Best Beekeeping Software: Apiary Record Apps Compared

Reviewed by Thomas B. · Last Updated September 22, 2026 · How we review

The best beekeeping software is the one that still holds your records in five years, works with no cell signal in the yard, and lets you export everything as a file you own. On current vendor pricing, ApiManager gives the most generous free tier at 20 hives, APiLOG is the strongest choice if you ever need to document losses for a federal claim, HiveTracks suits operations that need several people logging into the same apiary, and BeeKeepPal is the simplest paid step up from a notebook. Feature lists matter far less than data portability, because beekeeping apps do shut down.

Key Takeaways

• Free tiers differ enormously: ApiManager covers 20 hives free, while BeeKeepPal and APiLOG cap their free plans at two hives.
• Offline capture is the single most important feature for most US beekeepers, because outyards rarely have usable signal.
• Export to CSV or Excel is not a nice extra. Beetight closed in February 2025 and deleted user data, which is what happens to records you cannot get out.
• USDA’s ELAP honeybee program asks for proof of colony inventory before and after a loss event, so dated records have a direct financial value.
• Paid plans in this category run roughly $29 to $70 a year, so price is rarely the deciding factor. Workflow and export are.
• Record-keeping software and hive sensor hardware solve different problems and are not substitutes for each other.

What Counts as Beekeeping Software

Search for “beekeeping software” and you get three different product categories mixed together, which is the main reason roundup articles in this space read as though nobody tested anything. Separating them first saves a lot of wasted trial signups.

The first category is the record-keeping app: a structured logbook for inspections, treatments, feedings, queens and harvests, entered by you, on your phone, standing at the hive. Every tool compared on this page belongs here. The second is sensor hardware with a companion dashboard, such as hive scales and in-hive temperature probes, which records things automatically but knows nothing about what you saw when you opened the box. The third is general farm-management or inventory software that happens to list bees as a livestock type, usually with no varroa fields and no frame-by-frame inspection structure.

These are not competitors. A weight curve tells you a flow started; it cannot tell you the queen was superseded three weeks earlier. If you want the hardware side of the question, our guide to what hive sensors actually tell you covers what the data genuinely supports, and reading a hive weight curve goes deeper on scale data specifically. The rest of this article is about the logbook.

Within the logbook category, the features that vendors advertise are almost identical: inspection forms, treatment logs, photo attachment, multi-apiary grouping, reminders and reports. Assume all of that is present everywhere. The things that actually differ, and that you will feel every week, are the free-tier ceiling, whether the app captures data with no signal, whether multiple people can work in the same account, and whether you can get your history out as a file. That is what the comparison below is built around.

Tool-by-Tool Comparison

Every figure in this table was read off the vendor’s own current page while writing this article, not copied from another roundup. Prices in this category change without announcement, and several widely shared comparison posts still quote tiers that no longer exist. Check the vendor page before you subscribe, and treat any article that does not link to one with suspicion.

Two patterns fall out of that table immediately. First, the spread in free-tier generosity is enormous for products that are otherwise similar: 20 hives versus two is not a rounding difference, it is the difference between a free tool and a trial. Second, nobody in this category is expensive. The gap between the cheapest and dearest paid plan here is about forty dollars a year, which is less than one replacement queen. Choosing on price is close to meaningless; choosing on whether the app works when you are standing in a field with one bar is not.

ApiManager: The Most Generous Free Tier

ApiManager is the outlier on price because its free plan covers up to 20 hives with all features included, which is more colonies than most sideline beekeepers will ever run. Its own site describes the offline mode as something that “activates automatically on mobile devices when there is no internet connection,” and it exports apiaries, hives, inspections, feedings, harvests, treatments and finances to Excel or CSV.

The finance tracking is unusual in this category. Most logbooks stop at biology; ApiManager will also hold purchases, sales and product stock, which matters if your honey sales have grown past the farmers’ market table and you would rather not keep a separate spreadsheet. Reports and charts are generated from the same data.

One practical catch worth knowing before you plan around it: the vendor states that subscriptions can only be bought through the mobile apps as in-app purchases on Google Play or the App Store. If you intend to work mainly on a laptop, you still need a phone in the loop to pay. The paid tiers are priced annually rather than monthly, which is why they look so cheap next to the others: $14.99 a year to lift the cap to 50 hives is genuinely low.

