RateBeer Shut Down: 5 Best Alternatives in 2026
RateBeer closed on 1 February 2025. If you are looking for an alternative, you are not comparing two live apps; you are rehoming twenty years of tasting notes. Crumble is the closest match for a private beer journal with per-beer scoring; Untappd is where most of the community actually went.
RateBeer ran from 2000 and became one of the two great beer databases of the internet. Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired a controlling stake in 2016, which cost it a large part of a craft-beer audience that had joined precisely to escape multinational brewing. Untappd (younger, mobile-first) took the traffic. The site announced closure in December 2024 and went dark on 1 February 2025. At least one person publicly tried to buy and revive it; nothing came of it.
The practical consequence is the part nobody enjoys: if you did not export your ratings before February 2025, they are gone. There is no archive to request and no account to log into. Everything below assumes you are starting again, and the guide is written accordingly.
The alternatives at a glance
| App | Best for | Rating style | Who sees it | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Untappd | The biggest database and the community | 5-point, per check-in | Public feed | Free (paid tier) |
| Crumble | A private beer journal you keep | 0–5 in tenth-of-a-star steps, six flavour axes | Friends only | Free |
| BeerAdvocate | Long-form reviews and forums | Multi-criteria, out of 5 | Public | Free |
| Vivino | If your drinking has drifted to wine | 5-point | Public | Free |
| A spreadsheet | Total control, zero features | Whatever you build | Nobody | Free |
1. Untappd: where the community actually went
Being honest first: Untappd is the biggest beer database in the world and the place most ex-RateBeer users landed. If what you miss is the coverage (that any obscure gose from a two-person brewery is already in the database), nothing here competes. Check-ins, badges, brewery pages, venue menus, an enormous social graph.
Trade-offs: it is a check-in network, not a tasting journal. The rating is a single 5-point score with a comment box; there is no structured place for the six things you actually noticed. It is also public by default, which is a different bargain from the one RateBeer's reviewers were used to. Our full write-up is in the best Untappd alternative and beer tracking apps.
2. Crumble: best if you want the notes, not the network
The thing RateBeer had that Untappd does not is structured evaluation. RateBeer asked you to score aroma, appearance, taste, palate and overall; that discipline is why its notes were worth reading years later. Crumble is built on the same idea, applied per beer:
- Six flavour axes per beer (sweetness, bitterness, body, hops, malt and finish), scored alongside an overall 0–5 rating in tenth-of-a-star steps. A 3.8 and a 4.1 are different answers, which matters when you are ranking a shelf.
- A shelf, not a feed. One entry per beer with brewery, style and ABV; sessions hang off it, so re-tasting the same beer a year later gives you a comparison rather than a duplicate.
- The beer add-on is free. So are all the others: wine, whisky, coffee, tea and matcha. No subscription is needed to track any of them.
- Friends-only, not public. Your shelf is visible to people you have accepted and nobody else. EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant, no ads, no data sold to a brewer.
- Beer and food on one map. The bar you drank it in is a place you can rate too, which RateBeer never did. See how to track beer for the full method.
Where it loses to Untappd: database size and community. Crumble has no brewery-submitted catalogue of every beer on earth; you type the beer in the first time you drink it. If discovery through other people is what you want, Untappd wins outright.
3. BeerAdvocate: the other survivor
RateBeer's old rival is still standing. BeerAdvocate keeps the multi-criteria review format and the forums, and it is the closest thing left to RateBeer's culture of long, argued write-ups. If the reason you used RateBeer was the reading as much as the logging, this is the closest replacement.
Trade-offs: it is web-first and shows its age on a phone, and the community is a fraction of Untappd's. As a personal record it is a public archive rather than a private one.
4. Vivino: if the beer years are winding down
A real pattern among ex-RateBeer users: the shutdown was the moment they noticed they had been drinking more wine than beer for a while. Vivino is the equivalent database on the wine side, with label scanning and a large ratings corpus. If that is you, our Vivino alternatives guide covers what it gets right and where a private journal beats a marketplace.
5. A spreadsheet: genuinely defensible here
RateBeer closing taught its users something real: a database you do not control can vanish with ninety days notice. A spreadsheet cannot. Columns for beer, brewery, style, ABV, date, score and notes will hold a lifetime of drinking, sync everywhere, and outlive every company on this page.
Trade-offs: no map, no lookup, no photos, no friends, and typing on a phone in a bar is miserable, which is exactly why most spreadsheet journals die by month three. Worth keeping as a periodic export rather than as the primary tool.
Bringing beer history into Crumble
If you still have a file (an old RateBeer export, an Untappd export, or a spreadsheet you kept), it can come with you. Crumble's importer auto-detects Untappd exports in CSV or JSON and reads up to 2,000 rows in one go, mapping beer, brewery, style, ABV, your rating, your comment, the date and the venue.
For any other file, the importer matches column headers case-insensitively, so renaming two columns is enough to make it work:
| Rename your column to | And it becomes |
|---|---|
beer_name | The beer |
brewery_name | The brewery |
beer_style | The style |
beer_abv | ABV |
rating_score | Your score |
comment | Your tasting note |
created_at | The date you drank it |
venue_name | Where you drank it |
That is the honest answer to "can I bring my data": there is no RateBeer-shaped importer, because there is no RateBeer to export from, but any CSV with those headers will load.
How we compared these
We use Crumble daily and keep our own beer shelf in it, so the judgements about scoring and re-tasting come from real use. Each alternative was assessed on the four things RateBeer users say they lost: structured multi-criteria scoring, a database deep enough to find obscure beers, notes that stay readable years later, and control over whether the whole thing can disappear. Competitor features come from published material and store listings, checked in August 2026. Anything we could not verify was left out rather than guessed.
So which one
If you want the database and the people, go to Untappd and do not overthink it: that is where the community is. If what you actually miss is sitting down with a beer and scoring it properly, on axes, in something only your friends can see, that is what Crumble is for. And whichever you pick, export it once a year. That is the lesson RateBeer left behind.
Frequently asked questions
Is RateBeer gone for good?
Yes. RateBeer announced its closure in December 2024 and shut down on 1 February 2025. The site had been majority-owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev since 2016. At least one buyer publicly tried to acquire and revive it without success, and there is no official archive or account recovery.
Can I get my RateBeer ratings back?
Almost certainly not. If you exported your data before February 2025 you can still use that file; if you did not, there is no account to log into and no export to request. Any CSV you kept can be loaded into Crumble by renaming its columns to beer_name, brewery_name, rating_score and comment.
What is the best free RateBeer alternative?
Untappd if you want the database and the community, Crumble if you want a private journal with structured scoring. Crumble's beer add-on is free, as are all its drink add-ons, and it scores each beer 0 to 5 in tenth-of-a-star steps across six flavour axes: sweetness, bitterness, body, hops, malt and finish.
Which alternative keeps multi-criteria ratings like RateBeer had?
Crumble and BeerAdvocate. BeerAdvocate keeps a public multi-criteria review format closest to RateBeer's culture. Crumble scores six flavour axes per beer in a private journal. Untappd, by contrast, records a single 5-point score with a free-text comment.
Is Untappd owned by a big brewer too?
Untappd is owned by Next Glass, a beverage-technology company, not by a brewer. RateBeer's majority stake went to Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016, which is the specific thing that drove much of its craft audience away. If independence from large brewing matters to you, that distinction is worth checking for yourself before committing a decade of notes to any platform.