Drinqly vs Untappd: Which Drink App Fits You?
Two check-in apps, two different jobs. One is the best in the world at beer. The other is built for everything in the glass.
Untappd is the best app in the world for beer, huge database, badges, and a massive community. Drinqly takes the same check-in-and-remember loop and applies it to every drink: cocktails, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and mocktails, in one journal, with a full sober mode. Drink mostly beer? Untappd. Drink across categories, or non-alcoholic too? Drinqly.
This is an honest comparison written by the team behind Drinqly, so read it with that in mind, but we have tried to be fair, because the truthful answer is that these apps are built for different people. If you love Untappd, there is a good reason, and for a lot of drinkers it is still the right call. The question is not which app is better in the abstract. It is which one matches what is actually in your glass.
The one-sentence difference
Untappd is a beer app with a social check-in loop. Drinqly is a social check-in loop that works for any drink. Untappd went deep on one category and built the best community in it. Drinqly went wide, treating a cocktail, a natural wine, a pour-over, and a mocktail as equally worth logging. Neither approach is wrong; they just serve different drinkers.
| Untappd | Drinqly | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | Beer & breweries | Every drink, equally |
| Cocktails, wine, spirits | Secondary | First-class, rich details |
| Coffee, tea, mocktails (sober) | No | Full sober mode |
| Check in, rate, photo | Yes | Yes, any drink |
| Social feed | Yes, large community | Friends + worldwide feed |
| Community size | Massive | Growing |
| Beer database depth | Best in class | Good, not beer-specialized |
| Venue discovery | Breweries & bars | Bars, cafes & venues |
| Platforms | iOS & Android | iOS & web (Android soon) |
Notice we handed Untappd the rows it deserves. Community size and beer depth are genuinely theirs, and no honest comparison pretends otherwise.
Where each one wins
- Beer is your main thing
- You want the biggest beer database
- You love badges & brewery culture
- You want the largest community
- You drink across categories
- You want cocktails & wine logged too
- You also drink non-alcoholic
- You want one journal, not four apps
Open your last ten drinks in your memory. If eight of them were beer, Untappd is your app. If they were a mix, a cocktail, a wine, a whiskey, a couple of coffees, that is the exact gap Drinqly was built to close.
The thing Untappd cannot do
Here is the difference that matters most as drinking changes. A growing share of the glasses people care about have no alcohol in them, the matcha, the single-origin pour-over, the zero-proof spritz a good bar now makes on purpose. None of that has a home in a beer app. Drinqly has a full sober experience where those drinks get the same check-in, rating, and journal as anything else. If some or all of what you drink is non-alcoholic, that is not a small feature difference; it is the whole reason to choose Drinqly.
Can you use both?
Of course, and some people do, especially serious beer drinkers who want Untappd's badges and brewery depth but keep a Drinqly journal for everything else they pour. There is no rule here. But if you are tired of your drinking life being split across a beer app, a wine app, and a notes file, the point of Drinqly is that it is one place for all of it.