Who it suits: hobbyists and sideliners under 20 colonies who want a real database rather than a trial, and anyone who wants their honey-sale bookkeeping in the same place as their inspection notes.

HiveTracks: Built for Shared Apiaries

HiveTracks is the name most often cited in US beekeeping circles, and it is the one tool here with a long institutional track record. The mobile app is free and includes inspection logging and hive history. The paid tier, HiveTracks Pro, is listed at $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year and adds deeper performance tracking and seasonal trends, cross-apiary comparisons with yield reporting, multi-user access and exportable reports.

Multi-user access is the feature that decides it. If you have a partner, an employee or a club member who also opens your hives, an app where two people can log into the same apiary and see each other’s notes removes an entire class of problem: the inspection that happened but nobody wrote down. None of the cheaper options here handle shared teams as cleanly, with the partial exception of BeeKeepPal’s Team tier.

Because HiveTracks has its own depth, we treat it separately: our complete guide to HiveTracks for digital apiary record keeping walks through setting up an apiary, logging mite counts, tracking queen lineage and exporting data, and is the right place to go if this is the tool you have already chosen. This page deliberately does not re-review it in that depth.

One honest gap: the HiveTracks page does not state hive limits for either tier, nor does it commit to offline behaviour in writing. That is not a criticism of the product, it is a caution about planning around an unstated capability. If offline capture is a hard requirement for your yards, ask support before you subscribe rather than trusting a third-party blog that asserts it.

Who it suits: operations of roughly 20 colonies and up, anyone sharing an apiary with other people, and beekeepers who want yield comparison across sites rather than per-hive notes alone.

APiLOG: Offline-First With Compliance Reports

APiLOG runs in the browser on mobile, tablet and desktop with no app download, and its site states it “works fully offline so you never miss a detail in remote apiaries,” syncing the moment you reconnect. Its free Bee-ginner plan covers two hives and one apiary. Hobby is $2.46 a month or $29.50 a year for up to 10 hives, and Professional is $4.96 a month or $59.50 a year for unlimited hives and apiaries.

Two things make it distinctive. The first is capture speed: voice recording during inspections with automatic extraction of stores and brood pattern, plus QR or NFC tags on hive bodies so you scan rather than scroll to find the right colony. Anyone who has tried to type on a phone in a veil with sticky gloves will understand why that is not a gimmick. The second is that APiLOG explicitly advertises generating ELAP-compliant reports and printouts for regulatory purposes, which is the only time any vendor in this comparison names a specific US federal program. Whether the output satisfies your FSA county office is between you and that office, but it is the only tool here that has even tried.

The downside is the free tier. Two hives is a demonstration, not a plan. If you run three colonies you are a paying customer from the first season, which is fine at under thirty dollars a year but should be priced in honestly.

Who it suits: beekeepers with genuinely remote outyards, anyone who wants to dictate rather than type, and commercial operators who may file loss claims.

BeeKeepPal: The Simplest Step Up From Paper

BeeKeepPal covers web, iOS and Android. The Hobbyist plan is free and allows one apiary, two beehives and 20 inspections. Pro is $5.99 a month or $58 a year for unlimited apiaries, hives and inspections; Pro Team is $9.99 a month or $96 a year and supports three additional users. The site notes you can record inspections in the field with “No data necessary,” and inspection records can be exported at any time, with import available on the Pro tiers.

The import function deserves more attention than it gets. Most people arriving at a beekeeping app already have two or three seasons of history in a notebook or a spreadsheet, and most apps make you either retype it or abandon it. Being able to bring a spreadsheet in is the difference between starting your history today and starting it three years ago.

The 20-inspection cap on the free plan is a real constraint rather than a theoretical one. Twenty inspections is roughly one hive checked fortnightly for a single season, so the free tier is best understood as a full-season trial for one colony.

Who it suits: beekeepers moving off paper for the first time who want a short learning curve, and small partnerships of two or three people who need shared access without a commercial price.

What Happened to Beetight, and Why It Matters

For about fifteen years, Beetight was one of the most widely recommended free beekeeping record systems in the English-speaking world. It appeared in dozens of “best beekeeping app” lists. It is gone, and most of those lists still have not noticed.

