Four Home-Inventory Apps, One Bookshelf, One Saturday.

Marc is 38. Two-bedroom flat, partner, one kid, and a Saturday morning that nobody else needed him for. He'd been telling himself for about a year that he was going to "do an inventory" — properly, this time, not the spreadsheet that died at row 14 — and the Saturday had finally arrived without an excuse attached.

So he made a coffee, sat down in front of the living-room bookshelf, and downloaded four apps.

The bookshelf was the test. Eight items, all reachable from one spot on the rug: five books (one of them in Russian, one in Spanish, one a Borges paperback with the title half-rubbed off), a small wooden box of cables, a ceramic dish, and a framed photo. If an app couldn't handle a bookshelf on a Saturday morning, it wasn't going to handle the rest of the flat on a Tuesday night ever.

Here's what happened, in order.

App one: Sortly

Sortly opened cleanly. It has been around long enough that the onboarding doesn't fight you, and within about two minutes Marc had a folder called "Living Room" and was tapping the camera icon.

The photo capture is good. Genuinely good — Sortly's been doing photos and barcodes and QR labels for years and you can feel that in the flow. If Marc had been inventorying a small shop, with a stack of products that each had a barcode on the back, this would have been the moment he relaxed.

But these were books. None of them had a usable barcode that mattered to him as an object — the Borges paperback's ISBN sticker was the wrong edition anyway — and so Marc had to type each title himself. Author. Approximate value. Category. Sortly didn't guess anything. It waited for him.

By book five of eight he'd lost the thread. He stared at the Russian-language grammar textbook — Современный русский язык, 1987 edition, inherited — and realised he was about to spend ninety seconds typing a name he wasn't going to search for in that exact form ever again.

There was also a thing he half-remembered reading. In 2024 Sortly quietly retired its $4.99/month plan; long-time subscribers got migrated onto plans that started in the hundreds. It wasn't relevant to a Saturday-morning bookshelf, but it sat at the back of Marc's head as a small trust question. The kind you don't forget once it's there.

He closed the app at book six. Sortly's not bad. Sortly's specifically not built to do the work for you, and on a Saturday morning that's the difference.

App two: Encircle

Encircle was a different planet.

The flow is room-by-room, claim-shaped, and from the first screen it's obvious that the app's centre of gravity is an insurance adjuster, not a person looking for a book. Marc tapped into "Living Room" and was asked for floor material, square footage, and a wide-angle photo of the room as a whole before he got near a single object.

For its intended use case — filing a claim after a flood or a fire, with photographs that need to hold up in front of a person whose job is doubting you — this is exactly right. The flow produces a defensible record. The reports are the actual product.

For a Tuesday afternoon and a bookshelf, it was paperwork-shaped in a way that made Marc tired. One photo per item, plus a receipt slot he didn't have receipts for, plus a condition dropdown. He got two books in and closed the app.

There's also a thing about Encircle worth saying plainly. They've announced they're pivoting fully to B2B restoration contractors through 2026, which means consumer users — the people who downloaded it for exactly Marc's use case — are going to need somewhere else to keep their data fairly soon. We've written about that in a separate post for anyone in that situation. It's not a hit piece on Encircle; they did a real thing well for a long time. But it's a real reason not to start a new household inventory there in May 2026.

App three: HomeZada

This was the one Marc had been most curious about.

HomeZada — and Bevel, and Spullio, the same general lane — is the new AI wave. Point a camera at a whole room, the app produces a list of objects. Marc held his phone up to the bookshelf, pressed scan, and four seconds later had a list:

• Book
• Book
• Book
• Wooden container
• Bowl
• Picture frame
• Book
• Book

It was, on the spot, impressive. Free, fast, no typing. The room was "in".

Two problems showed up over the next ten minutes. The first: the labels were wrong in the way labels from a wide photo always are. "Bowl" was the ceramic dish, fine. "Wooden container" needed to become "box of HDMI and USB-C cables" if it was ever going to be useful when Marc was looking for an HDMI cable in November. Each correction took roughly as long as typing the item from scratch would have, because he was now correcting and typing.

The second problem was quieter and worse. Once the bookshelf was scanned, the app didn't have anywhere obvious for Marc to go. The shelf was a list. The list was correct-ish. And then what? Three weeks later, on the way to a friend's place, Marc would not be opening HomeZada to find the Borges. He didn't even know how he would find the Borges in it. The app's centre of gravity is the scan. The daily life afterwards is unfurnished.

HomeZada is genuinely better than AllKeep at one-photo-of-a- whole-room ingestion. So is Bevel. That's their thing and it's real. It's just not, on its own, an inventory you live with.

App four: AllKeep

Marc opened the fourth app, tapped into the bookshelf folder, and went into the bulk-grid camera. He lined up the eight items across two shelves, took one photo, and waited.

Eight items came back. Names mostly right — the Russian textbook landed as Modern Russian Grammar (1987 ed.), which was close enough. The Borges paperback came in as Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges. Two corrections in two taps: the ceramic dish was labelled "small bowl" and the wooden box wanted to be "cables box, living room shelf". Done.

He closed the app, made a second coffee, and didn't think about it again for three weeks.

The Tuesday that mattered was three weeks later. Marc was on the way out the door to a friend's place, the friend had asked about the Borges short story he'd mentioned, and Marc could not for the life of him remember which shelf the book was on. He typed "where's the book by Borges" into the app on the train.

It told him. Living room, top shelf, bulk-grid photo from May 4.

For Marc, that was the moment. Not the scan. The find.

What AllKeep is not

This is a comparison post on AllKeep's own site, so the honest section matters more than the flattering one.

AllKeep is not the strongest app at one-photo-of-a-whole-room ingestion. HomeZada and Bevel are stronger at that — if your mental model is "I want to walk through every room with my phone held up and have a list at the end", they will give you a list faster.

AllKeep is not the strongest app at retail-style barcode inventory. Sortly is. If you're tracking stock in a small shop, or a workshop with serial-numbered parts on every shelf, Sortly is closer in shape to what you need and the barcode flow is years ahead.

AllKeep is not the strongest app at adjuster-grade claim reports. Encircle is built for that and produces documents designed to be argued with by a professional. The claims-pdf output isn't AllKeep's lane and we'd be lying to say otherwise — though as noted above, Encircle is leaving that lane for consumers anyway.

What AllKeep is shaped for is the part that comes after the catalogue. Living with your stuff over years. Finding a book on a Tuesday. Sharing the inventory with a partner without it becoming a chore. Running more than one household in one app — a flat, the parents' house, the holiday rental. Asking the app plain-language questions and getting plain-language answers. That's the niche. That's specifically the niche.

The "right fit if you are" close

A short fit-guide, instead of a verdict.

• If you're inventorying a flat you live in, share with a partner, and want to find things faster than you can think — AllKeep is shaped for that.
• If you're a small-business shopkeeper tracking stock with barcodes — Sortly is closer.
• If you're a single-room insurance-claim preparer with no ongoing daily use — Encircle was that, and HomeZada or Bevel may now serve you better for the scan-and-list use case.
• If you want a wide-room AI scan and a list at the end, with no expectation of returning daily — HomeZada is genuinely good at that.

Marc kept AllKeep. He uninstalled the other three by Sunday evening. That is not a verdict on the other three; they all do something real. It's a verdict on his particular kitchen, his particular bookshelf, his particular Tuesday.

If your Tuesday looks like Marc's — partner, kid, flat, things you keep losing — the app is on Google Play. Try the bookshelf test yourself. Eight items, one photo, three weeks later type the name of one of them into the search and see what happens. That's the whole pitch.