The board is not the problem. The library you never had is.

PureRef is one of the few pieces of professional software that almost nobody resents paying for, and people rarely go looking because it broke. They go looking for one of three duller reasons: the collection has outgrown a scene file, the licence they bought does not cover the work they are now paid for, or they want the same thing for nothing.

Those are three different searches wearing the same words, and they end at three different applications. Below are seven, with prices and versions read off each vendor's own page on 4 September 2026 and linked so you can check them yourself. Nothing here is ranked, because a ranking would be answering a question you did not ask.

First, what the licence actually says

Worth clearing up, because it is the single most misread thing about this app. PureRef's download page sells the personal licence on a choose-your-amount basis — $15 and $7 are the presets, and a custom amount is allowed — but that licence is labelled personal use only, single user, hobbyist or educational. Commercial use is a $49 one-time small business licence covering at most three users per studio, or a per-seat business subscription at $10 a seat monthly, $8 on the annual plan. The FAQ on the same page says a valid licence lets you run it on as many computers as you need.

The current release is 2.1.3 for Windows 10+, macOS 10.14+ and Linux tested on Ubuntu 20.04. The home page advertises what it is for: dragging images in, arranging and aligning them, notes, desaturation, and keeping the window above everything else you are doing. It advertises no library, no tags and no search, and no video. That is not an omission — it is the product being one thing rather than five.

BeeRef: the free one that keeps the habit

Free, GPL v3. Windows, macOS, Linux.

The closest thing to a like-for-like replacement. Its site lists v0.3.3: an infinite sheet where you move, scale, rotate, crop and flip images, mass-arrange a selection, add text notes, and switch on an always-on-top mode with the title bar hidden. The part worth knowing is the format — a .bee file is a sqlite database with the images stored in an sqlar table, and the site tells you the command line that gets them back out.

Pick it if you want the working habit unchanged and the cost at zero, especially for commercial work where PureRef's personal licence does not reach. It has no index, no tags and no search either, so it solves the licence question and the money question and none of the rest. Ours against it.

Kuadro: not a board at all, and sometimes better for it

Free for any use, including commercial. Windows, with a Mac build.

Kruel Games' page states plainly that Kuadro is released free for any use including commercial use, with the single restriction that you may not redistribute it as your own, and lists version 0.9.5 with downloads for Windows and Mac. It is not a canvas: each image becomes its own borderless window, which you place across monitors, snap to its neighbours and save as a layout preset.

Pick it if you work across two or three screens and what you actually want is four images pinned in four places, not one board with everything on it. It is also portable — a single executable, no installer. Check the Mac build against your own macOS version before you rely on it. How it compares here.

refern: the upgrade, if the collection is what outgrew you

$35 once, up to 3 devices. Windows, macOS, Linux.

If you are leaving because the scene file became a filing system by accident, this is the most capable answer on the page. Its pricing page shows $35 once for up to three devices with no subscription and a 30-day trial that needs no card; the site advertises v1.7.0 with an on-device auto tagger, a search by meaning, a graph view, browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and importers for Eagle, PureRef and Allusion. That last one matters here more than anywhere: it is the only application on this page that advertises reading your existing PureRef boards.

Pick it if you want everything, are willing to pay $35 once for it, and would like your old boards to arrive rather than be rebuilt. Set against ours, it wins on capability and loses on price and on being three platforms rather than a Mac application.

Eagle: a catalogue that will hold everything

$34.95 once, 2 devices. Windows 10+, macOS 10.15+.

Its pricing article lists $34.95 USD as a one-time purchase activated on 2 devices with lifetime free updates, and the home page shows v4.0.0 Build23 dated 1 April 2026 with a 30-day full-feature trial, smart folders, colour search, duplicate detection and a browser extension.

Pick it if you want one application to be the place everything lives, and understand the trade it makes: Eagle's own documentation says importing copies files into the library rather than indexing them where they sit. Coming from PureRef, where images stay where they are, that is the change to think hardest about. The comparison.

Obsidian Canvas: if the references sit inside your notes

Free for personal use; $50 per user per year commercially.

