The other app in this category that will tell you where its files are

sqlite3 myfile.bee -Axv is on BeeRef's own front page, under a heading explaining that a .bee file is a sqlite database with the images kept in an sqlar table, and that the command above pulls them out whether or not BeeRef is installed. Almost nothing else in this category publishes its format and hands you the escape hatch in the same paragraph.

That matters here because it is the argument Coii Ref usually wins. So take it off the table first: on the question of what happens to my work if I stop using this app, BeeRef has a real, checkable answer, the same kind of answer we have, arrived at from the opposite direction. It is also free, open source under the GNU General Public License v3.0, and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, none of which is true of us.

The rest of this page is about the direction, because it is where the whole difference lives. BeeRef puts copies of your images inside one file. Coii Ref never touches your images and keeps a board as a list of where they are. Which of those you want depends on whether the thing you value is a canvas you can hand to someone, or a collection you can search.

The one-paragraph verdict

Take BeeRef if you want a free canvas to arrange references on while you work, if you want it floating over your art program, and if your boards are things you make for a job and then archive. Take Coii Ref, at $19 once on macOS 11 or later, if the problem is upstream of the canvas: thousands of images across several drives, no idea which folder holds the one you want, and no tool that can answer a question about them. Nobody needs both, but plenty of people would be better served by the one they did not install first.

The table

Where BeeRef wins

Nothing to pay, and the source is readable. GPL v3 is not a marketing adjective; it is a licence that means the program cannot be taken away from you and that anyone can check what it does. For a student, a class, or a studio that has to justify each purchase, free and auditable beats $19 and trust me, and it should.

Three platforms from one project. Windows, Linux and macOS builds all come off the same releases page. Coii Ref runs on macOS and nothing else, which is a straightforward loss on this row and the end of the discussion for anyone working across machines.

It floats, and we do not. BeeRef's feature list includes an always-on-top mode and the ability to hide the title bar so the window sits unobtrusively over your art program. That is the single most requested thing a reference tool can do while somebody is painting, and Coii Ref does not do it at all. If you want it and you want it free, the choice between BeeRef and PureRef is a better use of your afternoon than this page is.

Canvas editing tools we do not have. Move, scale, rotate, crop and flip; mass-scale a selection to the same width, height or area; mass-arrange horizontally, vertically or packed for space; drop text items onto the canvas. Coii Ref's canvases place, arrange and annotate images, and they are not trying to be an editor. If your boards get composed rather than assembled, BeeRef's canvas is the more capable surface.

One file you can hand over. Because a .bee carries the images inside it, sending a board to somebody sends the pictures too. A .coii-canvas is a list of paths, so it opens correctly on a machine that has those files and shows you nothing useful on one that does not. For collaboration by email attachment, that is a real advantage and it belongs on this side of the page.

Where Coii Ref wins

Your originals never move, and there is only ever one of each.

Embedding is a design choice with a cost: a picture that goes on three boards is three copies inside three files, plus the original in your folder, and editing the original afterwards does not change what any board shows. Coii Ref takes the other road. It reads the folders you already keep, in place, and never copies, moves or renames anything. A board holds references to files, so the file on disk stays the single copy of the picture and every board pointing at it shows the version you have now.

Whether that is better depends entirely on what you need. Portability of a single board goes to BeeRef; fidelity of a library, disk space and one authoritative copy of each image go here.

A search line over the whole collection.

This is the part a canvas app has no reason to build, and it is the reason libraries exist. Coii Ref indexes everything under the folder you point it at and lets you ask questions in one string:

AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. type:video ext:mov for the clips, tag:any:portrait,studio for either tag, -is:favourite to exclude the ones already starred, width:>=3000 for what will survive being printed. Save the string as a view and it re-parses on open, so renaming a tag updates every view that mentions it instead of breaking them.

Tags, ratings and notes that outlive a board. In BeeRef, meaning lives on the canvas: this image is here, next to that one. In Coii Ref it lives on the file, so a rating you gave a photograph two years ago is still there when it turns up in an unrelated search today. Boards come and go; the index is cumulative.

Video is in the same library as the stills. Same index pass, same tags and ratings, same query line, and proxies written at canvas resolution so a board of clips scrolls like a board of photographs. If a third of what you collect is footage, that is not a row in a table, it is most of the reason to have a library at all.

A watcher that keeps the index honest. Rename a folder in Finder, plug in the drive you forgot, drop four hundred new frames into a directory: filesystem events become the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again. There is no re-import step and nothing to remember. It keeps running after a trial expires, which is deliberate — an index that quietly goes stale is worse than no index.

The ten-year question, answered twice

Every app in this category eventually gets asked what happens to your work if you stop using it, and most answer with a promise. These two answer with a format.

BeeRef's answer: your images are inside a sqlite file, and here is the command line that extracts them. You do not need BeeRef, a licence, or the internet — you need sqlite3, which is already on your Mac. That is a good answer and it is worth more than most of the guarantees written on pricing pages.

Coii Ref's answer: your images were never inside anything. They are the same files in the same folders, with the same names they had before you installed anything, and a board is a pretty-printed JSON file listing which of them sits where. Open it in a text editor and you can read the arrangement. Delete the app and you have lost the viewer, not the work.

