Two good apps that are not in fact competing with each other

This page is written by a company that makes a third one, so start with the part that is not about us: if you are trying to decide between Eagle and PureRef, the reason it feels hard is that they do not overlap nearly as much as their marketing categories suggest. One is a catalogue. The other is a board. Choosing between them is like choosing between a filing cabinet and a corkboard over your desk, and the reason people keep asking is that both get called "reference tools".

Here is the ten-second version, and it is genuinely most of the answer.

• Your problem is finding something in a collection that has outgrown your memory of it → Eagle.
• Your problem is looking at four images while you draw, without them disappearing behind your art program → PureRef.
• Your problem is both, which is normal → PureRef is cheap enough that most people end up with it regardless, and the real question is which catalogue sits behind it.

The rest of this page checks the details, because the details are where the money and the file handling are — and both of those are worth knowing before you install anything.

What each one costs today

Eagle is a one-time purchase. Its support documentation lists the licence key at $34.95 USD, activated on two devices, with lifetime free updates and no subscription. There is a thirty-day full-feature trial. The current build listed on its home page is v4.0.0 Build23, dated 1 April 2026, for Windows 10+ and macOS 10.15+.

PureRef is pay-what-you-want, with conditions worth reading. Its download page marks the personal tier as personal use only, single user, hobbyist or educational, and offers $7 and $15 as suggested amounts alongside a custom field — you can also take it for nothing and pay later. Commercial use is licensed separately: $49 once for the small business tier, capped at three users per studio, with free updates within the 2.x line; or a per-seat business subscription at $10 per seat monthly, $8 when billed annually, with priority support. The current version on that page is 2.1.3, for Windows 10+, macOS 10.14+ and Linux. Their FAQ also states that a valid licence can be used on as many computers as you need, which is unusually relaxed and worth knowing if you work on three machines.

So: a studio pays $49 for PureRef and $34.95 per two devices for Eagle. An individual working on personal projects pays whatever they choose for PureRef and $34.95 for Eagle. Those are not the same kind of number, and the difference is not a discount — it is that the two products are priced for different roles.

The table

Three columns, because if you are on a Mac reading this you have a third option and pretending otherwise would be the kind of comparison this site is written against.

Two of those rows are the whole page. Files on import decides how much disk you spend and where your pictures actually are afterwards. Always on top decides whether the tool is useful in the ninety minutes when you are actually drawing.

Eagle, honestly

Eagle is the more complete piece of software of the two, and by some distance. It catalogues: folders, smart folders, tags, colour, formats, duplicate handling, and a browser extension for saving from the web. Its home page leads on collecting, searching and organising design files, and that is a fair description of what you get.

The thing to understand before you install it is the import model. Eagle's own support article states that it copies files to the library when importing, rather than creating index links to the original files. That is a deliberate design, and it buys real things: the library is self-contained, it can be moved as a unit, and Eagle can guarantee that what it shows you is still there. It also means your reference collection now exists twice unless you delete the originals, and that the canonical copy of a picture is inside an application's library folder rather than in a folder you named.

Whether that is a problem depends on you. Photographers with a Lightroom-shaped brain will not blink. Anyone who has spent an afternoon getting a folder tree right, or who syncs a references directory between machines with something they already pay for, will feel it immediately. It is the single most consequential difference between Eagle and both other apps on this page, which is why the Eagle comparison here is mostly about it.

PureRef, honestly

PureRef does one job with unusual completeness: it puts images on a single scene, and that scene can sit above everything else on your screen. Always on top, an overlay mode, transparency to the mouse, window locking, notes, desaturation, alignment tools, and drag-and-drop from a browser straight onto the board. It is small, it is fast, and a very large number of professional artists have it open all day.

What it is not is a library. A .pur scene holds the images you put on it and knows nothing about the eleven thousand you did not. There is no search across your collection, no tags on files, no ratings that survive from one board to the next. Ask PureRef what you have that is lit from behind and there is no mechanism for the question to mean anything — which is not a flaw, because that was never the job.

The commercial licensing is the other thing to get right up front. Personal tier is personal use only, so a freelancer billing a client is in small business territory: $49 once, up to three users. That is still inexpensive, and being clear about it now is cheaper than being clear about it during an audit.

Where the two of them leave a gap

Run both and you will notice the seam. PureRef is where the eight images you chose end up. Eagle is where you chose them from. The seam is that the choosing happens inside a library whose copy of the picture is not the copy in your folders, so the thing you drag onto a board is a duplicate of a duplicate, and the tags that helped you find it live somewhere only Eagle can read.

That seam is the whole reason Coii Ref exists, so here is its pitch in one paragraph and then a section you can skip. It indexes the folders you already have — no copying, no moving, no renaming — reads dimensions, EXIF and colour, and gives you one line of search across all of it. Boards are files in your own folders. It is $19 once, macOS 11 or later, three machines, thirty days to try without a card or an account. It does not float over your art program, it has no browser extension, and it is a smaller app than Eagle in almost every direction.

