The three-way comparison where one of them imports another

The reason these names get typed into the same search box is not that they compete. It is that refern's pricing page lists an importer for PureRef boards — alongside Eagle and Allusion — so somebody who has used PureRef for five years can find out what happens if they move. That is a real question with a real answer, and it deserves better than a feature grid.

Coii Ref is the third name here because we make it, and because on a Mac it is the cheapest of the three at $19 once. It is also the narrowest by a distance, and this page is written so you can work out whether narrow is what you want before you spend anything.

The verdict, up front

PureRef if the tool's job is to be visible while you paint. Nothing else on this page floats over your art program, and that is worth more than any number of database features to somebody who works with a board open eight hours a day.

refern if you want the most capable reference library in this category and you are willing to pay $35 for it. On-device automatic tagging, a search that finds images nobody labelled, a relationship graph, colour search, smart folders, browser extensions for three browsers, importers from three apps, and Windows and Linux builds as well as macOS. Coii Ref has none of those. If you read that list and two items made you sit up, stop reading and go and try it.

Coii Ref if the appeal is a smaller app with a specific promise: your folders stay exactly as they are, the workspace is a directory you can copy, and every board is a plain JSON file you can open in a text editor in ten years. $19 once, three machines, macOS 11 or later, thirty days to try every feature with no card and no account.

What each one costs, checked today

PureRef's tiers are on its download page: the pay-what-you-want tier is marked personal use only, single user, hobbyist or educational, with $7 and $15 offered as suggestions and a custom field; the small business licence is $49 once for a maximum of three users per studio with free updates in the 2.x line; the business tier is per seat, monthly or annual. Their FAQ says a valid licence can be used on as many computers as you need.

refern's price and trial are on its own pricing page: $35 once, three devices, thirty days with no card, every feature, updates included. Its changelog puts v1.7.0 on 26 August 2026, adding PDF viewing with continuous scrolling and text search inside the document, after v1.6.0 on 23 August introduced linked copies — one file appearing in more than one folder without being duplicated.

Coii Ref is $19 once for three machines, updates included, nothing renewing.

The feature table, with the losses marked

Nine of those rows go to refern, one to PureRef, three to Coii Ref, and that distribution is the honest shape of this category. refern is the more capable application and pretending otherwise on our own site would be both wrong and the kind of wrong you would catch in five minutes on their download page.

What PureRef gives you that neither of the others does

A board that hovers. Always on top, an overlay mode, a window you can lock, transparency to the mouse, desaturation, notes and alignment tools — all of it in service of one idea, which is that the reference should be in your eyeline while your hand is busy. Neither refern nor Coii Ref does this, and a library window behind a painting app is not a substitute for it.

It is also the smallest install, the one that asks least of your machine, and the only one of the three whose price is a question rather than a number. If your collection is a few hundred images and your problem is entirely about the current job, a library app is a heavier answer than you need.

What refern gives you that Coii Ref does not

Automatic tagging, on your own machine. You download the recognition components once; after that it can suggest tags, pull text out of an image and describe what is in it, locally, when you ask. Thirty thousand untagged images is the difference between a library and a folder you scroll, and this is the feature that closes that gap. There is no answer to it on our side and no plan you should count on.

Search by meaning. Describe what you want rather than naming a tag, and it surfaces images that carry no such label. Coii Ref's search is literal: it knows what is already true of a file — type, extension, dimensions, rating, tags, notes, EXIF — and nothing about what a picture depicts. This is the single biggest capability gap between the two apps.

Everything a mature library grows. A relationship graph between images, colour search, smart folders, linked copies so one file can sit in several folders without duplication, embedded IPTC and XMP keywords read out of files that already carry them, browser extensions for saving from the web, PDF viewing as of last month. Coii Ref has none of those. It reads colour into its index but has no search-by-colour filter, and describing that any other way would be a lie you would catch on day one.

Three platforms. Windows and Linux builds exist and are supported. Coii Ref is macOS only.

What Coii Ref gives you

Nothing of yours changes, and you can see that it did not.

The database, the thumbnails and the canvas-resolution proxies all live inside the folder you pointed at. Whatever backs that folder up has backed up the library; moving the folder to another drive moves the workspace; opening it on a second Mac needs no export step. Delete the three coii- items and you are looking at your original folders, unchanged, because nothing of yours was ever put anywhere else.

A board is a file you can read. Something.coii-canvas is pretty-printed JSON in one of your own folders, listing which images sit where. It diffs in git, it syncs through whatever you already sync with, and you could write a script against it without asking us anything. Neither of the other two publishes what a board is at this level — PureRef's .pur is its own document format, and refern does not document where a canvas lives — so this is the one guarantee on this page you can verify with cat instead of trusting. The Obsidian Canvas comparison is the page where somebody else wins the same argument, if you want to see it argued against us.

One query line, and saved views that follow renames.

AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses, because grouping is what makes a query impossible to draw as chips. A term the parser does not recognise becomes free text instead of an error, so the grid keeps returning rows while you type. type:video ext:mov narrows to clips; has:notes no:tags finds what you wrote about and never filed; -is:favourite excludes what you already starred.

A very short network list. Two kinds of outbound 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 trial days. No update check, because there is no in-app updater. No analytics and no crash reporting. refern publishes its own list — activation, trial time, update checks, optional component downloads, feedback and requested web saves — and every item on it is reasonable for what the app does. Ours is shorter because the app does less.

$19. Sixteen dollars is not a reason to choose a tool you will open every day. It is worth stating because both are one-time purchases with three device slots and a thirty-day trial, so this is the one row where the two are directly comparable.

Moving between them

PureRef to refern is the well-trodden path and the reason this comparison exists. Boards come across as editable canvases with layout, notes, drawings, groups and fills intact, which is a genuinely unusual amount of care for an importer.

PureRef to Coii Ref is manual. There is one importer here and it reads a refern library, so you would save the images off a scene into a folder, index the folder, and rebuild the arrangement once on a canvas. For one board that is two minutes. For forty boards it is an afternoon, and probably not worth it.

refern to Coii Ref is the path the importer was built for. Point Coii Ref at the folder your references already live in and let it read them; then run the importer, which carries ratings, tags, notes and canvases across by matching relative paths. Originals are neither moved nor rewritten, so your refern library still works afterwards and you can run both for a fortnight while you decide. What does not survive is anything that depended on a feature we do not have: graph connections have nowhere to go, and tags a tagger suggested arrive as ordinary tags with no way to generate more.

Coii Ref to anywhere is the case the file formats were chosen for. The images never moved, so any app that reads folders sees the same library it would have seen. The boards are JSON, readable without us.

The scale question, because it changes the answer

Under a thousand images, PureRef wins by default: there is nothing to search that scrolling does not solve, and an index is machinery you do not need yet.

Between one thousand and about ten thousand, an index starts paying for itself, and the choice between refern and Coii Ref is mostly about whether you have tagged anything. If you have not, refern's tagger is worth the difference in price on its own. If your files already carry structure — sensible folders, some ratings, notes you actually wrote — a literal query line over them is enough, and the cheaper app does the job.

Past that, at forty thousand across several drives with one of them unplugged today, both libraries handle it and the question becomes what the library does when the disk changes underneath it. Coii Ref's answer is the watcher: filesystem events become the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again, so a rename stays a rename rather than becoming a new file with a lost rating, a moved folder is followed, and a drive that comes back is reconciled rather than rediscovered. It keeps running after a trial ends, because an index that quietly goes stale is worse than no index at all.

What to test during the trials, rather than reading about

All three can be tried before you pay, so the cheapest way to settle this is a fortnight of your own material rather than anybody's comparison table. Three tests separate them faster than any feature list.

Point each one at the folder you dread. Not the tidy one — the four-year directory named refs 2 with duplicates and screenshots in it. What you are measuring is how long the first pass takes, whether the app wants to reorganise it, and how much disk it costs you afterwards.

Search for something you saved and cannot name. Try it in refern's meaning-based search and in a literal query line. If the picture you were thinking of comes back from a description, that is refern's tagger and semantic search earning $35 in one afternoon. If you find it just as fast with tag:any:... and a rating filter, you already have the structure a cheaper app needs.

Build one board and then look at what it became. In PureRef it is a .pur scene you can hand to somebody. In refern it is a canvas inside the library. In Coii Ref it is a JSON file in whichever folder you saved it to — open it in a text editor while the trial is running, because that is the claim most worth verifying before you buy rather than after.

A fourth test, if video matters: drop thirty clips in and see what the app does with them. Coii Ref indexes them on the same pass as the stills, gives them the same tags and ratings, reaches them from the same query line, and writes proxies at canvas resolution so a board of footage scrolls like a board of photographs. PureRef's scenes are images, so that folder simply is not part of its world.

One more thing worth doing while all three trials are live: open the folder each app writes into and look at it. What an application leaves on your disk after a fortnight tells you more about how it will behave in year three than any feature list does, and it takes about ninety seconds to check.

Who should pick which

PureRef: you paint or model with a board in view; your reference problem is this week's, not this decade's; you want to pay what you think it is worth, or $49 for the studio.

refern: you want the most capable library in the category; you have a large untagged collection; you want tagging, meaning-based search, colour, a graph, or browser extensions; you work on Windows or Linux as well as a Mac.

Coii Ref: you are on a Mac; your folders are already organised the way you want them and you refuse to hand them to an application; you want boards that are plain files; you collect video as well as stills; $19 once, and the smallest network footprint of the three.

Neighbouring pages if this did not settle it: Coii Ref against PureRef and against refern go deeper on each pairing, Eagle versus PureRef covers the catalogue that copies your files, the Eagle comparison explains that copying in detail, and Kuadro is the free option for people who only wanted the floating windows. Or take the thirty days: download Coii Ref and point it at the folder you would be most embarrassed to show anyone.