refern does more. Coii Ref does less, deliberately.

If you want the most capable reference manager in this category and you are not only on a Mac, buy refern. It has an on-device tagger, a search that finds an image nobody tagged, a relationship graph, browser extensions for three browsers, importers from three other apps, and it runs on Windows and Linux as well. At $35 once it is not expensive for what it is.

Buy Coii Ref if a smaller app that does less is the point: $19 once, macOS only, and a workspace that is a folder on your disk — database, thumbnails and canvases all inside it, the canvases as plain JSON files you could open in a text editor in ten years. That is the whole argument, and for a good number of people it is not enough of one. This page is written so you can tell which group you are in before you pay either of us.

The table

Rows we lose are marked as losses, because you will find out anyway and finding out on your own is worse.

Where refern wins

It is the more capable app, and it is not close.

The tagger is the clearest example. You download the recognition components once, and after that refern can suggest tags, read text out of an image and describe what is in it, on your own machine, only when you ask it to. If you have thirty thousand images that nobody has ever tagged, that is the difference between a library you can search and a folder you can scroll. Coii Ref has nothing equivalent and no plan you should count on.

Its search goes further for the same reason. You can describe what you want — the sort of phrase you would say out loud, like dramatic lighting — and it will surface images that carry no such tag. Coii Ref searches what is already true of a file: its type, extension, dimensions, rating, tags, notes, EXIF. Both are useful. Only one of them finds the picture you never labelled.

Three platforms. refern runs on Windows and Linux. Coii Ref does not, and saying so is the end of the discussion for anyone who works across machines. The Coii Ref codebase builds for both, but only the macOS builds are signed, tested and released, and a platform that has not shipped is not a platform.

It collects, and we only organise. refern has extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, so saving an image from a web page into the library is one click. Coii Ref indexes folders on disk and has no opinion about how the file got there. If your reference habit is mostly browser-shaped, that gap is daily friction, not a footnote.

It imports from three apps. Eagle folders and metadata, PureRef boards rebuilt as editable canvases with their layout and notes intact, Allusion's nested coloured tags. Coii Ref imports from refern and nothing else. If you are coming from Eagle or PureRef today, refern will take your work across and we will not.

Linked copies. One physical file can appear in several folders in refern without being duplicated, and its Eagle imports keep multi-folder placements. If your existing organisation depends on an image living in four places at once, that maps cleanly onto refern and awkwardly onto a filesystem.

Where Coii Ref wins

A canvas is a file, and you can read it.

This is the one that matters most and gets discussed least. A Coii Ref canvas is Something.coii-canvas: pretty-printed JSON, saved in whichever of your own folders you put it in. It diffs in git. It syncs through whatever you already sync with. You can open it in a text editor, and you could write a script against it without asking us for anything.

refern's own FAQ answers "can I get files back out?", so your images are not hostage. What it does not say is what a canvas is or where it lives — and a board you spent two days composing is not the same asset as the images on it. This is not a claim that refern will lose your boards. It is a claim about what is verifiable: you can check ours with cat, and that is a different kind of guarantee from a promise on a pricing page.

That difference is the whole answer to the question everybody in this category has learned to ask: what happens to my library if the app shuts down? Inboard and Pixave were both well-liked Mac apps in this space. Both stopped. The users who came out fine were the ones whose work was already in a format something else could read.

The workspace is a folder, not a location the app knows about.

Everything Coii Ref writes goes inside the folder you pointed it at: the database, the thumbnails, the canvas-resolution proxies. It is the design the feature list is organised around, and whatever backs that folder up has backed up your library. Moving the folder to another drive moves the workspace with it, and opening it on a second Mac needs no export step. The what it sends section on the home page lists every connection the app can make, which is four rows, and none of them carries a picture of yours.

A smaller network surface. refern is honest about its own: activation, trial time, update checks, optional component downloads, feedback, and web saves. Every one of those is reasonable. Coii Ref makes two kinds of request ever — the licence check when you press Activate, and one at launch read only for its Date header, so a wound-back clock cannot mint free trial days. There is no update check because there is no in-app updater, and no analytics of any kind. If you work somewhere that audits outbound traffic, that list is shorter to defend.

One query line instead of a panel of controls. The same string drives the grid, the saved views and the autocompleter:

type:video ext:mov                    just the clips
tag:any:portrait,studio               either tag
rating:>=4 -is:favourite              good, not yet starred
has:notes no:tags                     written up, unfiled

AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, and no parentheses — grouping is what makes a query impossible to autocomplete or draw as chips. A word it does not recognise becomes free text rather than an error, so the grid never stops returning rows while you are still typing. A saved view stores that text and nothing else, and re-parses it every time you open it: rename a tag and the view follows, because there is no membership list to repair.

$19 against $35. Sixteen dollars is not why anybody chooses a tool they will use every day. It is worth stating plainly anyway, because both apps are one-time purchases with three device slots and a thirty-day trial, so price is the one row where the comparison is genuinely like for like.

