You are in a shop holding a bottle you are almost sure you already own. Almost. Everyone solves that moment the same way in the same order: memory, then a note, then a spreadsheet, then something built for the job. Each step happens for a reason, and each one stops working at a point you can predict. Here is where.
| Notes app | Spreadsheet | General inventory app | NailPal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adding a bottle | Type it, or take a photo you will never find again | Type every field, on a phone keyboard | Type every field, plus set up your own fields first | Scan the barcode or snap the label and it fills brand and shade |
| Swatch photos | In the camera roll, mixed with everything else | Links to files, or nothing | Yes, usually one or two per item | Up to six per bottle, kept with the bottle |
| Search | Text only, and only what you typed | Ctrl+F, if you are at a computer | Yes, across whatever you set up | Brand, shade, colour, finish, swatch number, accents ignored |
| Knows what polish is | No | Only the columns you invented | No, it holds tools and furniture just as happily | Finishes, owned / wishlist / untried, favourites, dupes |
| Catching a repeat buy | You remember, or you do not | Sort and read carefully | Only if you built a field for it | Flags an exact match when you log the same bottle again |
| In the shop | Scrolling four thousand photos | Painful on a phone | Works, if you kept it up to date | Search or scan the bottle in your hand |
| Privacy | Yours | Yours | Depends on the app | Private by default, never a public feed |
| Getting your data out | Copy and paste | It is already a file | Export, on paid tiers usually | CSV export, any time, free |
| Cost | Free | Free | Free tier, then monthly once you pass its item cap | Free and unlimited, no card |
Fine for thirty bottles. The wall is photos: they land in the camera roll with everything else, they are not searchable, and a picture cannot tell you whether it is a shade you own or one you liked in a shop.
The most common answer, and the most abandoned. It holds anything you are willing to type, which is the problem: every bottle is a row of manual entry on a phone keyboard, so within a month you stop updating it and it starts lying to you.
Built for stockrooms and moving boxes, so it will happily hold polish. It has no idea what a finish is, no owned / wishlist / untried, no dupe check, and its barcode lookups are aimed at retail goods. Most of them also charge once you pass a few hundred items, which is where a real collection starts.
Narrow on purpose. It does one category, so it can scan a bottle, read a label, keep six swatch photos per shade, and answer the question you ask in a shop. Free and unlimited, because capping the size of your own collection would be a strange thing to charge for.
Worth saying plainly, because a comparison page that finds no downsides is an advert:
Do not import anything and do not plan a system. Add the ten bottles nearest to you, then search for a shade you are sure you own and see which answers first, the app or your memory. Sign in with Google, no card, and you can export the whole thing to a spreadsheet the day you decide you were happier with one.