There are at least forty wine apps on the App Store right now. Most of them do one of three things: scan a label, rate a wine, or sell you a bottle. A handful try to do all three. A couple do something genuinely different.
We tested the ones that matter. We're including ourselves in this comparison because leaving PairScan out would feel dishonest, and being dishonest about competitors would undermine the whole exercise. So here's a straight look at five wine apps, what each one does best, and where each one falls short.
Vivino: The One Everyone Has
Vivino is the 800-pound gorilla. Over 60 million users. The largest wine community on the planet. If you've ever scanned a wine label with your phone, there's a good chance Vivino was involved.
What it does well: Label scanning is fast and accurate. You're standing in a wine shop, you see a bottle you've never heard of, you scan it, and within two seconds you've got a crowd-sourced rating from millions of other users. That's genuinely useful. The ratings aren't perfect — crowd-sourced scores tend to skew toward popular, approachable wines and punish anything unusual — but as a quick gut check in a store, it works. The marketplace integration is also strong. You can buy wines directly through the app, compare prices, and track what you've tried.
Where it struggles: Vivino knows wine. It doesn't know food. Open the app at a restaurant and it can tell you that the Barolo on page four has a 4.2 rating. It cannot tell you whether that Barolo is the right call for the seared tuna you just ordered. (It isn't.) There's no menu scanning. No pairing engine that accounts for what you're actually eating. Vivino is built for the wine shop, and at the wine shop, it's excellent.
Best for: Browsing, buying, and building a record of wines you've tried. If you only install one wine app, this is probably it — not because it does everything, but because it does the most common thing (standing in a store, wondering "is this any good?") better than anyone.
CellarTracker: The Collector's Tool
If you have a wine cellar — a real one, even if it's just a temperature-controlled closet with fifty bottles — you probably already use CellarTracker. If you don't have a cellar, you probably haven't heard of it.
CellarTracker has over 11 million community tasting notes. That's a staggering number. The depth of data on specific vintages, producers, and regions is unmatched by any other consumer app. Serious wine people live in CellarTracker. The inventory management is precise — you can track every bottle, when you bought it, what you paid, when it's drinking at its peak.
Where it struggles: CellarTracker is designed for the long game. Cataloging, cellaring, tracking drinking windows. It's not designed for the moment you sit down at a restaurant and need to make a decision from an unfamiliar wine list in the next two minutes. There's no menu integration, no food pairing engine, no way to point your phone at a wine list and get an instant recommendation. It's a library, not a concierge.
Best for: Managing a collection and reading detailed tasting notes before opening a bottle at home.
Wine-Searcher: The Price Engine
Wine-Searcher is the app for one very specific question: "Where can I buy this wine, and what should I pay for it?"
It's professional-grade. Retailers, importers, and sommeliers use Wine-Searcher to source bottles. The price database is enormous — over 18 million listings from merchants around the world. If a wine is for sale somewhere on Earth, Wine-Searcher probably knows about it. The price history tools are particularly useful. You can see whether a wine's price has spiked, whether you're getting a fair deal, and which vintage offers the best value.
It's a tool for buying, not for drinking. There's no food pairing logic. No taste profile learning. No menu scanning. Wine-Searcher answers "where and how much," and it answers that question better than anyone else. If you're the kind of person who hunts for specific vintages or compares prices across merchants before committing, this app will save you real money.
Best for: Finding fair prices and sourcing specific bottles from retailers worldwide.
Hello Vino: The Simple Pairing App
Hello Vino was one of the first apps to tackle food-and-wine pairing directly, and it still does the basics well. Pick a dish category, get a wine suggestion. It's straightforward, clean, and doesn't try to overwhelm you.
The app has added some AI-driven learning over the years — it attempts to adjust recommendations based on what you've liked before. The recommendations are sensible if generic. Ask it what to drink with chicken and you'll get a reasonable answer. Ask it what to drink with the miso-glazed black cod at a specific restaurant and you're on your own, because Hello Vino doesn't read menus. It works from broad food categories, not from the actual dishes in front of you.
