Best Home Inventory Apps 2026: 6 Ranked, Free and Paid

Short answer: for most people the answer is Sortly on its free tier (100 items) or HomeZada Essentials if you want a home-specific structure at no cost. Your own insurer’s app is worth checking first, because it is free and its format is the one your adjuster expects. Rankings below are ordered by what you get without paying.

A home inventory is the list of everything you own, with photos, purchase dates, and values, kept somewhere you can actually retrieve it after a fire, flood, or break-in. Almost nobody has one. The people who do overwhelmingly built it with an app, because photographing 400 possessions into a spreadsheet is a project most people abandon in the kitchen.

The problem with most "best home inventory app" roundups is that they rank apps by feature count without mentioning the thing that actually decides it for a homeowner: the free tier limit. Almost no homeowner is going to pay a monthly subscription to list their furniture. So the practical question isn't "which app has the best features," it's "which free tier holds my whole house, and what happens when I hit the cap."

This page compares six options on exactly that. Pricing verified September 2026. Mendlog is included, but honestly scoped: it is a maintenance log, not an inventory app, and for pure contents documentation you want one of the others.

How many items does a typical home actually have?

This is the number that determines which free tier works for you, and it's the number nobody publishes. Rough guidance from how people actually build these:

• Itemized to the individual object (every book, every shirt): thousands. Nobody finishes this. Don't try.
• Itemized to the meaningful object (each appliance, each piece of furniture, each electronic device, jewelry individually, clothing grouped by category): roughly 150 to 400 items for a typical 3-bedroom home.
• Itemized to the high-value object only (anything over $200, plus grouped categories for everything below): roughly 60 to 150 items.

The third approach is what insurance adjusters actually work with, and it's the one that gets finished. Most claims use category-level valuation below a couple hundred dollars per item ("kitchen small appliances, $600 total") and item-level detail above it. That means a 100-item free tier is genuinely workable, and a 500-item tier is more than most people will ever use.

1. Sortly (free tier: 100 items)

Sortly is a general-purpose inventory app that a lot of homeowners use for contents documentation. It has the cleanest mobile capture flow in the category: photo, name, category, custom fields, done. Barcode scanning for anything with a UPC. Exports to CSV and PDF.

Pricing: Free tier covers 100 unique items, 1 user, and 1 custom field. Advanced is $24/month billed annually or $49/month billed monthly for 500 items and 2 users. Higher tiers run to $149/month.

The thing nobody tells you: Sortly's paid tiers are priced for small businesses tracking equipment and job sites, not for homeowners. $24/month is $288/year to catalog your own furniture, which no homeowner should pay. Treat Sortly's free 100-item tier as the actual homeowner product, and if you outgrow it, move to a different tool rather than upgrading.

Best for: homeowners who want the best capture experience and can work within 100 meaningful items. Use the high-value-only approach described above and 100 is plenty.

2. HomeZada Essentials (free tier: home inventory included)

HomeZada's free Essentials tier includes Home Inventory and Home Documents. This is genuinely the best-fit free option for people who want a home-specific tool rather than a general inventory app, because the categories and structure are built around a house rather than a warehouse.

Pricing: Essentials is free and includes Home Inventory, Home Documents, a contact list, and limited AI features. Premium is $99/year and adds maintenance tracking, remodel projects, and finances. Deluxe is $189/year for up to 3 properties.

The catch: everything except inventory and document storage is paywalled. If you're looking at HomeZada for maintenance tracking, that's Premium at $99/year. But if inventory is genuinely all you want, the free tier does that job and doesn't push you toward a cap.

Best for: homeowners who want home-specific inventory categories and don't need maintenance features. For the full breakdown of what the free tier does and doesn't include, see Free Alternatives to HomeZada.

3. Itemtopia (freemium)

Itemtopia positions explicitly around home inventory for homeowners, renters, families, and collectors. It covers rooms, belongings, valuables, receipts, warranties, photos, serial numbers, and service records. It runs on iOS, Android, Mac with Apple silicon, and web, and operates in over 100 countries with 11 languages.

Pricing: freemium. Paid subscriptions are handled through the Apple App Store and Google Play, so the price varies by country and region. There is a separate Business Pro tier for teams and commercial asset tracking. Check the current price in your own app store, since regional pricing means any figure published elsewhere may not match what you see.

Strengths: consumer-first positioning (not a business tool repurposed for homes), broad platform support including web, and it explicitly covers estate planning and collections use cases alongside insurance.

Best for: homeowners who want a purpose-built consumer inventory app and are willing to evaluate the paid tier price in their own region.

4. Your insurance carrier's own app (free for policyholders)

Several major carriers offer home inventory tools to policyholders, either as a standalone app or a feature inside their main app. The appeal is obvious: the data lives with the company that will process your claim.

Pricing: free for policyholders.

Strengths: zero friction at claim time, because your adjuster is already looking at the system your inventory lives in. No export step, no format mismatch.

Weaknesses: your inventory is tied to that carrier. If you switch insurers (and most people do, repeatedly), you may lose it or face a manual migration. Feature sets are also typically thinner than dedicated apps, and several carriers have quietly discontinued their inventory features in recent years.