The difference in practice is what a backup covers. Backing up a folder of .bee files backs up your boards and the images in them, twice over if the originals are also on that disk. Backing up the folder Coii Ref indexes backs up the originals, the boards, the index, the thumbnails and the proxies, because all of it is in there, and it opens on another Mac with no export step. Neither is wrong. One duplicates deliberately and one refuses to.

What switching costs, in either direction

BeeRef to Coii Ref. Extract the images from any .bee you care about using the command their site publishes, put them in a folder with a name that will still make sense in a year, and point Coii Ref at it. The first index reads dimensions, EXIF and colour and writes thumbnails and proxies inside that folder; on a large library you start it and go and make coffee. What does not come across is the arrangement — Coii Ref has one importer and it reads a refern library, so a board gets rebuilt once, by hand, in about two minutes. Your .bee files are untouched throughout, so this is additive rather than a migration.

Coii Ref to BeeRef. Drag the images off a canvas into BeeRef and save. The tags, ratings and notes do not travel, because BeeRef has nowhere to put them. Nothing of yours is locked up on our side either: the originals never moved, and the canvas is a JSON file you can read.

Running both is entirely reasonable and costs nothing on either side. Find in one, paint from the other.

The scale question

Under a thousand images, neither app is solving anything you could not solve with a Finder window and some patience. The interesting number is forty thousand, spread across an internal drive, two externals and an archive you have not plugged in since March, in a folder tree you reorganised twice and regret both times. That is where reference collections actually end up, and the two designs pull apart hard at that size.

A canvas app scales with the board. Opening a .bee with two hundred images in it is fine; what it cannot do is tell you which of the forty thousand deserve to be on the next board, because it has never seen the other thirty-nine thousand eight hundred. The collection is not a thing it has an opinion about.

An index scales with the collection. The first pass over forty thousand files is a job you start and leave — it reads dimensions, EXIF and colour, writes thumbnails and canvas-resolution proxies, and then never has to do it again, because after that the watcher does arithmetic instead of work. A rename is a rename rather than a deletion and a new file with a lost rating. A folder you move is followed. A drive that comes back online is reconciled rather than rediscovered. That is the entire reason to run a library app, and it is a reason that does not exist until your collection is big enough to have gone out of your head.

Six drives means six workspaces here, each self-contained, each backed up by whatever already backs up that drive, each openable on another Mac with no export. A canvas that pulls from two of them is still one JSON file you can copy anywhere.

What free costs, and what $19 buys

It would be easy to write this section dishonestly in either direction, so here is the plain version.

Free costs you nothing and is worth what you can see. BeeRef is a finished tool for a specific job, its licence guarantees it cannot be withdrawn from you, and its file format is documented well enough that the work is safe regardless of what anyone does next. Those are strong properties and they are not diluted by the price. A great many people should use it and stop reading here.

The $19 buys a different thing: an index and the machinery that keeps an index true, on a Mac, for one payment and no renewal. Three machines, updates included, thirty days to try every feature without a card or an account. If it turns out you did not need an index, that money bought you nothing, and the honest way to find out is the trial rather than this page.

What it does not buy is more platforms, an always-on-top window, a browser extension, colour search, PDF support or automatic tagging, none of which Coii Ref has. Two of those, BeeRef does have. The rest belong to bigger apps — refern has most of them — and if any one of them is the feature your week turns on, buy the app that has it rather than the one this page is about.

Two words that mean different things here

"Canvas." BeeRef's canvas is a document: a surface with images and text items on it, which you compose, crop, arrange and save as one file. Coii Ref's canvas is a view onto files that exist elsewhere: you place them, arrange them and write notes, and the file records placements rather than pictures. Both are called canvases and only one of them contains anything.

"Reference viewer." For BeeRef the noun is viewer and the emphasis is on viewing while you make something, which is why the always-on-top mode is a headline feature. For Coii Ref the emphasis is on reference as a collection — what you have, where it is, what you thought of it — and the viewing is the last step, once the finding is done. Choosing between them is really choosing which of those two words describes your problem this month.

Who should pick which

BeeRef, if: you want free and open source; you work on Windows or Linux as well; you want the board floating over your art program with the title bar gone; you compose boards with crop, flip and mass-arrange; you send whole boards to other people; your collection is small enough that finding things has never been the hard part.

Coii Ref, if: you are on a Mac and the collection is the problem; you want one query line over thousands of files across several drives; you want tags, ratings and notes attached to files rather than to a canvas; you collect video as well as stills; you want boards that reference your originals instead of copying them; you would rather the app wrote nothing outside the folder you gave it.

For the neighbouring comparisons: refern is the most capable app in this category and beats us on most feature rows, Eagle copies what you import into its own library by design, Kuadro is the other free viewer worth knowing about, and Finder tags is the option you already own. If the plain-file argument is the one you came for, the Obsidian Canvas comparison is where a competitor wins it outright.

Thirty days, every feature, no card, no account: download Coii Ref, point it at the folder your references already live in, and see whether the searching half is the half you were missing.