If you keep bees and you have decided that a shoebox of damp index cards is no longer a record system, you eventually land on the same short list. HiveTracks is one of the oldest names in beekeeping software, with years of development behind it and a real research pedigree. HiveBook is a newer, free iPhone app built around a narrower idea: your inspection notes should open instantly in the bee yard whether or not you have a bar of signal. Both track hives. They aim at different beekeepers.
This comparison is written by the people who make HiveBook, so read it with that in mind. The goal here is not to convince you that HiveTracks is bad software — it is not, and plenty of beekeepers are happy with it. The goal is to help you figure out which side of the line you are on, because the honest answer is that the decision comes down to three things: how many colonies you run, whether you have connectivity where your hives are, and whether you need other people looking at the same records.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | HiveBook | HiveTracks |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Around $50/year for paid tiers |
| Works Offline | Yes — fully offline, always | Limited — web-based, expects connectivity |
| Account Required | No | Yes |
| Best For | Solo beekeepers and small sideliners, 1–40 hives | Larger operations, clubs, teams, research groups |
| Platform | iPhone and iPad | Web browser, with mobile access |
| Key Features | Inspections, queen tracking, treatments, feeding, harvest logs, apiary grouping | Inspections, apiary mapping, weather integration, reporting, multi-user sharing, regulatory tools |
| Data Privacy | Stays on your device | Stored on company servers |
Pricing
HiveTracks has a free entry tier and paid plans that land in the neighborhood of $50 per year depending on the plan and how many colonies you manage. That is not an outrageous price for software that gets maintained, and anyone who has run a business knows that recurring revenue is what keeps a product alive. If HiveTracks saves you one deadout a year through better mite-treatment timing, it has paid for itself several times over.
HiveBook is free. Not free-trial free, not free-until-you-hit-five-hives free. There is no paid tier, no unlock, no per-colony ceiling. The app is a companion product to a family of record-keeping apps, which is how it stays free without ads chewing through your screen while you are standing over an open hive.
| Cost Over Time | HiveBook | HiveTracks (paid tier) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | About $4.17 |
| 1 year | $0 | About $50 |
| 3 years | $0 | About $150 |
The number that matters is not the annual figure, it is what happens to the records if you stop paying. Subscription software generally moves your account to a read-only or reduced state when the payment lapses. Your ten years of queen genetics and mite counts are still technically yours, but getting them out in a usable form is now a chore you do on someone else's schedule. With a free offline app, there is no lapse condition. The data sits in the app on your phone whether you open it weekly or once next March.
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Features
HiveTracks is the more feature-dense product, and that is a genuine strength rather than a thing to be defensive about. Its apiary mapping is good: you place yards on a map, and the system pulls weather data tied to those coordinates, which is a real advantage when you are reconstructing why one yard superseded in July and another did not. Reporting is more developed than most beekeeping apps bother with, and if you need to hand a summary to a state inspector, a grant program, or a club board, HiveTracks has thought about that workflow. Multi-user access means a mentor, a business partner, or a club officer can see the same colonies you do. The company has also done work on data standards and research collaboration, which matters if you want your records to contribute to something bigger than your own yard.
HiveBook covers the operational core and stops there on purpose. You log inspections with the fields you actually fill in the yard — brood pattern, queen sighting or evidence of one, temperament, stores, space, and free-text notes for the thing you will otherwise forget by the time you get to the truck. You track queens by source, install date, and marking color, so requeening decisions are grounded in when the queen actually started laying rather than a guess. You log varroa treatments with product and date, which is the record that keeps you honest about rotation and resistance. Feeding, harvest weights, and equipment notes each get a place. Hives group into apiaries so a twelve-hive yard reads as a unit.
The clearest way to state the gap: HiveTracks does more, and HiveBook does the part you do fifty times a season with fewer taps. If your bottleneck is that you never write anything down because the app is annoying to open at the hive, more features do not fix that. If your bottleneck is that you need a report for a regulator, fewer features do not fix that either.
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Offline & Privacy
This is the section where the two apps genuinely diverge, and it is not a marketing distinction. Bee yards are frequently in places with bad cell coverage. An orchard on a back road, a field behind a treeline, a mountain outyard — these are exactly the places where a browser-based tool gets slow or stalls entirely. Standing in a veil, gloves on, smoker going, watching a spinner is how inspections stop getting logged. You tell yourself you will enter it tonight, and then you enter three of the eight from memory.