Best for: policyholders who expect to stay with their current carrier long-term. Check whether yours still offers this, because availability has been shrinking. Whatever you build here, export a PDF copy annually so you own a version independent of the carrier.

5. A spreadsheet plus cloud photo storage (free)

Google Sheets or Excel with columns for room, item, brand, model, serial, purchase date, price, current value, and a photo link. Photos live in Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud.

Pricing: free, assuming you already use one of those storage services.

Strengths: no item cap, no subscription, no app that can shut down or change its free tier. Trivially exportable to PDF for an adjuster. Survives you switching phones, insurers, or anything else. This is the only option on the list with no platform risk at all.

Weaknesses: mobile capture is slow, which is the entire reason inventory projects get abandoned. No prompts to add new purchases. Photo linking is manual. Realistically, most people who choose this option complete the kitchen and living room and then stop.

Best for: spreadsheet-comfortable people who will actually maintain it, and anyone who wants zero dependency on a vendor staying in business.

6. Encircle (verify current consumer availability)

Encircle was built for insurance adjusters and restoration contractors and historically offered a consumer tier for home inventory documentation. Its adjuster-native export format was its main advantage: the output was already in the shape a claims professional expects.

Status note: as of September 2026, the original consumer-facing domain redirects to a different domain, and the current site does not respond to automated checks, which is consistent with a repositioning toward the professional restoration and insurance market. We were not able to verify whether a free consumer tier still exists.

Best for: check directly before investing time in it. If a consumer tier still exists, the claims-native format is a genuine advantage. If it has gone fully B2B, use Sortly or Itemtopia instead. This is a good reminder to pick tools with export you control, since consumer tiers of B2B products are the first thing to get cut.

Where Mendlog fits (and where it doesn't)

Mendlog is a home maintenance log, not a home inventory app, and the distinction matters for this decision.

• Home inventory answers "what do I own, what's it worth, and can I prove it existed." Room-by-room contents, photos, values. For insurance claims after a loss.
• Maintenance log answers "what has been done to this house, when, by whom, and what's still under warranty." Repairs, contractors, service dates, warranties. For selling the house and for not forgetting when the water heater was installed.

They overlap on major appliances and systems, where both want the make, model, serial, and install date. They diverge everywhere else. If you want contents documentation for insurance, pick one of the five above. If you want a repair and warranty history that turns into a documented maintenance record when you sell, that's what Mendlog does.

Plenty of homeowners run both, and the overlap is small enough that it isn't much duplicate effort.

The decision, in one paragraph each

• Want the best capture experience and can live within 100 items: Sortly free. Use the high-value-only approach and you won't hit the cap.
• Want home-specific structure without a cap: HomeZada Essentials free.
• Want a purpose-built consumer app across phone, Mac, and web: Itemtopia, after checking the paid price in your region.
• Staying with your insurer long-term: their app, with an annual PDF export so you own a copy.
• Want zero vendor dependency: spreadsheet plus cloud photos, if you'll genuinely maintain it.
• Want maintenance and warranty history instead: that's a different tool. See Best Home Maintenance Apps 2026.

Three rules that matter more than which app you pick

1. Cloud storage is not optional

An inventory stored only on your phone is useless in exactly the scenario it exists for. If the house burns down with your phone in it, you need the data somewhere else. Verify your chosen app syncs to the cloud, and if you're using a spreadsheet, confirm the photos are in cloud storage and not just your camera roll.

2. Export a PDF annually regardless of the tool

Apps shut down. Free tiers get cut. Companies pivot to B2B. Centriq shut down its consumer app in 2025 and left users scrambling, and Encircle appears to have repositioned since. An annual PDF export saved to your own storage means the tool going away is an inconvenience rather than a loss. This applies to every option on this list including the free ones.

3. Finish one room at a time

The reason most inventories don't exist isn't tool choice, it's scope. Do the kitchen this Saturday. Living room next weekend. Master bedroom after that. Photograph the wide shot of each wall and open cabinet first so you have visual evidence even if you never itemize that room. Trying to do the whole house in one afternoon is why the majority of these projects die.

What to document per item

For anything over roughly $200, adjusters want:

• Specific description (brand and model, not "TV")
• Serial number for anything that has one
• Purchase date and original price, approximate is fine
• At least one photo, several for high-value items
• Receipt photo if you have it

Below $200, group by category with a total. For jewelry, art, firearms, and collectibles, check your policy's per-item scheduled coverage threshold (commonly $1,000 to $2,500) because anything above it needs its own appraisal to be fully covered.

For the full adjuster-perspective breakdown of what survives scrutiny at claim time, see Home Inventory App for Insurance Claims: 5 Best Options.

The bottom line

Pick based on the free tier, because you're probably never going to pay for inventory software and that's a reasonable decision. Sortly free is the best capture experience at 100 items. HomeZada Essentials free is the best home-specific structure with no cap. A spreadsheet is the only option with zero platform risk. Your insurer's app is the smoothest at claim time if you stay with them.

Whichever you pick, the app matters far less than finishing the kitchen this weekend and exporting a PDF once a year. An imperfect inventory that exists beats the perfect one you were going to build eventually.