If you keep bees and you've spent any time looking for a way to stop losing your inspection notes to rain-soaked notebooks, you've probably run into both of these names. HiveTracks has been around a long time and has a real reputation in the beekeeping world. HiveBook is newer, free, and built around a different assumption — that the moment you actually need your records is the moment you're standing in a yard with no signal, a smoker in one hand, and a frame in the other. This comparison is written by the HiveBook team, so read it with that in mind. We've tried to be straight about where HiveTracks genuinely does things we don't.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | HiveBook | HiveTracks |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $50/year |
| Works Offline | Yes — fully, all features | Limited — web-based, needs connection |
| Account Required | No | Yes |
| Best For | Solo beekeepers, sideliners, small honey businesses | Clubs, associations, multi-user operations, data-sharing projects |
| Platform | iOS (iPhone and iPad) | Web browser, plus mobile apps |
| Key Features | Inspections, queen tracking, treatments, harvest logs, hive history, feeding records | Inspections, apiary mapping, weather integration, multi-user roles, reporting, community data |
| Data Privacy | Stored on your device only | Stored on company servers |
Pricing
HiveTracks runs about $50 a year for its paid tier. That's not outrageous for software you use through a whole season, and it pays for hosting, sync, ongoing development, and support. Any tool that stores your data on servers has real recurring costs, and a subscription is an honest way to cover them. If you're running enough colonies that the software saves you a single lost queen or one missed mite treatment, it has already paid for itself.
HiveBook is free. Not free-trial free, not free-with-a-paywall-at-hive-number-four. There's no subscription tier, no unlock, no ads. That's possible because your data never touches our servers — it lives on your phone, so we're not paying to store or sync it. Different architecture, different cost structure.
Here's what that looks like over time for a single beekeeper:
| Time Period | HiveBook | HiveTracks |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly (equivalent) | $0 | ~$4.17 |
| 1 Year | $0 | $50 |
| 3 Years | $0 | $150 |
| 10 Years | $0 | $500 |
A hundred and fifty dollars over three years is roughly a nuc, or a season's worth of mite treatments, or a decent extractor fund contribution. For a hobbyist with four hives, that math matters. For a commercial operation with staff who need shared access, $50/year is noise and the shared access is worth far more than the fee. Be honest with yourself about which of those you are.
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Features
Where HiveTracks is genuinely strong. It's a mature platform with years of refinement behind it. Its apiary mapping is good — you can place yards geographically and see your operation laid out, which matters when you're managing sites across a county. Weather integration pulls conditions against your inspection dates automatically, which is legitimately useful for understanding why a nectar flow stalled or why a colony went defensive on a particular day. Multi-user roles let a club, a mentorship program, or a two-person operation share records with different permission levels. Its reporting is more elaborate than ours, and it has participated in aggregate data efforts that feed into broader colony-health research — a real contribution to the beekeeping community that a purely local app can't make.
If any of that describes your needs, HiveTracks is likely the better fit and you should stop reading comparison articles and go sign up.
Where HiveBook is strong. We optimized for the thing that happens 40 times a season: you open a hive, you look, you need to write down what you saw, and you need it recorded in under thirty seconds with gloves on. HiveBook does inspections, brood pattern notes, queen status and requeening history, mite counts and treatment logs with dates, feeding records, harvest yields per hive, and running per-colony history you can scroll back through. Tap a hive, see everything that's ever happened to it in one timeline.
The interface is deliberately plain. No dashboard you have to configure, no onboarding wizard, no setting up an "organization" before you can log your first inspection. Open app, add hive, done. Several beekeepers have told us they moved off web platforms not because those platforms were bad but because the interface had accumulated more than they needed and every inspection turned into navigation work.
HiveBook is iOS-only. That's a real limitation, and if you're on Android, HiveTracks wins by default. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.
