Comparison
WHIG vs Sortly
Sortly is a catalogue you build item by item. WHIG builds the inventory for you, values it, and seals it for insurance.
If you are comparing Sortly and WHIG for a home contents inventory, it helps to know they are built for different jobs. Sortly is a general-purpose visual inventory tool. You add items one at a time or by scanning barcodes, attach photos, fill in custom fields, organise everything into folders, and sync it across devices. It is popular with businesses tracking stock, collectors cataloguing what they own, and people organising a move. Sortly is polished, flexible, and does that job well.
WHIG is narrower on purpose. It exists for one thing: a private, valued, insurance-ready record of your home contents. Instead of typing in each item, you walk through your home and talk. WHIG's AI identifies what it sees, estimates a replacement cost from current retail pricing data, and captures a timestamped frame for each item. The result is a complete inventory plus a cryptographically sealed Evidence Package, without the manual data entry that usually stops people before they finish.
Both can technically hold a list of your possessions. The real question is which one you will actually complete, where your data ends up living, and whether what you produce will stand up when you need to make a claim. This page walks through those differences fairly, so you can decide which fits.
- Pricing
- Free tier (100 items, 1 user). Paid plans from $24/mo (Advanced, regularly $49).
- Platform
- Web and mobile apps
- Based in
- United States
- Best for
- Sortly is genuinely right for businesses, teams, collectors, and movers who want a flexible, hands-on catalogue with barcodes, custom fields, and folders synced across devices.
WHIG vs Sortly, feature by feature
Estimated values are exactly that. Not a professional valuation.
How Sortly builds your inventory
Sortly builds your inventory through manual effort. You create each item, add a photo, and fill in fields like value, quantity, location, and notes. For products with barcodes you can scan to speed things up, and on paid tiers you can generate QR labels to tag boxes or shelves. For a business with a stockroom of barcoded goods, this is efficient and precise. For a household full of furniture, clothing, electronics, kitchenware, tools, and decor, most of which has no scannable barcode, it means a lot of typing and photographing, room by room, item by item.
WHIG takes the opposite approach. You record a short video walkthrough and narrate as you go. The AI does the cataloguing: it identifies items, estimates a replacement cost from current retail pricing data, and keeps a timestamped frame as visual proof of each one. You are not entering values by hand, which removes both the effort and the guesswork that comes with pricing hundreds of items yourself. The values WHIG produces are estimates, not a professional valuation, and specialist pieces like jewellery or art are flagged for a qualified valuer.
Privacy: where your inventory actually lives
With Sortly, your catalogue is stored in Sortly's cloud, on a US-based service. That is normal for a SaaS inventory tool and convenient for syncing across a team, but it does mean a detailed, photographed list of everything valuable in your home sits on a third party's servers. For a household inventory, that is a meaningful amount of sensitive information held somewhere you do not control.
WHIG is built around zero-knowledge privacy. Your inventory is encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM, the key stays on your phone behind Face ID, and the inventory is never sent to WHIG. The finished record is delivered to storage you own, whether that is Google Drive, iCloud, the device itself, or your own S3 bucket. WHIG's own database never holds item names, brands, values, your transcript, or item images. It keeps only room labels, cryptographic hashes, and anonymised aggregates. The video is processed in isolation and deleted within the hour, and at most within 24 hours. In practical terms, WHIG cannot see what you own, and that is by design.
Proof: will it hold up at claim time?
A spreadsheet or a catalogue is a list. At claim time, an insurer is often interested in evidence: what you owned, roughly what it was worth, and that the record was not assembled or edited after a loss. Sortly is a general inventory tool. It stores photos and values you enter, and you can export to CSV, but it does not cryptographically seal a record or independently verify that it is unchanged. Nothing in Sortly proves when your list was created or that it has not been altered since.
WHIG is designed for exactly that moment. Each step of processing is SHA-256 hashed and signed with ECDSA on the NIST P-256 curve, using a key held in AWS KMS that is never exported. The result is a tamper-evident Evidence Package: if anything in the sealed record changes, verification fails. Anyone, including a loss adjuster, can confirm a record at whig.app/verify directly in their browser, with nothing uploaded. This is documentation and evidence, not a recommendation about your cover, but it gives you a record built to be trusted rather than just a list you typed.
What Sortly really costs
Sortly's free plan covers up to 100 unique items for a single user, with no QR or barcode label creation. A typical home has well more than 100 items once you count furniture, clothing, kitchenware, electronics, tools, and everything in the garage, so most households will hit that ceiling. Beyond it, Sortly is a subscription. The Advanced plan is $24 a month for 500 items and 2 users, the Ultra plan is $74 a month for 2,000 items, and Premium is $149 a month for 5,000 items, with introductory pricing that rises at renewal. These plans make sense for a business amortising the cost across operations, but for a home inventory you keep for years, a monthly fee adds up. Advanced at $24 a month is $288 in a single year.
WHIG is free to start and $38 one-time for the permanent Evidence Package. There is no subscription and no per-item ceiling on what your walkthrough captures. Over a few years of keeping your contents record current, a one-time fee and a recurring monthly plan are simply not in the same range. If your goal is an ongoing home contents record rather than active business stock management, the cost difference compounds in WHIG's favour.
Business inventory vs insurance evidence
It is worth being clear that Sortly is not trying to be an insurance product, and it does not claim to be. It is a strong general-purpose inventory system: stock control, asset tracking, collection management, packing for a move, tracking tools across job sites. Its folders, custom fields, multi-user access, purchase orders, and QuickBooks integration are features a business wants, and they are well executed. If that is your use case, Sortly's flexibility is a genuine strength rather than overhead.
