Inboard clips from the browser. Coii Ref reads what is already on the disk.

These two apps cost almost the same money and are both deliberately small, so the choice is not about which is more capable — neither is trying to be. It is about where your references come from. If most of them arrive by seeing something in a browser and wanting to keep it, Inboard is built for that moment and Coii Ref is not — Inboard publishes extensions for three browsers, takes a full-page screenshot, and files the page title and URL with the image, and Coii Ref has no browser extension at all. If most of them are already sitting in folders on your Mac — dropped there over years by a dozen different habits — then Coii Ref is the one that reads them where they are, and Inboard is the one you would have to feed.

That is the whole decision, and the rest of this page is the evidence for it.

What is checkable about Inboard today

Every claim on this page was read off Inboard's own pages on 3 September 2026, because a comparison written from memory is a comparison that is wrong the month after a price change.

• $19.99, one payment, on the Mac App Store. Version 1.1.9, updated 9 October 2025, sold by Regular SIA. The listing is here.
• macOS 14.6 or later, per that same listing.
• Browser extensions for Chrome, Safari and Firefox, with full-page screenshots, and the page title and URL saved alongside the image — all described on inboardapp.com.
• Tags, including a view of every tag for browsing by one.
• PNG, JPG, GIF, PSD, AI and PDF, in the words of their own feature list.
• A library you export and import when you set up a new Mac, again from their site.
• "Cloud sync is coming soon" is what that page says about sync, so today the honest row for both apps is: no sync of any kind.

What their site does not spell out is whether an image you add stays in the folder you added it from or is taken into the app's own library. That is worth five minutes of your trial rather than a guess from a competitor, because it is the single behaviour that decides how much a reference manager can hurt you later. Ours is stated plainly: files are indexed where they sit and never copied, moved or renamed.

The table

Two rows there are blank rather than lost, and the difference matters. "Not published" means their site does not say, not that the answer is no — and a page that turned an absent sentence into a missing feature would be the kind of page you should stop trusting on the rows where it is confident.

Where Inboard is the better buy

It is built around the moment of collecting. A reference habit that runs through a browser — Dribbble, an artist's portfolio, a shop listing, a screenshot of a scene you liked — wants one click at the moment you see the thing, and then nothing else to do. Extensions in Chrome, Safari and Firefox are exactly that, and the full-page screenshot means the whole layout survives, not just the one image you managed to right-click. Coii Ref has no browser extension and no plan you should buy on. It starts working after the file is on your disk, which means with Coii Ref that first step stays whatever it already is: drag to a folder, ⌘⇧4, a download.

It reads design documents. PSD, AI and PDF are on Inboard's list and not on ours. If your collection is half PDF — tear sheets, printed spreads, brand guidelines somebody sent you — that is not a small gap, it is most of your library. Coii Ref covers images and video and nothing else.

It is a Mac App Store purchase. Family Sharing, one place to reinstall it from, no licence key to keep in an email, and refunds through Apple. For a lot of people that is worth more than any feature argument. Coii Ref is sold directly, with a 30-day trial that runs before any payment rather than after — different trade, not a better one.

Its scope is small on purpose. So is ours. Neither of these apps is going to answer a question the way refern will, and refern is the app to read about if what you actually want is the most capable tool in the category rather than the smallest one that fits.

The row that decides it more often than anyone expects

Inboard's App Store listing asks for macOS 14.6 or later. Coii Ref runs on macOS 11 Big Sur and up, on Apple Silicon and on Intel, as two native builds.

This is not a feature argument and it is not a criticism — requiring a recent system is a perfectly reasonable thing for a small team to do, and it buys them a simpler app to maintain. It is simply the fact that settles the question for anyone on a 2017 iMac that does the job fine, a work machine somebody else controls the updates on, or the second Mac in the studio that exists to run one old plugin. Check the About This Mac dialog before you read any further, because on those machines this comparison has one candidate.

Where Coii Ref is the better buy

Your folders stay your folders. Coii Ref indexes what is already on disk. Files are never copied into a library, never renamed, never moved. Everything the app writes — the database, the thumbnails, the canvas-resolution proxies — goes inside the folder you pointed it at, so backing up that folder backs up the library, and moving that folder to another drive moves the whole workspace with it.

That is also the answer to the question anyone who has used Mac utilities for a decade has learned to ask before buying another one: what happens to my collection if this app stops. The honest answer for Coii Ref is that your images were never inside it, so they carry on being files. The same question is worth asking of Apple Photos, whose default library holds the originals inside a package, and of Eagle, which takes a copy into its own library folder by design.

One line of search, over the whole disk. Coii Ref has a query language rather than a filter panel, and the same string drives the grid, the autocompleter and the saved views:

type:image ext:png added:>2026-06        the PNGs from this summer
tag:any:type,packaging rating:>=4        either tag, and good
has:notes no:tags                        written up, never filed

AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. A word it does not recognise becomes free text instead of an error, so the grid keeps returning rows while you are still typing. Saved views store the text of the search and re-parse it every time they open, which means renaming a tag does not break them — there is no membership list to repair.

