Bubbles vs Sourdough Starter
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Bubbles
Track your home fermentation projects with recipes, reminders, and notes. This app helps you manage sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, and more, with options to create your own recipes and store your progress.
- Fermentation recipes
- Custom recipe creation
- Batch notes and photos
- Ferment archive
- Guides on fermentation
- Offline functionality
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Bubbles keeps track of your home fermentation. Pick a recipe, follow the steps, and get a reminder when it's time to burp, taste, or move the jar to the fridge. - Recipes for sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, sourdough starter, tepache and more - Write your own recipes, or import one from a website link or pasted text (Premium) - Add notes and photos to each batch, and look back at finished ferments in the archive - Back up your ferments, recipes and photos and restore them on a new phone (backup with Premium, restoring is free) - Guides on salt, acidity, temperature, mold vs kahm yeast, cleaning and storage Made in Europe Bubbles is built by a small team in Europe and designed around GDPR principles. You don't need an account, and the app works offline. Your data stays on your device unless you turn on cloud backup, which stores it on our servers in the EU. We never sell data. Privacy Policy: https://bubblesferment.com/privacy-policy Terms of Use (EULA): https://bubblesferment.com/terms-of-service
Sourdough Starter
This app helps you track and care for your sourdough starter and other ferments. It uses your phone's camera to analyze your starter's progress and provides personalized feeding schedules and troubleshooting advice. It also includes recipes and calculators for various fermented foods.
- Camera-based starter analysis
- Personalized feeding schedules
- Troubleshooting for ferment issues
- Recipes for starter and other ferments
- Ferment tracking for multiple types
- Bake planning and calculators
- Voice and widget controls
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Your sourdough starter is alive. Fermento treats it that way. Klaus — or whatever you name yours — has a face. Leave him too long and he looks hungry. Feed him and he beams. It sounds silly right up until you realise you haven't killed a starter in months. A PHOTO INSTEAD OF A GUESS Hold the jar up to the camera. Bubbie reads the bubbles, how far it climbed, the crust drying on the glass — six things a camera can genuinely judge, not ten invented ones. Then she says what it means for your next feed, and moves it. Photograph a cut loaf and she reads the crumb the same way. SIX JARS, ONE SHELF Sourdough starter, brine pickles, kombucha, kraut and kimchi, yogurt and kefir, ginger bug. Each gets its own character, rhythm and checklist. FROM FLOUR AND WATER Three day-by-day recipes raise a starter from scratch: the grams for each day, and what you should be seeing. Around day four it looks dead in every one of them — Fermento tells you that before you throw it out. REMINDERS THAT READ THE ROOM Free jars run on a fixed rhythm you choose. With Plus, tell Fermento how warm your kitchen is and it pulls the next feed forward on hot days, pushes it back when it's cold. Quiet hours are respected — nothing pings you at 3 a.m. Burp reminders for pickles, fizz checks for kombucha, a wake-up when a jar leaves the fridge. FEED BY THE SCALE Tell Fermento once what the empty jar weighs and every feed names the number to watch for instead of an amount to guess at. Your jar can hold a blend — 70 % wheat, 30 % wholegrain rye — and Bubbie says whether that ratio carries it to the next feed. WHEN SOMETHING LOOKS WRONG Grey liquid on top? White film? No rise? Photograph it, or pick what you see from a list. Bubbie explains what it actually is, and with Plus installs a real fix: a changed ratio, a shorter schedule, a set number of feeds. The jar stays in rescue mode until it's back on track. IT LEARNS YOUR STARTER Log a rise and Fermento remembers how long it took. The countdown to the peak is free and runs on your Lock Screen. With Plus it drops the rule of thumb and uses your jar's own measured curve instead. PLAN A BAKE BACKWARDS Say when the dough goes together and Fermento names the feed time and the ratio so the starter peaks exactly then. One plan a month is free. WHEN YOUR HANDS ARE FULL "Hey Siri, feed my starter in Fermento." A widget and a Control Centre button do the same in one tap. On bake day the step you're in counts down on the Lock Screen. EVERYTHING YOU DID, KEPT A calendar that fills itself and, with Plus, a photo timeline per jar and a monthly recap to share. Dough and brine calculators. Discard recipes so nothing goes in the bin. Your whole log exports as CSV — free, because it is your data. BADGES YOU EARN Twenty milestones and twenty-one outfits for your jars. None of them can be bought — they only come from actually looking after your ferments. WHAT LEAVES YOUR IPHONE No account, no sign-up, no ads, nothing sold on. Your jars, photos and history live on the device and sync through your own iCloud if you want them to. A photo sent for a reading is resized, stripped of its location, and stored nowhere — not on the server, not in a log. The weather heads-up is optional and sends a rounded-off region, never an address. Anonymous counts show where people get stuck; a switch in Settings turns them off. FERMENTO PLUS Unlimited jars, full history, the photo readings, the bake planner, rescue plans, temperature-aware reminders, photo timelines and the bake book. Free keeps two jars and 30 days of history. Fermento is a logbook, not a lab. It won't tell you whether something is safe to eat - when in doubt, throw it out. Apple Standard EULA: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Terms of Use: https://jonaspolenz368.github.io/Fermento/terms.html Privacy Policy: https://jonaspolenz368.github.io/Fermento/privacy.html
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Sourdough Starter at every 3 days against Bubbles's every 3 months. Bubbles's advantage is device support (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.3 vs 17.0). On price, rating, ratings volume and ads 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
Both are free to download. Bubbles sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $3.99 per month and Sourdough Starter sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.49 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Bubbles against 5.0 for Sourdough Starter. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 2 respectively.
Bubbles ships an update every 3 months, Sourdough Starter every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and November 6, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Bubbles | Sourdough Starter |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) | 5.0 (2 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 2 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | Freemium |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 15.3 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 95 MB | 16 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | MANTAS LATKAUSKAS | Jonas Polenz |
Customer experience
Bubbles
Sourdough Starter
In-app purchases
Bubbles
- Bubbles Premium Monthly$3.991 Month
- Bubbles Premium Annual1 Month trial$29.991 Year
Sourdough Starter
- FermentoPlusMonthly7 Days trial$4.491 Month
- Fermento Yearly7 Days trial$35.991 Year
Questions
Is Bubbles free?
Is Sourdough Starter free?
Which has better reviews, Bubbles or Sourdough Starter?
Do Bubbles or Sourdough Starter have ads?
Which is updated more often, Bubbles or Sourdough Starter?
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