Beli alternatives: 4 other ways to track the restaurants you love

September 3, 2026 · 3 min read

Beli deserves its popularity. The head-to-head ranking mechanic (is this place better than that place?) produces a personal top-100 that’s weirdly fun to build, and the social layer of friends, leaderboards, and shared tastes gives it real pull.

But not everyone bounces off Beli for the same reason. Some people don’t want another social feed. Some want to share a list with exactly one person, not a network. Some just want a private record that isn’t anyone’s growth metric. Different reason, different alternative: here are four.

1. GoodEats: if you want it private

GoodEats is the app I built, so discount my bias accordingly. But it exists precisely because I wanted the tracking half of Beli without the social half. Two shelves (“Been” and “Want to go”), 1 to 5 stars plus notes, dish-level ratings so you never forget what to order, a color-coded map, and menu scanning that runs entirely on your phone.

The defining difference: no account, no feed, no analytics. Your data lives on your device and in your personal iCloud, syncs through Apple’s infrastructure, and can be exported as JSON any time. The only thing that ever reaches a server I run is the optional feedback form, if you choose to use it; your list of places never does. Nobody, including me, can see where you eat. If your reaction to a dining leaderboard is “why is this a competition?”, this is your lane.

2. Truffle: if you want a journal with friends

Truffle sits between the extremes: it works as a personal restaurant journal but adds a social layer for connecting with foodie friends when you want it. Less rank-driven than Beli, more record-keeping.

3. Vimini: if you want sharing without the accounts

Vimini pitches itself at “restaurant aficionados”: save your favorite places, import the lists you already keep in Notes or Google Maps, and share reviews with friends, no login required. It’s newer and lighter than the others here, but if what pushed you off Beli was the account-and-feed apparatus rather than the sharing itself, it’s the closest thing to a middle path.

4. A spreadsheet: if you want total control

Unfashionable but real: a Google Sheet with columns for name, neighborhood, status, rating, and notes does 80% of the job, costs nothing, and bends to any system you invent. What you give up is capture speed (no share-sheet saving) and the map view, which, in practice, is what decides whether the list gets used when you’re standing on a corner, hungry.

How to choose

Ask one question: who is the list for?

• An audience of friends → Beli.
• A small shared circle → Truffle; sharing without sign-ups → Vimini.
• Just you, forever, privately → GoodEats.
• A committee of one with strong opinions about columns → the spreadsheet.

And whichever you pick, the advice from our capture-system post applies: the tool matters less than the ten-second habit of saving a place the moment someone mentions it.

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