Libella.app VS TitleEntry

Libella.app's answer

Most book apps rely on retail databases, so they struggle with older, out-of-print and non-English books. Libella.app looks books up in national library catalogues across Europe and the US (Library of Congress, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, BnF, SBN Italy, Biblioteca Nacional de España and more), so it finds the exact edition you own, even books printed before the ISBN existed. It runs in the browser on both phone and computer: scan on your phone, organise on a big screen.

TitleEntry's answer:

TitleEntry reads books from a photo of the shelf. The AI bookshelf scanner reads the spines, identifies each book and picks the edition from the publisher printed on the spine, so old, second-hand and foreign-language books with no usable barcode still get catalogued. Barcode scanning handles everything with an ISBN, and books with no barcode at all can be added from a photo of the title page. The same catalogue is then used for AI stocktaking: photograph the shelves and TitleEntry reports what is missing, short or not yet catalogued.

Libella.app's answer

If your shelves hold older or European books, Libella.app finds them where other apps return nothing. It works on phone and computer without installing anything, keeps your data in one account across devices, and lets you edit many books at once in a table view. There are no ads and no third-party trackers. The first 100 books are free forever, and larger libraries cost 2.99 €/month or 29 € once.

TitleEntry's answer:

Most cataloguing apps depend on a barcode. TitleEntry also works where barcodes run out: shelves of older stock, books in other languages and collections that were never catalogued. It is one place to add books, organise them on shelves, check them against lists, count them at stocktake and export them, from a phone or a desktop browser. Libraries can export MARC records and print barcode and spine labels; bookshops can record sales against their stock. Every account is set up with you, so you start with a catalogue shaped to your collection.

Libella.app's answer

People with large home libraries who no longer know what they own: book collectors, avid readers, families sorting out an inherited collection, and anyone with older or non-English books that mainstream apps don’t recognise. Many of our users catalogue hundreds of books in their first week.

TitleEntry's answer:

Bookshops, both new and second-hand, school and small libraries, and private book collectors: anyone with a physical collection that needs an accurate, searchable record and a fast way to keep it up to date.

Libella.app's answer

Libella.app started with a simple problem: a home full of books and no idea what was on the shelves. Existing apps worked well for new English bestsellers, but not for the older and local editions that fill most European homes. So we built a catalogue that asks the libraries themselves, connecting it to national library catalogues across Europe and the US. It is made by a small independent team in Europe.

TitleEntry's answer:

TitleEntry began with a simple question: why does cataloguing a shelf still mean typing every book in by hand? The first customer was a bookshop in Turkey with a large legal and academic list, and about half its stock was missing from the usual book databases. Making those books findable shaped the product: TitleEntry looks books up across several sources, including national library catalogues, and reads spines and title pages when no database has the book. It has since grown to serve libraries, schools and collectors, with stocktaking, list checks, labels and MARC export added along the way.

Libella.app's answer

A progressive web app in plain JavaScript, hosted on Netlify with serverless functions; Supabase for accounts and the database; Google Gemini for recognising books from shelf photos and copyright pages; our own bridge to national library catalogues over Z39.50 and SRU; plus Open Library and Google Books.

TitleEntry's answer:

A web app that runs in any phone or desktop browser and can be installed to a home screen. AI vision models read book spines and title pages, the phone camera or a USB scanner reads barcodes, and book details come from several book databases and national library catalogues.