Comparison · Updated July 2026
The best Sortly alternatives for home inventory
Sortly’s free plan stops at 100 items, and its cheapest paid tier runs $288 a year. That’s fair pricing for a contractor tracking $40,000 of tools. It’s a lot for someone cataloguing a spare room. Here are eight alternatives built for houses instead of warehouses, starting with ours, and including one that isn’t an app at all.
Free • No 100-item wall • iOS + Android
Last reviewed 16 July 2026
The short version
- Best free Sortly alternative for a household: iFoundIt. No item cap, so you can do the whole house.
- Best for insurance: Encircle. Free, and built by people who document properties for a living.
- Best if you want to own your data: HomeBox. Open source and self-hosted, if you’re happy running a server.
- When to just stay on Sortly: you print QR labels, you share with a team, or you need a web dashboard. Sortly does those things properly and most of this list doesn’t do them at all.
Sortly is priced for warehouses, not households
Sortly’s pricing isn’t unreasonable. It’s just aimed at somebody else.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Items | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 100 | 1 |
| Advanced | $49 | $288/yr ($24/mo) | 500 | 2 |
| Ultra | $149 | $888/yr ($74/mo) | 2,000 | 5 |
| Premium | $299 | $1,788/yr ($149/mo) | 5,000 | 8 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | 10,000+ | 12+ |
Sortly pricing verified July 2026 from sortly.com/pricing. Monthly figures are the standard rate; annual figures reflect the discounted yearly price. Check their site for current rates.
Look at what those tiers actually sell you. Going from Free to Advanced doesn’t unlock a smarter way to find your drill. It raises a number, 100 items to 500, and adds QR label printing that most households will never touch. That’s the structural problem here: Sortly prices on record count, not on what you do with the records.
A business tracking 2,000 items is running purchase orders, multiple users and barcode workflows against them every day. A household with 2,000 items is doing nothing with them. Just owning them. Same tier, same bill, completely different value.
And 100 items is smaller than it sounds. An average three-bedroom house passes it before you’ve finished the kitchen. Photograph your electronics, your tools and the contents of one closet and you’re done. Not with your inventory, with your free plan.
That’s where the reviews get pointed. On Capterra and G2 the complaints cluster around the bill rather than the product. One reviewer reported their cost rising 357%, around $1,100 more per year. Another described a 77% increase that forced them to downgrade, calling it “an untenable change in price”. Several use the phrase “bait and switch”. One home user, whose plan had reached $299 a month, put it like this:
“Highway robbery for consumers who only use their system for managing a home inventory for insurance purposes.”
A Sortly customer, reviewing on Capterra
Those are their words, not ours, and they’re worth reading in context, because plenty of the same reviewers rate the app itself highly. That’s the pattern, and it’s a telling one. People like Sortly. They leave over the invoice.
None of which makes Sortly a bad product. It’s a good product with a price sheet aimed somewhere else. If you’re tracking $40,000 of equipment across three job sites, $288 a year is nothing. If you’re trying to remember which box the winter coats went in, it’s hard to justify.
The best Sortly alternatives for home inventory
Every app below is one you can go and download today. We checked.
That sounds like a low bar. It isn’t. Search for Sortly alternatives and you’ll find pages recommending apps with no App Store presence we could locate, no pricing page, and review counts in single digits. We left those out.
We also left out the business tools: inFlow, Zoho Inventory, Odoo, Snipe-IT, Asset Tiger. Those are the honest answer if you’re running a warehouse or a fleet. If that’s you, this isn’t your page, and those are the names worth searching. What’s left is eight options for people who have houses.
iFoundIt
Our pickBest for: Overall, for a household
- Free tier:
- Free, no item cap
- Paid from:
- No paid tier
- Platforms:
- iOS, Android
We built iFoundIt because we kept buying things we already owned. It does one job: remember where you put something, so you can find it later without opening four boxes.
You photograph an item, give it a name and a location (“loft, blue crate”, “kitchen drawer two”), then move on. About ten seconds each. Later you search “passport” and it tells you where the passport is. There’s no item ceiling to plan around, no per-seat pricing, and it works on a plane. If you want the full list, we keep it on the features page.
Where we’re weaker: there’s no QR label printing, no web dashboard, and on Android you’re side-loading an APK from Google Drive because we don’t have a Play listing yet. That last one is a real hassle and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
- Free with no item ceiling, so you can catalogue the whole house
- Photo-first capture fast enough that you actually finish
- Works offline, with Face ID or fingerprint lock
- Built for finding things at home, not managing stock
- No QR or barcode label printing
- Phone only, with no web app
- Android install is a direct APK, not a Play listing
Pick it if you want to inventory a whole house for free and never think about tiers again.
