You search for the best home inventory app because somebody sensible told you to make a list of everything you own, and you would quite like to get it over with in an evening.

Then you read four roundups and they all rank the same way. Barcode scanning. Custom fields. QR labels on boxes. Reports in PDF.

None of that is the thing that kills a home inventory. What kills it is March, when the washing machine arrives on a Tuesday and the person who installed the app is at work.

Every app here photographs a thing. That was never the hard part

Take the feature grids side by side and almost everything on them is shared. Photos of items. Rooms and categories. Barcode scanning. Export to PDF or CSV. Sortly, Itemtopia and the NAIC’s own free app all do those four, and the NAIC one does them for nothing. Checked on each company’s own site and App Store listing, 20 September 2026.

So the grid cannot tell you which to install, in the same way it cannot tell you which grocery app to install. What it hides is the question underneath.

An inventory is not a document you write. It is a record of arrivals, and arrivals do not check who is holding the account.

Look at the diagram again. Five things came into that house across a year, which is a normal year. Two of them landed on a Saturday when you were at the door. The other three came on weekday delivery slots, and in an app with one login they were never entered by anybody, because the person who signed for them could not.

The free tier in this category is a one-person tier

This is the specific thing the other roundups skip, and it is on each company’s own pricing page.

Sortly’s free plan is listed as 100 unique items and one user licence. Itemtopia is free to try, and inviting people and managing permissions sit behind Premium at $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year, with additional user access sold as separate in-app purchases from $2.99 for one extra person. The NAIC’s free app is built around one phone and an export you email to yourself. All checked 20 September 2026.

Here is the same Tuesday in Chirpy. The washing machine is in the hall, the delivery note is on top of it, and the person who is in opens the Home tool and adds a record: Bosch washing machine, the date off the note, what it cost, kitchen. It is on the household record before the driver has reached the van, and you see it that evening without being told. Nobody was invited, nobody paid for a second seat, because everyone in the house is already in the household.

Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, with no card.

The best home inventory app for each kind of household

Five, sorted by the household rather than by a score. Every figure below came off the company’s own site or its own App Store listing on 20 September 2026.

NAIC Home Inventory, if you want the list and nothing else

Published by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the standard-setting body run by the American state insurance regulators. It is free, it carries no in-app purchases, and it groups belongings by room and category, photographs them, scans barcodes for item details and exports the inventory whenever you want it.

It also ships disaster preparedness and claims guidance, which is a sensible thing for a regulator to put in a consumer app. The limit is the one every single-purpose app has: it is another icon you have to remember exists, and it is built around one phone, so the delivery that arrives on somebody else’s day never reaches it.

Sortly, if you are labelling bins rather than furnishing a house

The free plan is 100 unique items and one user licence, with item photos, in-app barcode and QR scanning and low stock alerts. Paid plans run from Advanced, listed at $24 a month or $288 a year, up through Ultra and Premium, and the small print on that page notes a 50 percent first-year discount with 20 percent at renewal.

One thing Sortly does better than anything else here: if you are cataloguing a workshop, a rental’s stock or a garage full of labelled bins, its QR and barcode work is a different class of tool and we would not pretend otherwise. For a family’s belongings it is a warehouse system priced like one, and 100 items is roughly a kitchen and a living room before it stops. Chirpy keeps the same records with no item cap and no per-seat charge, next to the lease, the renewals and the money they belong beside.

HomeZada, if the house itself is the project

The free Essentials plan includes home inventory, home documents, a contact list and a news feed. Premium is $99 a year or $15.95 a month and adds maintenance, remodel projects, home finances and reports; Deluxe is $189 a year and covers up to three properties.

It is aimed squarely at owners who think of the house as an asset with a maintenance schedule attached. Renters, and anyone who mainly wants to know what is in the spare room, are buying a lot of machinery they will never open, and the free plan that holds the inventory is the plan without the maintenance and the finances that are the point of it.