HiveBook is offline-first, not offline-tolerant. Everything lives on the device. There is no sync step to wait on, no cached-mode caveat, no state where the app works differently because you have one bar. Airplane mode changes nothing. The app opens the same in a dead-signal outyard as it does in your kitchen.
The best record system is the one you actually use at the hive, not the one you intend to fill in later. Notes written twenty minutes after you closed the lid are already fiction.
Privacy follows from the same architecture. HiveBook requires no account, no email, no password. Your yard locations, colony counts, treatment history, and harvest volumes never leave your phone. For hobbyists that is mostly a matter of preference. For anyone selling honey commercially, running pollination contracts, or keeping bees on land they would rather not have mapped in a third-party database, it is a real consideration. Yard coordinates and production numbers are competitive information in some regions.
To be fair to HiveTracks: cloud storage buys you things offline storage cannot. If your phone goes in the pond, cloud records are still there. Multiple people can read the same data. You can log in from a laptop. Those are legitimate benefits, and they are the reason cloud beekeeping software exists. With HiveBook, your backup strategy is your device backup strategy, and you should have one either way.
The same offline-first thinking runs through the other apps in this family, because the problem is not unique to bees. Barnsbook handles livestock and barn records for people working cattle in a corral where nobody has ever had reliable service, and CropsBook does planting, spraying, and harvest logs for market gardeners and row-crop growers standing at the far end of a field. Beekeepers who also run a few head or a market garden tend to want the same behavior across all of it: open the app, write the record, done, no signal required.
Who Should Use HiveTracks
Pick HiveTracks if any of these describe you:
- You run a team. More than one person inspecting the same colonies, or an operation where a manager needs visibility into what crews recorded. Shared cloud access is the whole point, and no offline single-device app replaces it.
- You need real reports. Grant reporting, regulatory submissions, club or association records, or anything you have to export and hand to a third party in a defensible format.
- You work across devices. If you do serious planning on a laptop in winter and want the same data there, a web platform is simply the right tool.
- You want mapping and weather tied together. Multiple scattered outyards where correlating conditions to colony performance is part of how you make decisions.
- You are not on iPhone. HiveBook is iOS. If you carry an Android phone, this comparison ends here and HiveTracks is your answer.
- Your yards have signal. If your bees are in the backyard on solid wifi, the offline advantage is theoretical and you should weigh features instead.
Fifty dollars a year against the value of a properly documented operation is not a hard call at commercial scale. Nobody running two hundred colonies should choose software based on saving four dollars a month.
Who Should Use HiveBook
Pick HiveBook if this sounds more like your season:
- You are the whole operation. One to forty hives, one person, nobody else needs to see the records. Multi-user features are overhead you pay for and never use.
- Your yards have no service. If you have ever given up on an app mid-inspection because it would not load, offline-first is not a feature, it is the requirement.
- You are in year one or two. New beekeepers should not be evaluating subscriptions before their first winter. Establish the habit of writing things down, then decide if you have outgrown a free tool.
- You want fewer taps at the hive. A simpler app gets opened. A thorough app that takes ninety seconds to load and navigate gets skipped on hive seven of nine.
- You would rather not have an account. No signup, no password reset in April, no email, no yard coordinates on someone's server.
- You want a $0 line item. Sideliners selling honey at a farmers market are counting margins closely. Free software is margin.
The realistic outcome for most hobby and small sideline beekeepers is that HiveBook covers everything they were going to use anyway. The advanced tooling in a larger platform tends to go untouched at ten colonies — not because it is bad, but because those problems have not shown up yet.
The Bottom Line
HiveTracks is a capable, established platform, and it earns its price for operations that need shared access, formal reporting, and cross-device work. If you manage a team, report to anyone, or run bees as a business at scale, the subscription is defensible and this comparison should not talk you out of it.
For everyone else — and that is most beekeepers — HiveBook does the job for free, without an account, and without depending on a signal you probably do not have where your hives are. The records that matter most are the ones you write with your gloves still on: brood pattern, queen status, mite count, what you fed and when. If a free offline app captures those reliably and a paid cloud platform captures them plus a dozen things you will never open, the free one is the better fit until your operation genuinely outgrows it.
Trying it costs nothing and risks nothing. Install HiveBook, log your next inspection in both tools if you are currently paying for one, and see which one you actually reach for while a colony is open in front of you. That comparison is worth more than any article.
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