Canvases are files you can open in ten years. A Coii Ref canvas is a .coii-canvas file: pretty-printed JSON, saved in whichever of your own folders you put it in. It diffs in git, syncs through whatever you already sync with, and opens in a text editor. Inboard is a grid and a tag list rather than a canvas app, so this is less a row it loses than a job it never took on — but if the reason you are shopping is that you want to arrange references spatially, that is the difference between these two.

Video is a first-class citizen. Same index pass, same tags and ratings, same query line — type:video ext:mov is not a mode you switch into — and proxies written at canvas resolution so a board of clips scrolls like a board of stills. Inboard's own format line names no video format, which for a motion designer settles it in the other direction from the PDF row.

Two kinds of outbound request, ever. A licence check when you press Activate, and one request at launch read only for its Date header, so a wound-back clock cannot mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. That list is on the home page in full, and it is short enough to be checked rather than believed.

Two different bets about tagging

Both apps have tags, so the row is a draw and the thinking underneath it is not. Inboard's is the classic collector's model: you save a thing, you tag it while you are looking at it, and later you browse the tag. That works beautifully as long as you tag at the moment of saving, which is exactly the moment their extensions are designed for — the image and the intention are in front of you at the same time.

Coii Ref bets that you will not tag most things, because almost nobody does. So it makes the untagged case survivable: the index knows a file's type, extension, dimensions, EXIF and colour before you have said a word about it, and the query line reaches all of that. no:tags is a legitimate search, and so is rating:>=4 -is:favourite. Tagging in Coii Ref is something you do to the images that earned it, on a second pass, rather than a tax on saving.

Which bet is right depends entirely on how you work, and you probably already know the answer. If your existing folders are full of files nobody ever labelled, the second bet is the one that pays. If you are a disciplined tagger — and a few people genuinely are — the first is not a compromise at all.

When the library gets large

Neither app is worth installing for four hundred images; Finder handles that and so does your memory. The interesting question is what happens at forty thousand files spread over a couple of drives, in folders you reorganise every time a project ends.

Coii Ref's answer is a first index pass you start and walk away from, and after that a watcher rather than a re-import. Filesystem events turn into the smallest re-scan that makes the database true again, so a rename in Finder is a rename and not a new file with a lost rating, a moved folder is followed, and a drive that comes back online is reconciled instead of rediscovered. The watcher keeps running after the trial ends, too, which matters more than it sounds: a library that quietly goes stale every time you tidy up is a library you stop trusting, and one you stop trusting is one you stop searching.

Inboard does not publish numbers about large collections and neither do we, so treat any claim about speed — including one you read on a competitor's site — as something to test with your own files during a trial. Both apps let you do that at no cost.

What switching actually costs

Be clear-eyed about this: there is no importer. Coii Ref reads a refern library and nothing else. Moving from Inboard means exporting your images out to folders — which their site says the library supports — and then pointing Coii Ref at those folders.

What comes across is everything that lives in the files: the images themselves, their dimensions, EXIF, colour. What does not come across is whatever lived only in Inboard's database. Tags are the painful one. If you have carefully tagged four thousand images, you are re-doing that work or starting a different way, and no amount of enthusiasm on this page changes it.

The realistic version, and the one worth actually doing, is to skip the re-tagging entirely. Export to folders that mean something — a folder per project, per client, per year, whatever your tags were mostly encoding — and then let search do the rest. Coii Ref can find on ratings, notes, dimensions, type, extension and dates without a single tag being applied, so a library that arrives untagged is not a library that arrives unusable. Tag the good ones as you meet them again.

Nothing about this is one-way. Coii Ref never modifies your originals, so running both for a fortnight costs you disk space for a second set of thumbnails and nothing else. Thirty days is the trial, no card and no account, which is enough time to find out whether one line of search is a thing you enjoy or a thing you tolerate.

What neither of them does

Worth knowing before you spend an evening on this. Neither app syncs to a phone, and neither has a mobile app, so a reference you find on the train reaches either library the way it always did — by arriving in a folder later. Neither is collaborative: no shared workspace, no comment thread on an image, no link that opens a live board for a client. Neither is an editor, and neither is a catalogue for your own shoots the way Lightroom is. And neither is a backup: both are perfectly happy to be pointed at a single drive with no copy anywhere, which stays your problem to solve with the tool you would have used anyway.

Who should buy which

Buy Inboard if your references arrive through a browser and you want them captured in one click; if full-page screenshots are how you keep a layout; if PSD, AI or PDF make up a real share of what you collect; if you want a Mac App Store purchase with Family Sharing; and if your Mac is on macOS 14.6 or later.

Buy Coii Ref if the images are already on your disk and the problem is finding them; if you have a Mac that has not been updated in a couple of years; if video belongs in the same library as the stills; if you want to arrange references on a canvas that is a file you own; and if you would rather the app never touch, copy or rename an original.

There is a third answer, and for a smaller collection it is the right one: keep using folders. Finder tags go a surprisingly long way for free, and the page on them is honest about exactly where their ceiling is. Neither of these apps is worth twenty dollars until scrolling has stopped working, which usually happens somewhere north of ten thousand files or the first time you cannot find something you know you saved.

If you are weighing more than these two, the neighbouring pages are the ones to read next: Pixave is the other small Mac organiser of the same generation, and the library has the round-ups for everything else. Or download Coii Ref — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and you can have both apps installed while you decide.