ArtDeck VS ViewForge

ArtDeck's answer

Most reference apps stop once the image is saved but ArtDeck keeps going.

It is the only reference board where collecting and studying happen in the same place, on the device you happen to be holding.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

ArtDeck's answer

Against PureRef. PureRef is excellent on a desktop and has more specialized window modes: click-through transparency, always-on-top of one chosen app, separate overlays. It also runs on Windows and Linux, which ArtDeck does not. Choose ArtDeck when your references need to move between iPhone, iPad, and Mac, when you work on iPad beside a drawing app, when you study video reference, or when you want palette, value, composition, and measurement tools built in.

Against Eagle. Eagle is a library manager with strong tagging, smart folders, and batch operations on Mac and Windows. It has no native phone or tablet board. ArtDeck is a board first: things sit side by side on a canvas rather than in a grid, and the board travels with you.

Against Pinterest and the camera roll. Both are good at saving and bad at using. Pinterest ties your collection to an account, an algorithm, and a connection. ArtDeck boards are files on your devices, work offline, and never get reorganized by someone else's feed.

Against Milanote and general canvas tools. Those are built for teams planning work together, priced per seat per month. ArtDeck is built for one person studying images, bought once.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

ArtDeck's answer

People who save images because looking at them carefully is part of how they work.

Concretely, that is digital artists and illustrators, concept and game artists, 3D artists, designers, photographers, animators working from motion reference, and art students. It also fits anyone with thousands of screenshots and saved pins who has never been able to actually use them.

What they have in common is a habit rather than a job title: they gather references from the web, the camera roll, files, and other apps, lay them out side by side, and study what makes them work. They also tend to own Apple hardware and move between it during a single project. Save something on the phone in the morning, study it on iPad beside Procreate in the afternoon, organize the board on Mac later.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

ArtDeck's answer

ArtDeck started from a personal problem: references were everywhere and useful nowhere. Saved pins in one place, screenshots in the camera roll, links in browser tabs, images in folders. Plenty of collecting, almost no returning.

The first version was the fix for that, a board where images, links, notes, and videos could sit together on one canvas and come along across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The second idea is the one that shaped the app. Collecting a reference and understanding it are not the same thing. Artists have always had a manual set of moves for the second part: squint at the image, flatten it to values, sample the colors, check where the lines land, measure the angle. Those moves were happening outside the app, in other tools or not at all. So ToolBox was built into the board, five lenses that open on any saved image without taking you away from it.

The belief underneath all of it is that what you collect shapes what you create. Collecting is creative work, not filing. And a tool for that should be yours: one purchase, no subscription, works offline, your boards on your own devices.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

ArtDeck's answer

ArtDeck is a native Apple application, not a cross-platform wrapper. It is written in Swift with SwiftUI, and shares one codebase across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS while adapting the interface to each.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import