Two rows that look identical and are not

The trial. Both are thirty days with no card. What differs is the shape of the cliff at the end, and Coii Ref's is unusual enough to be worth stating: one category of action stops, which is growing the library. Registering a new folder, running the importer and kicking off an indexing pass by hand are refused until you buy. Everything that reads keeps working permanently — search, tags, saved views, canvases, thumbnails — and the folder watcher keeps running too, so a file you rename in Finder next March does not quietly turn the database into a liar. An unpaid Coii Ref does not hold your work hostage; it just stops taking on more. What refern does at day thirty-one is a question for its own FAQ, not for a page written by its competitor.

Video. Both handle it, so the row is a draw and the detail underneath is not. In Coii Ref video is the same kind of thing as an image all the way through: it is indexed on the same pass, it carries the same tags, ratings and notes, it goes onto a canvas beside the stills, and it is addressable from the same query line — type:video ext:mov is not a mode you switch into. Proxies are written at canvas resolution beside your files so that a board full of clips scrolls like a board full of photographs. If your references are half footage — motion designers, editors, anyone collecting film stills and the shots they came from — that is worth trying against your own material during the trial rather than taking from a table.

Who you are actually buying from is the same answer twice: Lemon Squeezy is the merchant of record for both, so both charges appear under that name, and both handle VAT and sales tax at checkout. The licence itself comes from Riff Tech, Inc. in our case.

The scale question

Neither app is worth installing for four hundred images. The interesting question is what happens at forty thousand across six drives, one of which is not plugged in today, in folders someone else keeps reorganising — because that is the state a real reference library reaches after a few years, and it is the case that shaped Coii Ref.

Indexing that many files is a first pass you start and walk away from. After it, the thing that keeps the library true is the watcher rather than a re-import: filesystem events become the smallest re-scan that makes the database correct again, so a rename 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 rather than rediscovered. A library that goes stale every time you tidy up in Finder is a library you stop trusting, and one you stop trusting is one you stop searching.

This is also where the file-shaped design stops being philosophy and starts being operational. Six drives means six workspaces, each self-contained, each backed up by whatever already backs up that drive, each openable on the other Mac without an export. Boards that reference images across two of them are still one JSON file you can copy anywhere.

What switching costs

Coming from refern to Coii Ref takes about an hour for a large library, most of it waiting for the first index.

You point Coii Ref at the folder your references already live in and let it read them — dimensions, EXIF and colour — writing thumbnails and proxies beside your files. Then you run the importer. It carries across the things that are not in your files: ratings, tags, notes and canvases. It matches them by relative path rather than by id, which is why it works at all across two apps that never agreed on identifiers, and it is also why the one thing that breaks it is having reorganised your folders in between.

What does not come across: anything that depended on a feature we do not have. Graph connections have nowhere to go. Tags a tagger suggested come across as tags, since by then they are just tags — but you will not be able to generate more of them.

Your refern library is untouched by all of this. Nothing is moved and nothing is rewritten, so running both for a fortnight while you decide costs you nothing but disk space for a second set of thumbnails. That is the honest way to answer this page: install the trial, import, and use it for two weeks against real work.

Going the other way — Coii Ref to refern — you would keep your files and your canvases, since both are yours in the first place, but there is no importer on that side.

What neither of them does

Worth knowing before you spend an evening trialling both. Neither is a collaboration tool: there is no shared workspace, no comment thread on an image, no link you send a client that opens a live board. Neither has a mobile app, so a reference you find on your phone reaches the library the way it always did, by arriving in a folder later. Neither is a photo editor, and neither is trying to replace Lightroom for a catalogue of your own shoots — they organise what you collect, which is a different job from developing what you shot.

And neither is a backup. Both write their own artifacts beside or around your files, and both are perfectly happy to be pointed at a drive with no copy anywhere else. That is your problem to solve, with the same tool you would have used anyway.

Which one to buy

Buy refern if you use Windows or Linux at all; if a large part of your library is untagged and you want a machine to make a first pass at it; if you save references from the browser several times a day; if you are migrating from Eagle, PureRef or Allusion and want that history to survive; or if the relationship graph is a way of thinking you actually use rather than a feature you admire.

Buy Coii Ref if you are on a Mac and only a Mac; if your references already live in folders you have organised and you want them searched where they are rather than adopted; if you want the boards you compose to be files you can read, diff and back up like anything else; if the shortest possible list of outbound connections matters to you; and if $19 for a smaller app that does its narrow job well is a better trade than $35 for a wider one.

There is a third answer worth saying out loud: for a lot of people the right tool is still a folder and Finder, and neither of us is worth the money until scrolling stops working. That usually happens somewhere north of ten thousand images, or the first time you cannot find something you know you saved. Both apps are cheap enough that the real cost of getting this wrong is the evening you spend on it, not the money.

If you want to keep reading, the library has the other comparisons, the round-ups of what people leave each tool for, and the migration guides. The home page is the short version of what this app is, and the FAQ answers what actually stops at day thirty-one. Or just download it — thirty days, every feature, no card and no account, and the price only comes up after that.