The query line is the part that does the work: AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, type:video ext:mov for the clips, has:notes no:tags for the things you wrote about and never filed. Save the string as a view and it re-parses each time you open it, so renaming a tag updates the view rather than breaking it.

Disk space, which nobody costs beforehand

Three import models, three answers to how much room your references take.

Eagle copies, so a 200 GB collection becomes roughly 400 GB unless you delete the originals after importing — and deleting the originals means the library is now the only copy, which is a decision rather than a tidy-up. PureRef embeds what you put on a scene, so boards are self-contained and a picture used on five boards exists five times over, though each scene is small compared to a whole library. Coii Ref writes an index, thumbnails and canvas-resolution proxies inside the folder you pointed at, and never a second copy of a full-size original.

None of these is wrong. Copying buys self-containment; embedding buys a board you can email; indexing buys one authoritative copy of every picture and the right to reorganise your folders whenever you like. Pick the trade you can live with, and check the number on your own drive before you commit, because "references" is the folder that grows without anybody deciding to grow it.

What each one is like a year in

Eagle at a year: a library with real structure in it, that you now maintain. Everything new goes through the import step, and the originals question has been answered one way or the other. Search works well, because you fed it.

PureRef at a year: a folder of .pur scenes named after jobs, each a snapshot of what mattered that week, and a habit of opening last year's board to remember what you were looking at. Nothing to maintain at all.

Coii Ref at a year: the same folders you always had, plus an index that has quietly kept up with them, plus boards saved next to the work they were for. The maintenance is the watcher's problem: rename a folder in Finder and the index follows rather than losing the ratings on everything inside it.

If none of those three describes what you want, the honest fourth answer is refern, which is more capable than any app on this page — an on-device tagger, search by meaning, browser extensions and importers from Eagle and PureRef both — at $35 once for three devices across Windows, macOS and Linux. It costs more than everything here except Eagle, and for a lot of people it is the right purchase.

Moving between them later

Nobody picks a reference tool once. It is worth knowing which doors stay open.

Out of PureRef. A .pur scene is a PureRef document, and the practical route out of it is to save the images off the board into a folder. There is also a second route that costs money but no effort: refern imports PureRef boards and rebuilds them as editable canvases, layout and notes intact, which is the most complete PureRef migration anybody offers. Coii Ref cannot open a .pur at all — one importer, and it reads a refern library — so an arrangement you care about would be rebuilt by hand from the same images.

Out of Eagle. Because Eagle keeps its own copies, leaving means getting the files back out into ordinary folders first, and then deciding what to do about the tags and ratings, which are a property of the library rather than of the files. refern imports Eagle libraries including multi-folder placements. Coii Ref does not, and a page here saying otherwise would be selling you an afternoon of disappointment: from Eagle, you would export to folders, index those folders, and re-apply the metadata you cared about.

Between the two of them. Dragging images from an Eagle library onto a PureRef board works exactly as you would expect, and is how most people who own both actually use them.

Three questions worth answering before you install either

Where do you want the canonical copy of a picture to be? In an application's library, or in a folder you named? There is no correct answer, but there is a correct answer for you, and every other difference on this page follows from it. If you are not sure, the tell is whether you have ever reorganised a folder tree for pleasure.

How much of your reference is video? Eagle handles video; PureRef's scenes are images. If a third of what you collect is footage — film frames, motion tests, reference clips of how a fabric moves — a board app is going to hold half your library at most. Coii Ref indexes video on the same pass as stills, with the same tags, ratings and query line reaching both, and writes proxies at canvas resolution so a board of clips scrolls like a board of photographs.

Are you the only person who will ever open this? If boards get sent to art directors, self-contained files win, and PureRef's scenes travel well. If the library is yours alone and lives on your own drives, the copying model costs you disk and buys you nothing you will notice.

The offline question, briefly

All three applications on this page run without a connection once installed, and all three do something over the network at some point — activation at minimum. Eagle publishes a thirty-day trial and a licence key check; PureRef sells through its own site; 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 in Coii Ref because there is no in-app updater, and no analytics or crash reporting.

If you work somewhere that audits outbound traffic, ask each vendor for their own list rather than taking a competitor's summary of it — including this one. The point of naming ours here is that it is short enough to be checked, not that the others are long.

Who should buy what

Buy Eagle if you want one application to hold everything, you are comfortable with it keeping its own copies, you work across Windows and macOS, and you want the browser extension and the tagging depth that come with a mature catalogue.

Buy PureRef if the board is the point: always-on-top while you paint, a scene per job, nothing to maintain. Pay the studio licence if you are working commercially, and enjoy one of the few remaining tools that asks you what it is worth.

Buy both if you can — they genuinely complement each other, and together they cost less than most monthly design subscriptions.

Try Coii Ref if the copying is what has been stopping you, you are on a Mac, and you want your folders to stay exactly as they are while something builds an index over the top of them. Thirty days, every feature, no card. If you want free instead, BeeRef is open source and cross-platform and Kuadro costs nothing at all; if you already live in Creative Cloud, Adobe Bridge is free and leaves your folders alone too. The comparison pages for Eagle and PureRef go further into each one than a three-way page can.