Encircle
Best for: Insurance documentation
- Free tier:
- Free for personal use
- Paid from:
- Free
- Platforms:
- iOS, Android, web
Encircle is the strongest free option here that isn’t ours, and you’d be right to look at it seriously. It comes out of the insurance restoration world, built for the people who document properties after a fire or a flood, and that shows in the details.
The detail that matters most is unlimited nested locations. You can record that the watch is in the envelope, in the briefcase, in the closet, in the second bedroom, and Encircle holds all four levels. Multiple photos per item means the receipt lives next to the thing it paid for. There’s a web portal, which we don’t have.
The trade-off is what it’s for. Encircle assumes you’re documenting a property in one sweep, not looking for your hex keys on a Tuesday. If your reason for doing this is insurance, that focus is the point. If it’s everyday retrieval, it’s more app than you need.
- Free, across iOS, Android and a web portal
- Unlimited nested locations: room to briefcase to envelope
- Multiple photos and receipts per item
- Report output built for claims
- Built for property documentation more than everyday finding
- Heavier than most households need for quick lookups
Pick it if your main reason for doing this is an insurance record.
HomeBox
Best for: Owning your own data
- Free tier:
- All of it
- Paid from:
- Free forever
- Platforms:
- Self-hosted web
HomeBox is genuinely excellent, and we’d recommend it, but only if you already run a Docker host. If “Docker host” meant nothing to you, skip this one.
For everyone else: it’s open source, written in Go, runs in under 50MB of memory, and keeps your inventory on hardware you own. Locations, labels, custom fields, warranty and purchase dates, attachments. No tiers and no upsell, because there’s no company that can decide next year that your 400 items now cost $288.
The price isn’t money, it’s you. Backups are your problem. Updates are your problem. Reaching it from outside the house means a reverse proxy or a VPN. But if you’ve already got a NAS humming in a cupboard, this is the most durable answer on the list.
- Free and open source, with no tiers at all
- Your data sits on your hardware
- Warranty, purchase and maintenance tracking
- Several separate inventories in one instance
- You are the sysadmin: hosting, updates, backups
- No polished native mobile app
- Access away from home takes real setup
Pick it if you self-host things already and want this to still exist in ten years.
NAIC Home Inventory
Best for: An insurer-neutral starting point
- Free tier:
- Free
- Paid from:
- Free
- Platforms:
- iOS, Android
This one comes from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the body the state insurance regulators belong to. It exists because regulators kept watching people try to list their possessions from memory after a fire.
It is not a beautiful app. It’s a free, no-agenda capture tool with photos and barcode scanning, and nobody is upselling you at the end of it. The NAIC also publishes a plain home inventory guide that’s worth reading whichever app you land on.
- Free, from a neutral regulator rather than a vendor
- Nothing to upsell you
- Sensible insurance framing out of the box
- Basic, and updated infrequently
- Thin organization tools for everyday finding
Pick it if you want an insurance record and nothing else.
Nest Egg
Best for: Warranties and purchase records
- Free tier:
- Nest Egg Lite, 25 items
- Paid from:
- One-time unlock
- Platforms:
- iOS
Nest Egg leans on the paperwork side of owning things: what you paid, when the warranty expires, where the manual went. Scan a barcode and it fills in product details for you, which saves a lot of typing.
The free version, Nest Egg Lite, stops at 25 items, a smaller wall than Sortly’s. But the unlock is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription, and that changes the arithmetic completely. A few dollars once is a different proposition to $288 every year, forever.
- One-time purchase rather than a subscription
- Barcode lookup fills in product details
- Strong on warranties, receipts and manuals
- Free tier stops at 25 items
- iOS only
- Interface shows its age
Pick it if you care about warranties and receipts, and you’re done with subscriptions.
Itemtopia
Best for: Sharing with the household
- Free tier:
- 20 items
- Paid from:
- Subscription
- Platforms:
- iOS, Android
Itemtopia’s pitch is sharing: the household rather than the individual. More than one person can see and add to the same inventory, which none of the free apps here do well, ours included.
A warning on pricing: we found it quoted several different ways, in the region of $7.99 a month with annual bundles quoted anywhere from roughly $50 to $79 depending on the year and the promotion. Check the current number yourself before you commit. And treat the 20-item free tier as a trial, not a plan.
- Real multi-person household sharing
- Insurance-ready PDF export
- On both iOS and Android
- 20-item free tier is very small
- Pricing is quoted inconsistently across sources
- Subscription rather than one-time
Pick it if more than one person needs to add to the same inventory.
Memento Database
Best for: Designing your own fields
- Free tier:
- Limited free version
- Paid from:
- Cheapest subscription here
- Platforms:
- Android, iOS, web
Memento isn’t a home inventory app. It’s a database you can shape into one, which is either exactly what you want or exactly what you don’t.