After 15 years, thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of hives and billions of bees, Beetight has closed.

— Beetight, Beetight

The shutdown ran in stages: closed to new signups on 20 June 2024, switched to read-only on 1 October 2024 so existing installs could no longer add inspections, and closed completely on 2 February 2025, when user data was deleted. The reasons given were mundane and entirely typical of small software: ageing mobile APIs, underlying code that had become hard to update, and platform policy changes that demanded work the developer could not do.

The lesson is not that beekeeping apps are untrustworthy. It is that a small app is one person’s spare time, and that a decade of inspection history living only inside somebody else’s database is history you do not actually own. This is why the export column in the table above is not a checkbox to skim past. Practical habit: export a CSV at the end of every season and keep it with your other farm records. It takes two minutes, it survives any vendor decision, and it means the 2023 mite counts you want to compare against are still readable in 2033.

It is also a reasonable test of any article recommending software to you. If a comparison published this year still lists a tool that shut down more than a year ago, nobody opened the site. Our own guide to keeping beekeeping records treats the paper fallback seriously for exactly this reason.

The Records Regulators Actually Ask For

Most articles justify record keeping with self-improvement: spot trends, make better decisions, learn from your mistakes. All true, and all easy to postpone on a hot day with nine more hives to open. There is a harder reason, and it has a dollar figure attached.

The USDA Farm Service Agency runs the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program, known as ELAP, which pays eligible producers for colony, hive and feed losses caused by qualifying adverse weather and loss conditions, including colony collapse disorder. The 2024 program year established an average fair market value of $129 per colony and $230 per hive, with a normal mortality rate of 24.2 percent above which colony losses become claimable. Those payments depend on documentation you either have or do not have when the storm hits.

For honeybee colony and hive losses, the participant must include proof of inventory at the beginning of the program year and inventory immediately before and after the eligible adverse weather event or loss condition.

— USDA Farm Service Agency, ELAP – Honeybee Assistance fact sheet

Read that carefully, because it is a record-keeping specification in disguise. You need a dated colony count at the start of the year, and a dated colony count immediately before the event. Nobody counts hives the day before a flood on purpose; you have that number only if you were logging routinely. The fact sheet also notes that if you were paid for a honeybee colony or hive loss in either of the previous two years, you must provide documentation substantiating your beginning inventory for the current year, and that claims based on colony collapse disorder require proof that best management practices were followed, including preventative varroa treatment.

That is the clearest answer to “why bother.” A treatment log is not a diary entry, it is evidence that you managed mites. An apiary inventory dated in March is not trivia, it is the baseline of a claim. Any of the apps above will produce both, provided you actually enter the data, and the notice-of-loss deadlines are short, so reconstructing from memory afterwards is not an option.

State programs add their own layers. Requirements vary widely between states, from hive registration to movement permits to inspection records, so check your own state department of agriculture rather than assuming a rule you read about elsewhere applies to you. The federal ELAP documentation requirement, though, applies everywhere in the US.

Offline Use Is the Real Decider

If you only test one thing during a free trial, test the app with airplane mode on. Put the phone in airplane mode, walk through a full inspection entry including a photo, close the app, reopen it, and see whether the record is still there. Then turn the radio back on and confirm it syncs rather than duplicating.

This matters more in US beekeeping than the vendor marketing suggests, because the good forage is usually where the towers are not. ApiManager, APiLOG and BeeKeepPal all state offline capture explicitly. HiveTracks does not state it on its beekeepers page, which means you should verify it rather than assume it.

There is a second, subtler failure mode. Some apps capture offline but lose photos, or queue a record and then silently drop it when the session expires. The airplane-mode test above catches both. Do it before you have a season of data invested, not after.

The related habit is deciding what you will actually record at the hive versus afterwards. Trying to type an essay per colony guarantees you stop by July. Our piece on field note strategies for serious beekeepers covers the short-code approach, and creating digital field logs deals with structuring entries so they are still useful a year later. If you run enough colonies that inspection time itself is the constraint, time management for multi-hive apiaries is the relevant piece.

Choosing by Operation Size

Scale changes the answer more than any other variable, because record keeping stops being optional somewhere between ten and twenty colonies. Below that you can hold the yard in your head. Above it you cannot, and the day you realise this is usually the day you cannot remember which hive you requeened.

