Comparison

BeanBase vs OLLA Brew Lab

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

BeanBase

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BeanBase is an app thoughtfully designed for coffee lovers like you. It’s more than just a logging tool—it’s your intelligent companion for exploring, learning, and enjoying the world of coffee. Core Features: - Comprehensive Logging: Easily record every detail of your coffee beans—from origin, elevation, and variety to roaster, roast level, and processing method. - Precision Brewing Tracker: Keep track of your brewing sessions in detail, including equipment used, grind size, water temperature, brew time, final rating, and tasting notes. - Personalized Flavor Library: Capture the subtle flavors and textures of coffee to build your own tasting archive. - Data Visualization: Discover hidden patterns with intuitive charts that analyze your brewing data, bean preferences, and origin distribution. - Intelligent Identification: Simply take a picture of the coffee packaging and AI will automatically extract detailed information such as bean variety, origin, processing method, etc., making recording easy and fun. You no longer have to manually enter tedious coffee information. - Elegant Browsing: Enjoy your coffee bean collection like a gallery with a unique carousel view that showcases key details and photos at a glance. - Highly Customizable: Beyond recording, you can also manage your own origins, varieties, processing methods, roasters, and more—creating a database that truly reflects your coffee world. Whether you’re just stepping into the world of specialty coffee or you’re a seasoned enthusiast, BeanBase helps you systematically manage your coffee knowledge, enhance your tasting skills, and document every step of your coffee journey.

About

OLLA Brew Lab

Features
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OLLA Brew Lab is a coffee workbench for iPhone and iPad that keeps roast curves, brew logs and cupping records in one place. It is made for home roasters, specialty coffee enthusiasts and small roasters. Bean cards, brew logs and cuppings are free. Roast to Cup, the roastery workbench for curves, roast profiles and inventory, is part of OLLA Pro. ROAST CURVES (OLLA PRO) Log a roast live with large buttons for charge, yellowing, first crack and drop; development ratio and weight loss follow from what you record. Replay any curve, compare batches, and set a batch as your baseline. Import curve files in 11 formats; the source is detected from the file itself. ROAST PROFILES: DESIGN BEFORE YOU CHARGE (OLLA PRO) Set targets for first crack, drop and development ratio, and see the first-crack window, drop window and weight loss projected on the spot. No machine connection is needed. Save a design to the curve library, or export it as .alog, JSON or CSV. YOUR BEAN LIBRARY One card per bag: origin, variety, process, estate, altitude, roast level, roast date, purchase details and your own notes. Resting and drinking windows count down on their own; a Home Screen widget shows a pinned bean. Photograph a label, a bean list or a cafe menu and OLLA reads it on device, showing the words each field came from; nothing is saved until you confirm. On supported devices, Apple Intelligence fills gaps, corrects misreadings and adds explanations and translation in three languages, all on device. The Coffee Codex holds 2,000+ cross-linked entries, from origins and varieties to processing and brewing. BREW LOG Record dose, grind, water temperature, ratio, TDS, extraction yield, timing and sensory impressions. The Tools tab sits alongside, with a step-recipe brew timer, an extraction-yield calculator and brewing-water recipes. CUPPING Score on a classic ten-attribute sheet, or use sensory scoring: cup profile, quality impression and five-cup consistency. Describe flavor with 16 everyday words or the full flavor wheel, and export a cupping sheet as a PDF. For professional sessions, OLLA Pro adds blind-coded assessment with cup-by-cup records and a five-class verdict from L5 to L1. FIELD GUIDE City coffee guides, one volume per city, readable offline. Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Fukuoka are published; the other cities on the city bar are still being curated. Each list is selected from public data by OLLA's own scoring. COFFEE JOURNAL Beans, brews, cuppings and roasts stay linked, gathered in one archive with search, filters and yearly stats. HOW PEOPLE USE OLLA · A home roaster designs the next batch, logs it, and cups it a few days later on the same bean card. · A specialty coffee drinker scans a new bag, watches its resting window and dials in a pour over. · A small roaster keeps green and roasted stock, lot codes and labels in one ledger with OLLA Pro. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No sign-up is required. No tracking, no ads, no third-party analytics. Your records stay on your device, and in your own iCloud if you turn on sync. Camera access is requested only when you scan and photo access only when you pick a photo; recognition runs on device. OLLA works in English, Simplified Chinese and Japanese. OLLA PRO OLLA Pro includes Roast to Cup (roast curves, pre-roast design, inventory, labels and assessment sessions), iCloud sync across devices, PDF reports with your shop name, and advanced widgets. Roast and inventory records from before 1.3.0 stay viewable. OLLA Pro is a monthly or annual auto-renewing subscription, or a one-time purchase; the annual plan includes a 7-day free trial. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation. A subscription renews automatically unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel it in your Apple Account settings. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Screenshots

BeanBase4 screens
OLLA Brew Lab4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is in-app purchases: OLLA Brew Lab at none against BeanBase's 1. OLLA Brew Lab also leads on iOS requirement (16.0 vs 18.0). On price, update cadence, ads and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. BeanBase sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. OLLA Brew Lab asks for nothing beyond the download.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly weekly. The most recent releases landed on September 30, 2026 and October 9, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard2 real differences · 4 level
BeanBase versus OLLA Brew Lab: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterBeanBaseOLLA Brew Lab
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyWeeklyWeekly
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesNo — better
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad
Requires iOS18.016.0 — better
Further details — not scored
Size43 MB169 MB
Age rating4+4+
Developer超 李HU JIANHUA

In-app purchases

1 purchases

BeanBase

One-time1
  • One-time Unlock$12.99
None

OLLA Brew Lab

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is BeanBase free?
BeanBase is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is OLLA Brew Lab free?
OLLA Brew Lab is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do BeanBase or OLLA Brew Lab have ads?
Neither BeanBase nor OLLA Brew Lab shows ads.
Which is updated more often, BeanBase or OLLA Brew Lab?
BeanBase ships an update weekly, and OLLA Brew Lab weekly. Most recently, BeanBase was updated on September 30, 2026 and OLLA Brew Lab on October 9, 2026.

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