You define the fields. If you want to track fabric type on your armchairs, or the tuning of every guitar in the house, Memento will let you build that. A purpose-built inventory app won’t. The flip side is that you begin with an empty structure and a blank page, and plenty of people never get past that part. It’s the cheapest paid option on this list.
- Total control over your fields and structure
- Cheapest subscription of anything here
- Syncs across devices, with templates to start from
- You’re building the app, not just filling it
- No home-inventory opinion out of the box
- Overkill for photograph-and-go
Pick it if you’ve outgrown apps that decide your fields for you.
A spreadsheet
Best for: Zero install, zero lock-in
- Free tier:
- Free
- Paid from:
- Free
- Platforms:
- Anything
A roundup that won’t say this isn’t being straight with you: if you own thirty things worth insuring, a spreadsheet is fine. Google Sheets, Excel, Numbers. Columns for item, room, value, serial number, and a link to a photo in your cloud drive. Done in an afternoon, and nobody can ever raise the price.
It falls apart on photos and on momentum. Photos are most of the point of a home inventory, and spreadsheets handle them badly, because you end up maintaining a folder of images and a column of filenames that slowly stops matching. It also gets tedious fast, which matters more than it sounds. An inventory you abandon halfway is worth nothing.
- Free, no install, no lock-in
- Export is trivial because it’s already a file
- Photos are a nuisance to manage
- No real search by location
- Most people quit partway through
Pick it if you’re documenting a short list of valuables rather than a house.
Also considered, and close: Under My Roof (polished, iOS, paid), Belongings (clean and simple, smaller feature set) and Itemlist (good room-and-container model). Any of the three could reasonably have taken a slot.
All eight, side by side
Sortly’s own row is at the bottom for reference. Free tiers are where the real difference shows up.
| App | Free tier | Paid from | Platforms | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| iFoundIt | Everything, no cap | No paid tier | iOS, Android | A whole household, free |
| Encircle | Free for personal use | Free | iOS, Android, web | Insurance documentation |
| HomeBox | All of it | Free forever | Self-hosted web | Owning your data |
| NAIC Home Inventory | Free | Free | iOS, Android | A neutral starting point |
| Nest Egg | 25 items (Lite) | One-time unlock | iOS | Warranties and receipts |
| Itemtopia | 20 items | Subscription | iOS, Android | Household sharing |
| Memento Database | Limited free version | Cheapest here | Android, iOS, web | Custom fields |
| A spreadsheet | Free | Free | Anything | A short list of valuables |
| Sortly | 100 items, 1 user | $288/yr | iOS, Android, web | Businesses and teams |
iFoundIt vs Sortly, in detail
We’re not a neutral party here, so the fairest thing we can do is be specific about where we lose.
| Feature | iFoundIt | Sortly |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan item limit | No cap | 100 items |
| Free plan users | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest paid tier | No paid tier | $288/yr |
| Photo-first quick capture | ||
| Search by name & location | ||
| Works offline | ||
| Export to PDF | ||
| Face ID / fingerprint lock | ||
| QR-code label sheets | ||
| Barcode scanning | ||
| Web dashboard | ||
| Multiple users | Paid tiers | |
| Purchase orders & QuickBooks | Higher tiers | |
| Best suited for | Homes & everyday belongings | Businesses & teams |
Where iFoundIt wins
Scale, for free. You can photograph every room in the house and never see a wall or a paywall, which, for the thing most people actually want from a home inventory, is the whole ballgame. Capture is quicker too, because there’s less to fill in per item. And we lock the app behind Face ID or a fingerprint, which Sortly doesn’t.
Where Sortly genuinely wins
If you need to print QR labels for 300 storage bins, use Sortly. We can’t do that. Sortly also has barcode scanning, a proper web dashboard, multiple users on paid tiers, purchase orders, and a QuickBooks integration higher up. Every one of those is a real feature that real people need, and we have none of them.
Where it’s a wash
Both apps are photo-first, both search by name and location, both work offline, and both export a PDF you can hand to an insurer. If you only need those four things, pick on price and on which one feels better in your hand.
What iFoundIt can’t do yet
No QR label printing. No web app: it’s phone only. No shared household accounts, so it’s one person per inventory for now. And on Android you’re installing an APK from a Google Drive link because we don’t have a Play listing yet, which is genuinely annoying and near the top of our list. If any of those four is a dealbreaker, one of the other seven above will serve you better, and that’s fine. See everything iFoundIt does →
Comparison based on publicly available information as of July 2026 and subject to change. Sortly, Encircle, HomeBox, Nest Egg, Itemtopia and Memento Database are trademarks of their respective owners; iFoundIt is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them. Reviewer quotes are the words of the reviewers as published on third-party review platforms, not statements of fact by iFoundIt. If we’ve got something wrong, tell us and we’ll correct it.