Obsidian's pricing is free without limits for personal use, with a $50 USD per-user, per-year commercial licence. Its Canvas feature is an infinite space for laying ideas out, and the files use the open JSON Canvas format the team published at jsoncanvas.org.

Pick it if your reference images are one part of a research habit that is mostly writing, and you would rather have both in the same vault than in two applications. It is not a picture tool and will not index a folder of forty thousand images. Where the two diverge.

Milanote: for the boards other people have to see

Free tier; $9.99 a month billed annually.

Milanote's plans page shows a free tier limited to 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads, an Individual plan at $9.99 a month billed annually or $12.50 billed monthly with unlimited notes and uploads, and a Team plan at $49 a month billed annually. There are desktop, mobile and iPad apps and a web clipper.

Pick it if the board's job is to be shown to a client and commented on. That is a genuinely different product from a reference sheet, and PureRef never pretended to do it. It is also the only entry here with a recurring price, which is the trade for the collaboration. Ours against it.

Coii Ref: boards that are files, plus the search PureRef never had

$19 once, 3 devices. macOS 11 Big Sur or later.

Ours, at the same length as the rest. It indexes the folders of images and video already on your Mac — no copying, moving or renaming — reads dimensions, EXIF and colour, and gives you one line of literal search over the lot, with saved views that store the text of a query rather than a frozen list of results. Canvases are .coii-canvas files written into your own folders as pretty-printed JSON, so a board diffs in git, syncs with whatever you already sync with, and opens in a text editor when there is no application to hand. Thirty days of every feature, no card, no account.

Pick it if the reason you are here is that your references have become a collection and you want them searchable without giving up the fact that they are just files. Do not pick it if what you love about PureRef is the floating window: Coii Ref is a library application and it does not sit on top of your art program. That, and the price, are the substance of the direct comparison, and if you are weighing all three at once there is a three-way version.

The thing worth asking every one of them: where does the arrangement live?

An hour spent composing a board is work, and work deserves a file you can account for. This is the question people forget to ask while comparing feature lists, and it is the one that decides how the next decade goes, because applications change hands, change price and change direction, and folders on a disk mostly do not.

Three of the tools here answer it in public. BeeRef documents the .bee file as a sqlite database with the images in an sqlar table and prints the command that extracts them. Obsidian publishes the JSON Canvas specification and stores canvases in it. Coii Ref writes .coii-canvas files as pretty-printed JSON into your own directories, which is a claim you can settle in one command rather than take on trust. PureRef's scenes are a documented part of its own ecosystem and refern advertises an importer for them, which is a form of answer too — somebody else can read the format.

The hosted end of the list is a different arrangement rather than a worse one: Milanote's boards live on its servers, which is exactly what makes them shareable with a client who has no software installed. The trade is visible and fair. What matters is knowing which one you have chosen before you have four hundred boards inside it.

A practical test, whichever you pick. Make a board with six images in it, then go and find the file it produced. If you can see it, copy it to a memory stick and open it on another machine, you have an arrangement you own. If you cannot find it at all, that is not a disqualification — it just means the application is the only route back to your work, and you should like the application very much before you commit years to it.

The seven, side by side

What you should actually do first

Work out which of the three reasons is yours. If it is the licence, the answer is BeeRef or Kuadro and you can stop reading. If it is money alone, the same two, and both are good. If it is that the collection got away from you, none of the free boards will help and you are choosing between refern, Eagle and Coii Ref on price, platform and how much application you want.

Do not throw away the scenes. A .pur file is small, and keeping the old boards costs nothing. If you move to refern, its PureRef importer is the reason to try it first; everywhere else, open the old board beside the new one for a week and rebuild only the arrangements you actually reach for. Most people discover they had four boards that mattered and thirty that were staging areas.

Separate the two jobs on purpose. The most common working setup among people who leave is not a replacement at all: it is a library for finding things and a board for looking at them, because those genuinely are different tasks. Keeping PureRef for the second one and adding something for the first is cheaper than any all-in-one and usually happier.

If the missing half is the finding, take the thirty days, point it at the folder your references already live in, and see how much of your board habit was really a search you could not type.