We built HiveBook as part of a small family of tools for people running things that live and grow. Barnsbook covers livestock and barn management for people with cattle, goats, or sheep alongside their bees — common enough on diversified small farms. CropsBook handles vegetable and market-crop planning, which pairs naturally with beekeeping if you're selling honey at the same farmers market where you sell produce. Same design philosophy across all three: offline-first, no accounts, records you own.
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Offline & Privacy
This is the sharpest difference between the two, and it's not a marketing angle — it's an architectural one.
HiveTracks is a web-based platform. That design gives you sync across devices, access from a desktop, and shared records for teams. The tradeoff is that it depends on a connection. Beekeepers keep bees where forage is, and forage is often where cell coverage isn't — back pastures, orchards, ridge tops, county land at the end of a gravel road. When you're out of signal, a connected platform degrades. You end up logging on paper and transcribing later, which is exactly the workflow the software was supposed to replace.
HiveBook has no network dependency because it has no network. Every feature works in airplane mode in a hollow with zero bars, identically to how it works on your couch. There is no "offline mode" with a reduced feature set, because there is no online mode to fall back from.
The privacy consequence follows from the same design. Your yard locations, colony counts, treatment records, and honey yields stay on your device. We don't have a copy. We can't sell it, lose it in a breach, hand it to anyone, or change our minds about it in a future terms-of-service update. For some beekeepers this is abstract. For others it isn't — hive locations are theft-sensitive, and production numbers are competitive information if you sell wholesale.
The flip side, and you should weigh this seriously: local-only data means if you lose your phone with no backup, your records are gone. HiveBook data is included in iPhone/iCloud device backups, and you can export your records, but the responsibility sits with you rather than with a company running redundant servers. Cloud platforms genuinely win on disaster recovery.
Who Should Use HiveTracks
Pick HiveTracks if you fit any of these:
- You need multiple people in the same records. A partner, an employee, a mentee, a club secretary. Local-only storage simply can't do shared access, and this is the clearest case where paying is the right answer.
- You're on Android or work primarily from a desktop. HiveBook isn't available to you.
- You manage many yards across a wide geography and want mapping plus automatic weather correlation tied to each visit.
- You want cloud backup handled for you and don't want to think about device loss.
- You value contributing to aggregate colony-health research through a platform that participates in those efforts.
- You need detailed exportable reporting for grants, certifications, or an operation large enough that record depth matters to an auditor.
Who Should Use HiveBook
Pick HiveBook if you fit these:
- You're a solo beekeeper. One to fifty hives, one person doing the inspections. No sharing needed, so you're paying for infrastructure you don't use.
- Your bee yards have poor or no signal. This is the single strongest reason to choose an offline app, and it describes a lot of yards.
- You want to log fast and get back to work. Minimal taps, no navigation overhead mid-inspection.
- You don't want another subscription. Beekeeping already has recurring costs. Software doesn't have to be one of them.
- You'd rather your operational data stay on your device. No account, no server-side copy.
- You're trying record-keeping for the first time and don't want to commit money before you know whether the habit sticks.
The typical HiveBook user runs somewhere between three and thirty colonies, sells honey locally or at a market, and needs to remember which hive got treated when and which queen came from which split. That's the sweet spot.
The Bottom Line
HiveTracks is good software that costs $50/year and earns it if you need what the cloud provides: shared access, cross-device sync, mapping across many sites, managed backup, deeper reporting. Nobody should feel bad about paying for that. It's a fair price for a real product with a real history in this industry.
HiveBook wins on a narrower but very common set of needs: you're one person, your yards have no signal, you want inspection logging that takes seconds, you'd rather not add a subscription, and you want your data on your own device. For that beekeeper, HiveBook does the job at zero cost with zero setup.
The good news is the decision is cheap to test. HiveBook is free and requires no account, so you can install it before your next inspection and log a few hives with no commitment and nothing to cancel. If you find you're missing mapping or you need your partner in the records too, HiveTracks is right there and you'll know exactly why you're paying for it. Trying the free option first costs you nothing but the download.
Ready to switch? Download HiveBook Free — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.