Beekio vs HiveBook

The short version

HiveBook is a journal — a fast, offline, well-built place to write down what you saw. Beekio is a plan — it reads what you wrote and tells you what to do next. Both are legitimate things to want. Most beekeepers only need the first.

Prices and platforms, as published

HiveBook figures are quoted from hivebook.app as published on 17 August 2026. Check there rather than trusting us — we are not a neutral party, and comparison posts written by other apps in this category disagree with each other about all of our prices, including ours.

Where HiveBook is the better choice

Four cases, and they are not edge cases.

• Your hives have no signal. HiveBook works offline. Beekio does not — inspections need a connection. If you keep bees out of coverage and want to log at the hive rather than afterwards, this decides it on its own.
• You are on Apple and want a native app. HiveBook is a real iPhone, iPad and Mac app. Beekio is a web app. It works well on a phone, but it is not the same thing.
• You want a journal and nothing more. If you already know what to do with your bees and just want somewhere tidy to record it, paying us for reasoning you do not need is a waste of your money.
• Two to five hives. Their free tier covers 5 hives; ours covers 2. On free plans alone, HiveBook gives a small hobbyist more room than we do.

Where Beekio does something different

• It reads the trend, not the entry. A mite count of 3 means little on its own. Three inspections of 1, then 3, then 6 mean something specific, and that is the thing a journal will not tell you — you have to notice it yourself, across weeks and hives.
• A plan at 5am, on Pro and Scaling. Generated in your timezone before you head out, without you asking for it.
• It scales past what you can hold in your head. Twelve hives is manageable in a notebook. Sixty is not. Beekio ranks by risk so the hives needing attention come first.
• Weather on every inspection, on Pro and Scaling, so conditions are on the record rather than in your memory.

On price

Beekio Keeper is $12 against HiveBook Pro at $4.99. We are not going to argue that away. What we will say is that the two are not the same purchase: one is storage, the other is analysis that costs us money every time it runs.

The question that settles it is not which is cheaper. It is whether you lost a colony last season to something visible in your own records two weeks earlier. If you did, one prevented loss covers a year of either product several times over. If you did not, buy the journal.

What we will not claim

• No offline mode, and none planned. Stated plainly because HiveBook has it.
• No native app. Beekio is a web app on any browser.
• The plan assists your judgement, it does not replace it. It shows what your numbers suggest and why.
• Your hive data is never shared with other beekeepers, and there are no advertising or analytics trackers on this site. That is in our privacy policy, not just in marketing copy.

Trying it

Two hives free, no card. Run it next to your journal for a season and decide on your own data. Join the waitlist, or read the docs first.