Itemtopia, if you want QR labels and one paid app to do it

Free to try, with Premium at $7.99 a month or $79.99 a year on its own App Store listing. Premium buys custom categories, unlimited custom fields, inviting people and managing permissions, QR label creation and scanning, activity tracking, and PDF and CSV reports.

The detail worth knowing before you commit: additional user access is sold separately on top, listed at $2.99 for one extra person and rising from there. So a household of four is Premium plus a seat purchase, and the sharing you wanted was the reason you were paying in the first place.

Chirpy, if the inventory is one of thirteen things

The record lives in the Home tool next to the lease, the utilities and the maintenance, and it carries what a claim asks for: the item, the date, what it cost, which room, and the receipt attached. The paperwork itself goes in Vault, which keeps the file in your own Google Drive rather than ours, so the proof is off the premises by default. Buy the thing on the weekly shop and the receipt can become a spend in Money at the same time.

Everybody in the household reads and writes the same record, which is the whole argument of this page. Basic is free for six people with no card; Plus is $7.99 a month or $59 a year, one price for the household rather than a price per head.

The five, side by side, free against free

One more thing about Encircle, which older roundups still recommend as the free option. Its own site now sells to restoration contractors and insurance adjusters, with no consumer home inventory product offered on it. Checked on getencircle.com, 20 September 2026. If a list of yours lives there, export it.

The item cap is the limit you meet in month two

A hundred items sounds generous until you start counting. The kitchen alone is the oven, the hob, the extractor, the dishwasher, the fridge, the microwave, the kettle, the toaster, the coffee machine, the mixer, the pans that cost something, the knives.

That is a dozen before you leave one room. Two bedrooms, a living room, a garage and a shed and you are past a hundred with the loft untouched.

Which produces a specific and annoying failure. You do not hit the cap on day one and abandon the app. You hit it in month two, having done the interesting rooms, and the things left outside the cap are the garage and the loft, where the bikes and the power tools are. The same shape appears when a moving house checklist ends at the van: the part that gets cut is never the part you would have chosen to cut.

The app that wins is the one that is still right in March

Every app in this piece can hold a correct inventory on the day you build it. The question is what it looks like eighteen months later, and the answer depends on one thing: whether adding something takes a decision.

If filing an arrival means finding the right icon, remembering the password and typing four fields, it happens for the first three purchases and then stops. If it happens in the app the household already opens for the rent and the renewals, it keeps happening, because it is not a special occasion.

What a record needs to say per item is a settled question, and a home inventory for insurance goes through the four fields a contents claim asks for and why a walk-round video answers two of them. The short version is that the date and the price are the two that decide the money, and both are known for about a day after the thing arrives.

On the expensive items the same record does a second job, since the purchase date and the receipt are what a repair claim wants. Keep track of warranties and receipts covers the one extra field that turns an inventory line into something that warns you before the cover lapses.

How to test one in a fortnight, without a Sunday

Nobody should evaluate these by cataloguing a house twice. Install one free tier and run five checks in a normal fortnight.

1. Add one thing standing up. Phone in one hand, delivery note in the other. If it takes more than a minute, it will not happen in March.
2. Have the other adult add one without being asked. This is the test most of the category fails, and it fails on the pricing page rather than in the app.
3. Attach a receipt to an item. Not a note saying there is a receipt. The file, on the line.
4. Export it and open the export. If the photos do not come with it, you have a list and not evidence.
5. Count how many items you are allowed. Then count your kitchen. Do this before you build anything.

If step two is the one that breaks, the answer is not a better inventory app. It is the same answer as the rest of the household paperwork, which the monthly household admin checklist works through: one place both of you already open, or two people keeping two half-records.

So which one

• You want a free list and nothing else. The NAIC app. It is free, it is from the regulators, and it exports.
• You are labelling bins in a workshop or a rental. Sortly, and budget for the paid tier.
• You own the house and run it like a project. HomeZada, $99 a year.
• Things arrive when the other adult is in. A household app. Chirpy is free for all six of you, the record is shared by default, and the receipt, the renewal and the rent are already in the same place.

Common questions