It's also iOS only, which cuts out a big chunk of the market. Development has slowed visibly — the feature set hasn't changed much in the last couple of years. But for someone who wants a quick, no-fuss wine suggestion based on a general food type, it does the job.
Best for: Quick, category-based pairing suggestions when you already know what kind of dish you're having.
PairScan: The Restaurant Tool
We built PairScan because none of the apps above solve the specific problem of sitting at a restaurant, looking at an unfamiliar menu and wine list, and needing to make a smart choice quickly.
Here's what PairScan does differently. You take a photo of the food menu and the wine list. The AI reads both — every dish, every wine, every price. It cross-references the specific dishes you're considering against the specific wines available, factoring in weight, acidity, flavor bridges, and preparation methods. It reads prices and won't recommend a $200 bottle when you're clearly in $50-a-bottle territory. Over time, it learns your palate — that you hate oaky Chardonnay, love Nebbiolo, prefer dry over sweet.
What it doesn't do: PairScan is not a wine encyclopedia. It doesn't have 11 million tasting notes. It won't help you manage a cellar or find the cheapest retailer for a case of Brunello. It doesn't have crowd-sourced ratings from 60 million users. We didn't build any of that because other apps already do it well.
PairScan does one thing: it reads what's in front of you and tells you what to order. Not a wine encyclopedia. A tool for the moment you're sitting at a table. The entire interaction takes about fifteen seconds — scan, tap your dishes, get a ranked list of wines with explanations for why each one works.
Best for: Making a confident wine choice at a restaurant, matched to the actual food you're ordering.
The Comparison, Side by Side
Here's an honest feature matrix. Green checks aren't value judgments — they just mean the app has a functional version of that feature.
| Feature | Vivino | CellarTracker | Wine-Searcher | Hello Vino | PairScan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Label scanning | Yes | Limited | Yes | No | No |
| Menu scanning | No | No | No | No | Yes |
| Food pairing | No | No | No | Basic (categories) | Yes (dish-specific) |
| Price awareness | Market prices | Purchase tracking | Retail prices | No | Restaurant prices |
| Taste learning | Ratings history | Tasting notes | No | Basic | Yes (active) |
| Collection management | Basic | Best in class | No | No | No |
| Crowd-sourced ratings | 60M+ users | 11M+ notes | Critic scores | No | No |
| Platforms | iOS, Android | iOS, Android, Web | iOS, Android, Web | iOS only | iOS, Android |
| Best use case | Wine shopping | Cellar management | Price sourcing | Quick suggestions | Restaurant pairing |
A few things stand out. No single app covers everything. Vivino and CellarTracker both have massive community data that took over a decade to build — you can't replicate that overnight and we aren't trying to. Wine-Searcher's price database is a moat that would take years to match. Hello Vino's simplicity is a genuine feature for people who don't want complexity.
PairScan is the only one that reads a physical menu and wine list together. That's a narrow focus, and it's intentional. We'd rather do one thing well than bolt on mediocre versions of features that other apps already own.
One thing the table doesn't capture: these apps aren't mutually exclusive. Some of the most wine-savvy people we know use three or four of them for different purposes. The question isn't "which is best" — it's "which is best right now, for what I'm doing."
When to Use What
This isn't a "one app to rule them all" situation. These apps occupy different moments in your wine life.
At the wine shop: Vivino. Scan the label, check the rating, read the reviews, buy with confidence. Nothing else comes close for in-store decisions.
At home with your collection: CellarTracker. Track your inventory, read the community notes, decide what to open tonight based on drinking windows and what you're cooking.
Sourcing a specific bottle: Wine-Searcher. Find it, compare prices, order it. Done.
Quick recommendation, no fuss: Hello Vino. Tell it you're eating chicken, get a wine type. Simple.
At a restaurant: PairScan. Scan the menu, scan the wine list, get a recommendation matched to your actual meal, your budget, and your taste.
Different apps for different moments. Vivino at the wine shop. CellarTracker at home. PairScan at the restaurant.