no shared reviews. |
| How you get to it | A native app you install. The iPhone listing requires iOS 18.6 or later. | A browser tab. Nothing to install, and it works on an old phone, an Android, or a laptop. |
| Scanning the label | Yes — the listing's own subtitle is “Cellar Tracker & Label Scanner”. | Yes, free on every plan. Reads wine, winery, vintage, varietal, region, and country. |
| Price you paid | Shows what merchants charge. Not built around recording what the bottle cost you. | A first-class field on every entry, and you can filter your favorites by it. |
| Where you had it | Oriented toward buying from its merchant network. | A first-class field, and a dedicated filter. “That red from the steakhouse” is a search. |
| Whose opinion you see | Millions of other drinkers, which is genuinely useful for a bottle you have never tried. | Only yours. Useful for the bottle you already know you liked and cannot name. |
| Buying wine | Yes — shop directly in the app from its merchant network. | No. It tells you what to look for; you buy it wherever you like. |
| Tracking and advertising | App Privacy lists identifiers and usage data as used to track you across other apps and websites. | No advertising, no ad-tracking cookies, no location collection. |
| Cost | Free with in-app purchases; the listing shows premium subscriptions from $4.99 to $57.00. | Free to start, including label scanning. A paid tier exists but is not needed to keep a journal. |
The two fields that decide whether you can buy the wine again
Almost every wine app will store a name and a rating. Far fewer treat what you paid and where you had it as things worth keeping, and those are the two that turn a memory into a purchase.
A rating tells you the wine was good. The price tells you whether it is the $16 Tuesday bottle or the $70 anniversary one — a distinction that matters enormously when you are choosing something for Friday. The venue tells you where to actually go get it, which is the difference between a wine you loved and a wine you can drink again.
Those two fields are why the buy-again wines list works at all, and why favorite wines can be filtered down to the ones under $25.
No download, which matters more than it sounds
iLovedThatWine opens in a browser tab. There is no App Store step between deciding to keep a wine journal and keeping one, and no minimum OS version standing in the way — Vivino’s iPhone listing requires iOS 18.6 or later, and several of the newer “remember your wines” apps require newer still.
It also means it works the same on an Android phone, an iPhone, a work laptop, and a five-year-old handset, and that you can send a friend a link at dinner and they can start their own journal at the table.
Where Vivino is genuinely the better tool
It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. If you want to know whether an unfamiliar bottle on a shelf is any good, a community of that size is something a private journal cannot replicate and should not try to. Food pairing suggestions, professional and crowd scores, and buying wine without leaving the app are all real advantages.
Plenty of people reasonably use both: a rating database for wines they have not tried, and a private journal for the ones they have. They are not really competing products so much as answers to opposite questions.
What switching actually involves
Nothing dramatic. Open the site, create an account, and photograph the label of the next bottle you like — the wine, winery, vintage, varietal, region, and country come off the label automatically, and you add your rating, a line of notes, the price, and the place.
If you want the fuller picture of that workflow first, the wine journal app page covers the personal record, the wine tracker app page covers finding bottles later, and how to remember a wine from a restaurant covers the hardest version of the problem. If your comparison is with your phone’s notes app rather than with Vivino, wine tracker vs notes app is the closer read.
Vivino alternative FAQs
What is the best Vivino alternative?
It depends which half of Vivino you actually use. If you want crowd ratings, food pairings, and to buy bottles in the app, alternatives like Delectable or CellarTracker cover similar ground. If what you want is a private record of the wines you personally liked, with the price you paid and the place you had it, a dedicated journal like iLovedThatWine is a closer fit than any of them.
Is there a wine app that does not require a download?
Yes. iLovedThatWine runs in a browser tab on any phone, tablet, or laptop, so there is nothing to install and no App Store or Play Store account involved. That also means it works on older phones that can no longer run the latest native wine apps.
Does Vivino track you?
Vivino's own App Privacy disclosure, checked on September 7, 2026, lists identifiers and usage data as used to track you across other companies' apps and websites, and lists precise location, contact info, purchases, and user content among the data collected and linked to your identity. iLovedThatWine does none of that: no advertising, no ad-tracking cookies, and no location collection.
Can I keep my wine notes private instead of posting reviews?
That is the main structural difference. Vivino is built around a shared review corpus, so its value comes from what other people publish. iLovedThatWine has no public feed and no shared reviews at all. Your entries are visible only to you.
Does a Vivino alternative still scan labels?
iLovedThatWine does. Photograph the bottle and it reads the wine name, winery, vintage, varietal, region, and country off the label, then hands them back for you to check. Label scanning is included on the free plan.
Takeaway
Pick the tool that matches the question you keep asking
If the question is “should I buy this?”, a rating database earns its place. If it is “what was that one I loved, and where did I get it?”, you want your own notes, with the price and the place still attached.