How to pick the right one for your house
Five questions that will narrow this list faster than any feature table.
Count your rooms, not your valuables
People underestimate this by a factor of five. One kitchen is 80 items if you’re honest about it. Before you pick anything, decide whether you’re cataloguing a house or a shortlist, because that answer rules out half this list immediately.
Work out who else needs it
If your partner also needs to find the Christmas decorations, sharing stops being a nice extra. Most free tiers here, ours included, are single user. Itemtopia and Sortly’s paid tiers are the honest answers.
Decide if you need labels
Printing QR labels for 300 storage bins is a genuinely different job to photographing your stuff. Sortly does it well. We don’t do it at all. If that’s your workflow, the rest of this page doesn’t matter much.
Check what an insurer would accept
A list of names isn’t a claim. You want photos, purchase dates, values and serial numbers, and a way to get them out as a document. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Ask what happens when you stop paying
Almost nobody thinks about this until it matters. Your inventory is worth most in the year you’re not paying attention to it. Find the export button before you need it, and prefer tools where your data walks out with you.
Different job in mind? We keep separate guides for organizing a home, moving house and renting.
Getting your inventory out of Sortly
The switch is less work than people expect, mostly because you shouldn’t try to move everything.
Get your data out of Sortly first
Do this while your account is still active. Sortly can export your items, and the free plan keeps working, but don’t leave it until after you’ve cancelled something.
Be realistic about what you re-enter
Nobody re-photographs 400 items. Nobody. Pick the sixty that would actually hurt to lose or replace, and start there. The rest can trickle in over months, or never.
Rebuild room by room, not category by category
Categories feel tidier and rooms are faster, because you’re standing in one. Our room-by-room checklist is built for exactly this, and one evening usually covers a floor.
Put the export somewhere that isn’t your house
An inventory that burns down with the house it documents has done nothing for you. Cloud drive, email it to yourself, give a copy to a relative. Then download the app and get on with it.
Still deciding whether any of this is worth an evening? The Insurance Information Institute has the neutral case for keeping a home inventory, and our own guide on keeping track of where you put things covers the everyday version.
Questions, answered
What is the best free Sortly alternative?
For a household, we’d point you at iFoundIt. It’s free with no item cap, so you can photograph and organize a whole house without hitting a wall partway through. Encircle is the strongest other free option, particularly if your goal is insurance documentation. If you’re comfortable running your own server, HomeBox is free, open source, and keeps your data on your own hardware.
What are Sortly’s free plan limits?
Sortly’s free plan is capped at 100 unique items and one user, and it doesn’t include barcode label creation. That cap is the reason most home users start looking for an alternative: an average three-bedroom house passes 100 items before you have finished the kitchen.
Is Sortly free for home inventory?
It is free up to 100 items and one user. Sortly does market a home inventory product, but its plans are priced by record count, so a household that wants to catalogue everything it owns is pushed onto a paid business tier fairly quickly, while rarely needing the business features those tiers are built around.
Is iFoundIt better than Sortly?
For a house, we think so, and we’re obviously biased. For a business, no. Sortly has QR and barcode label printing, multiple users, purchase orders and a web dashboard, and iFoundIt has none of those. What iFoundIt has is no item ceiling, no subscription, and a workflow designed around finding where you put something rather than managing stock.
Can I move my inventory from Sortly to another app?
You can export your data from Sortly, and you should do that before you cancel anything. In practice most people don’t re-enter everything. The realistic approach is to re-photograph the items that would genuinely hurt to lose, room by room, and let the rest arrive over time.
Is there an open source Sortly alternative?
HomeBox. It is fully open source, self-hosted, and free forever, with locations, labels, custom fields and warranty tracking. The trade-off is that you host it: you handle updates, backups, and remote access yourself. If you already run a home server it is the most durable option available.
Do I need an app, or will a spreadsheet do?
If you are documenting a short list of valuables, a spreadsheet genuinely works and costs nothing. It struggles once photos are involved, because you end up maintaining a folder of images alongside a column of filenames. Photos are most of the value of a home inventory, which is why dedicated apps tend to win for anything house-sized.
Which Sortly alternative is best for insurance?
Encircle is built by people who document properties after fires and floods, and it shows: unlimited nested locations and multiple photos per item, including receipts. iFoundIt covers the same ground more simply and exports a PDF. The NAIC also publishes a free, insurer-neutral home inventory app and guide worth reading either way.
More questions about the app itself? We’ve answered those here →
More ways to use iFoundIt
Inventory your whole house for free
No 100-item wall, no subscription, no tier to plan around. Download iFoundIt and start with one room.
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