7 Best Beer Tracking Apps in 2026

Updated July 21, 2026 · by the Crumble team

The best beer tracking app for most people in 2026 is still Untappd — its community, badges, and venue check-ins are unmatched — but apps like Pint Please, Beer Buddy, and Crumble now beat it on privacy and tasting depth. Which one fits you depends on why you track: to play the badge game with a big community, to remember what a beer actually tasted like, or to keep a quiet log that only your friends can see.

This guide compares the beer tracking apps that are actually alive and maintained in 2026 — what each does best, where it falls short, and who should pick it. One famous name is missing for a reason: RateBeer shut down in February 2025, and we cover what to use instead.

The picks at a glance

1. Untappd — best community, badges, and venue check-ins

Untappd is the default beer tracking app, and honestly: if you're happy on it, stay. Nothing else comes close to its database of beers, its network of bars and breweries with live tap lists, or its badge system — check in a beer, earn a badge for the style, the venue, the streak. The community is the largest in beer by a wide margin, which means the beer you're holding is almost certainly already in the database with a crowd rating attached.

The core app is free. The optional Insiders subscription ($5.99/month or $54.99/year) adds extra badges, deeper statistics, and more precise ratings.

Trade-offs: Untappd is built around a public feed — your check-ins, ratings, and location history are social objects by design. And a check-in captures a single score, not much about the beer itself; a year later, "3.75" won't tell you whether it was the bitterness or the body you liked. If either of those bothers you, the rest of this list exists for you — and if you're actively looking to move, our Untappd alternative guide covers the switch in detail.

2. Crumble — best private beer log with your friends

Crumble is a friends-first food and drink tracker: rate places and individual items on a half-star 0.5–5 scale, keep a wishlist, and see your circle's spots on a shared map. Pointed at beer, that means the breweries and beer bars you rate live on the same map as your restaurants — one app for everything you eat and drink.

What sets it apart for beer:

• It imports your Untappd check-ins — free. You don't start from zero. Bring your existing history over and keep it somewhere private.
• Private by default. No public feed, no strangers, no ads. Your log is visible to the friends you choose and nobody else. EU-hosted and GDPR-compliant.
• A beer tasting journal that goes past one score. The free beer journal scores every pour on six flavor axes, so a great beer is recorded as a shape — not a lone number. The optional Plus tier (from €1.99) adds an AI label scan that fills in brewery, origin, and style from a photo.
• Breweries and bars on the friends map, free. The free tier covers place and dish tracking, the wishlist, the shared map, and XP across 30 levels.
• No install required. It's a web app — open crumble.me in any browser and add it to your home screen on iOS, Android, or desktop.

Where it's not for you: Crumble has no badges, no global leaderboard of drinkers, and no crowd database of every bottling on earth. If badge-collecting community play is the fun part for you, stay on Untappd — genuinely. Crumble is for the quieter job of remembering, with the people you actually drink with.

Try Crumble free

3. Pint Please — best for scanning labels and pub offers

Pint Please, built by a Finnish team, centers on the scan: point your camera at a label, get the beer, rate it, remember it. It layers on beer offers at partner pubs and restaurants, and a light progression system — earn Pintcoins, level up, collect achievement stickers. It's especially at home in the Nordic and wider European beer scene, and it's free on iOS and Android.

Trade-offs: the community is far smaller than Untappd's, so obscure beers are more likely to be missing, and the social layer is thinner. As a personal scan-and-rate journal with real-world pub perks, though, it's the strongest independent option.

4. Beer Buddy — best for drinking socially in real time

Beer Buddy (Buddy Network GmbH) answers a different question: not "what did I drink?" but "who's drinking right now?" Tap a button and your friends get notified you're out; a live map shows who's where, so spontaneous joins actually happen. You can log from a catalog of 100,000+ drinks — beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic options included.

Trade-offs: Beer Buddy is a social presence app first and a tracker second. Ratings and tasting depth are minimal, so it complements a proper beer journal rather than replacing one.

5. BeerAdvocate — best written reviews and forums

BeerAdvocate predates the check-in era: it's a review site and forum where beers get paragraphs, not taps. Its top-rated lists and style guides remain some of the most useful reference material in beer, and when RateBeer closed, BeerAdvocate offered migrating raters a new home.

Trade-offs: its mobile app history is patchy — the original app was discontinued years ago, and the site is the reliable way in — so as a phone-first tracking tool it lags everything above. Treat it as the place to research a beer deeply, paired with a faster app for day-to-day logging.

6. BreweryDB — best for planning brewery visits

BreweryDB, by BrewLogix, is built around a large curated database of independent craft breweries. Its boards feature turns brewery-hopping into shareable routes — hand-curated trails you can follow or build yourself and share with friends. Free on iOS and Android.

Trade-offs: it's discovery-first, not diary-first — the point is finding your next brewery, not remembering last night's pour — and users report gaps in coverage and out-of-date tap lists. Pair it with a logging app and it earns its slot on a road trip.

7. A spreadsheet or notes app — best zero-dependency fallback

The RateBeer shutdown proved the case for it: a plain spreadsheet with columns for beer, brewery, style, date, score, and a one-line note can't be acquired, redesigned, or turned off. Plenty of serious tasters keep one.

Trade-offs: everything is manual — no label lookup, no map, no friends layer — and in practice the sheet stops getting filled in by February. If you go this route, our guide on how to track beer covers what's actually worth writing down so the habit sticks.

How to choose

• You love badges and a big community → Untappd. It's still the king of that game.
• You want your beer history private, shared only with friends → Crumble — and it imports your Untappd check-ins so you keep everything.
• You want to scan labels and catch pub offers in Europe → Pint Please.
• You mostly want to know who's out drinking right now → Beer Buddy.
• You read and write real reviews → BeerAdvocate, alongside a logging app.
• You're planning a brewery road trip → BreweryDB.

These aren't exclusive. A common 2026 setup is Untappd for the community plus a private journal for the beers worth remembering properly. And if what you actually want is the check-in habit applied to everything you consume — meals included — see Untappd for food. Whisky drinkers have their own version of this list in our best whisky tracking apps guide.

How we chose these apps

We build one of the apps on this list, so we set rules before writing it. First, every app had to be verifiably alive in 2026 — checked against its official site or current app-store listing — which is why RateBeer appears only as an obituary and why we left out beer apps that haven't shipped an update in years. Second, every competitor description is drawn from the app's own published features and marketing, not from our opinion of it. Third, each app had to do at least one beer-tracking job — logging, rating, remembering, or finding beer — with a usable free tier. We excluded brewing and inventory apps, which solve a different problem. And where another app is simply the better pick — Untappd's community, Pint Please's scanner, BreweryDB's road-trip boards — we said so in its section rather than burying it.

Frequently asked questions

Keep every beer you've loved in one place

Crumble is free, private by default, and runs in the browser you already have. Import your Untappd check-ins in minutes and put your favorite breweries on the map you share with friends.

Start your beer log on Crumble