WHIG is purpose-built for home contents insurance evidence. It uses current retail pricing data, estimates replacement costs automatically, captures frame-level proof, and seals the result. It deliberately does not try to be a flexible business catalogue. That focus is why it can remove the manual work and produce a verifiable record. Choosing between them is less about which is better overall and more about whether you are managing business inventory or preparing household insurance evidence.
Who should choose Sortly, and who should choose WHIG
Choose Sortly if you need a flexible catalogue you actively manage: a business tracking stock or assets, a collector who wants custom fields and barcode scanning, a team that needs multi-user access and CSV or QuickBooks export, or anyone who genuinely enjoys organising things by hand and does not need a sealed, verifiable record. For those jobs, Sortly is a well-made tool and the subscription buys real ongoing utility.
Choose WHIG if your goal is a private, valued, insurance-ready record of your home contents that you will actually finish. If the manual entry in any catalogue app is the reason you have never completed a home inventory, WHIG's video walkthrough removes that friction. If you want your data to stay yours, your values estimated for you, your record sealed and independently verifiable, and a one-time price instead of a subscription, WHIG is built for that specific outcome.
What Sortly does well
- Flexible visual cataloguing with photos, custom fields, folders, and QR or barcode scanning that suits business stock, collections, and moves.
- Multi-user and multi-device sync, plus CSV export and integrations like QuickBooks Online on higher tiers, which teams genuinely need.
- A clean, well-designed interface and a usable free tier of up to 100 items for people who want to start small and tag things by hand.
Sortly is genuinely right for businesses, teams, collectors, and movers who want a flexible, hands-on catalogue with barcodes, custom fields, and folders synced across devices.
Where WHIG pulls ahead
Your items never touch our servers
WHIG is zero-knowledge. Your walkthrough is turned into an inventory, encrypted on your device, and delivered to your own Google Drive. We hold room labels and cryptographic hashes, never item names, brands, or values. See exactly how on our security page.
A sealed record you can prove
Every step of processing is hashed and signed, so your Evidence Package is tamper-evident. Anyone can check it, including an insurer, at whig.app/verify. Sortly gives you a list. WHIG gives you proof.
One price, not a subscription
WHIG is free to start and $38 one-time for the permanent Evidence Package. No recurring fee to keep what is already yours.
Available internationally, not US-only
Where Sortly is tied to one market, WHIG works wherever you are. Replacement-cost estimates use current retail pricing data rather than one country's defaults.
The verdict
Sortly and WHIG both produce an inventory, but they are built for different ends. Sortly is an excellent flexible catalogue for businesses, collectors, and movers who want to manage items by hand and pay monthly for ongoing tools. For a private, verifiable, insurance-ready record of your home contents, WHIG is the better fit: it builds the inventory from a video instead of asking you to type it, estimates replacement values automatically, keeps your data encrypted on your own device and in storage you control, and seals the result into a tamper-evident Evidence Package you can verify in a browser. One is a catalogue you maintain. The other is evidence you can rely on, for $38 once. WHIG produces estimates and documentation, not professional valuations.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Sortly free?
- Sortly has a free plan that covers up to 100 unique items for one user. It does not include QR or barcode label creation. Most full households have more than 100 items, so many people reach the free limit and move to a paid plan.
- How much does Sortly cost?
- Beyond the free 100-item tier, Sortly is a monthly subscription. Advanced is $24 a month for 500 items and 2 users, Ultra is $74 a month for 2,000 items, and Premium is $149 a month for 5,000 items, with introductory rates that increase at renewal. Enterprise pricing is custom for 10,000 or more items.
- Can I use Sortly for a home insurance inventory?
- You can use Sortly to list and photograph your possessions and record values you enter yourself, which some people do for insurance. It is a general inventory tool, so it does not estimate replacement costs for you or seal the record. It also does not cryptographically verify that your list was not changed after a loss.
- Does Sortly have AI?
- Sortly builds inventory through manual entry and barcode scanning, item by item. It does not offer an AI video walkthrough that identifies items and estimates values for you. WHIG is the one that uses AI to turn a video into a valued inventory automatically.
- Is there a Sortly alternative built for insurance?
- WHIG is an alternative focused specifically on home contents insurance evidence. It uses current retail pricing data, and turns a short video walkthrough into a valued inventory plus a sealed Evidence Package. It is coming to iOS and Android, with a waitlist open now.
- Is WHIG or Sortly better for contents insurance?
- For contents insurance specifically, WHIG is purpose-built: it values items automatically, captures a timestamped frame per item, and seals the record so it is tamper-evident and verifiable. Sortly is a strong general catalogue but relies on manual entry and does not produce a sealed, verifiable insurance record. Sortly remains the better choice for business stock, collections, and moves.
- Where is my data stored with each app?
- Sortly stores your catalogue in its own cloud on a US-based service. WHIG encrypts your inventory on your device and delivers it to storage you own, such as Google Drive, iCloud, your device, or your own S3, and never holds your item names, values, or images itself. If keeping your data under your control matters to you, that is a key difference.
- Does WHIG value my items for me?
- Yes. WHIG estimates a replacement cost for each item from current retail pricing data as it builds your inventory, so you do not fill in values by hand the way you would in Sortly. These figures are estimates and documentation, not a professional valuation. Specialist items like jewellery or art are flagged so you can have them assessed by a qualified valuer.
See what you own, and prove it
WHIG is coming to iOS and Android. Join the waitlist for early access. Twenty minutes and your phone.
Join the waitlistCompare WHIG with other apps
See how WHIG measures up against the other home inventory apps, side by side.
Sources, as of June 2026
Competitor details are summarised in good faith from public sources on the dates shown and may have changed since. WHIG provides information and documentation, not a professional valuation.