One to five colonies. ApiManager’s free tier is the obvious pick because it does not expire or throttle you at 20 hives, and you can export whenever you like. If you prefer dictating to typing, APiLOG’s free plan covers two hives, which is enough to judge whether voice capture suits you.

Six to twenty colonies. Still ApiManager free, or a paid plan if you want the specific workflow. This is the band where habit matters more than software: any tool works, no tool works if you do not open it.

Twenty to a hundred colonies across several yards. Now multi-yard grouping, cross-apiary yield comparison and reliable offline capture all earn their keep. HiveTracks Pro or APiLOG Professional are the realistic candidates, and if anyone else touches your hives, multi-user access moves from nice to necessary.

Commercial and migratory. Export and reporting dominate. You will need documentation for loss claims, pollination contracts and possibly state movement requirements, so choose on the quality of the report output, not on inspection-screen design. Add hardware only where a weight curve or a sensor answers a question your logbook cannot, which our overview of hive monitoring technology and the piece on wireless hive scales for nectar flow tracking both address.

What None of Them Do Well

An honest comparison should say where the whole category falls short, and there are three gaps every tool here shares.

The first is that none of them will make you a better beekeeper by themselves. The value is entirely in the entering, and entering is a habit that competes with daylight. Every one of these apps has thousands of accounts with four inspections in them from an enthusiastic April.

The second is interoperability. There is no shared export format for apiary records. A CSV out of one tool does not import cleanly into another, so switching is manual work, and the field names differ enough that a migration is a retyping job with extra steps. This is why the Beetight closure hurt: even users who exported ended up with a file nothing else could read natively.

The third is that the AI features now appearing across the category are new and unproven. Voice transcription is genuinely useful and verifiable on the spot. An AI advisor telling you what your colony needs is a different claim, and none of these vendors publishes accuracy data. Use the transcription; treat the advice as you would advice from a stranger at a club meeting.

None of that argues for going back to paper. It argues for choosing on the boring criteria, exporting every season, and judging the app on whether it is still open on your phone in August.

Related guides: Bee ID Apps Compared: Seek vs. iNaturalist vs. BeeMachine

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free beekeeping app?

ApiManager has the most generous free tier we verified: up to 20 hives with all features included, on web, iOS and Android, with automatic offline mode and export to Excel or CSV. Other free tiers in this category cap at one or two hives, which makes them trials rather than usable free plans.

Is beekeeping software worth paying for?

Paid plans here run roughly $29 to $70 a year, less than the cost of one replacement queen. At that price the question is not cost but whether you will use it. Pay when you need multi-user access, unlimited hives, or report output for loss claims and contracts.

Do beekeeping apps work without cell service?

ApiManager, APiLOG and BeeKeepPal all state that they capture records offline and sync when a connection returns. HiveTracks does not state offline behaviour on its beekeepers page. Always test with airplane mode during a trial, including a photo, before you commit a season of data.

What happened to Beetight?

Beetight closed after about 15 years. It stopped new signups on 20 June 2024, became read-only on 1 October 2024, and closed on 2 February 2025 with user data deleted. Many current roundup articles still list it, which is a useful test of whether the writer checked anything.

Am I legally required to keep beekeeping records in the US?

There is no single federal logbook mandate, but records have direct legal and financial weight. USDA’s ELAP honeybee program requires proof of colony inventory at the start of the year and immediately before and after a loss event. State requirements for registration, movement and inspections vary, so check your state department of agriculture.

Can I move my records from one beekeeping app to another?

Partly. Most tools export to CSV or Excel, but there is no shared format, so importing into a different app usually means reformatting columns by hand. BeeKeepPal offers import on its Pro tiers. Export every season regardless, so your history survives any vendor’s decision.

Is a hive scale a replacement for a record-keeping app?

No. Sensors record weight, temperature and humidity continuously but know nothing about brood pattern, queen status, mite counts or treatments. They answer different questions. Most beekeepers who use both enter inspection notes in an app and use sensor data to decide when an inspection is worth making.

How many colonies before an app is worth it?

Around ten to fifteen is where memory stops being reliable, especially across several yards or once queens are being replaced at different times. Below that an app still helps with year-over-year comparison; above it, unrecorded inspections start costing real colonies.