Sommo vs Vivino: Which Wine App Is Right for You?
Comparing Sommo and Vivino side by side. Vivino excels at community ratings and price comparison, while Sommo uses AI to score wines, learn your palate, and build real expertise.
Quick Verdict
Vivino is the world's largest wine rating platform, great for checking crowd-sourced scores before buying. Sommo uses AI to analyse wines across hundreds of parameters, then learns your palate over time to deliver increasingly personalised insights. Choose Vivino to see what the crowd thinks. Choose Sommo when you want a genuinely intelligent wine companion.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Sommo | Vivino |
|---|---|---|
| Wine Analysis | AI analyses hundreds of parameters per wine | Crowd-sourced average star rating |
| Personalisation | Learns your palate from your journal and improves over time | Same ratings for everyone |
| Wine Scanning | AI label scanning with comprehensive educational briefing | Label scan showing community ratings and prices |
| Tasting Notes | Structured SAT format with AI feedback and alignment scoring | Free-text reviews with star ratings |
| Restaurant Help | AI-powered menu scoring for wine lists | Check individual wine ratings manually |
| WSET Exam Prep | Full prep for Levels 1-4 with spaced repetition | Not available |
| Wine Purchasing | Focus on understanding, not selling | Built-in marketplace with retailer links |
| Pricing | Free tier + Premium subscription | Free with ads + Premium subscription |
Choose Sommo
Choose Sommo if you want an AI that gets smarter about your palate with every bottle. Sommo scores wines across hundreds of parameters, provides structured tasting feedback, and adapts its recommendations as your journal grows, becoming more valuable the more you use it.
Choose Vivino
Choose Vivino if your main goal is checking crowd-sourced ratings before buying. Vivino's 65 million users provide instant consensus, price comparisons, and a built-in marketplace. It's ideal for quick purchase decisions.
Vivino is the world’s most popular wine app with over 65 million users. It built the largest community-driven wine rating database on the planet, and that’s genuinely impressive.
But if you’ve been scanning labels and checking scores for a while, you might have noticed something: a 4.2-star rating doesn’t actually tell you much. Does it suit your palate? Why does it taste the way it does? Will you like it more than the 4.0-rated bottle next to it?
That’s where Sommo takes a fundamentally different approach.
How the Two Apps Think About Wine
Vivino asks the crowd: “What do 65 million people think of this wine?” You get an average star rating, useful but blunt, and it doesn’t account for your personal taste.
Sommo asks the AI: “What are the hundreds of characteristics of this wine, and how do they align with what this specific user enjoys?” The result is a personalised, multi-dimensional analysis rather than a single number.
Where Vivino Shines
Vivino built something genuinely useful:
- Massive rating database: instant consensus on almost any bottle from millions of users
- Price comparison: see what a wine costs across different retailers
- Wine marketplace: buy directly through the app in many countries
- Social features: see what friends are drinking and follow wine influencers
- Sheer coverage: almost every wine you scan will have ratings available
If you walk into a shop and just need a quick “is this decent?” check, Vivino answers that instantly.
Where Sommo Wins
Sommo takes a completely different approach to what happens after you scan a label.
AI That Scores Smarter Than the Crowd
A Vivino rating is an average of millions of subjective opinions. Sommo’s AI analyses wine across hundreds of parameters including grape characteristics, regional typicity, vintage conditions, winemaking techniques, and flavour profile. It’s not a popularity contest; it’s an intelligent assessment.
An App That Learns Your Palate
This is the big difference. Every wine you log in Sommo’s journal teaches the AI more about your taste. Over time, Sommo’s recommendations and insights become personalised to you, not to 65 million strangers. The more you use it, the smarter it gets.
Scan to Learn, Not Just to Rate
When you scan a label with Vivino, you see a star rating and some prices. When you scan with Sommo, you get a comprehensive wine briefing covering the region’s terroir, the grape’s characteristics, flavour expectations, food pairings, and educational context. Every scan makes you a little more knowledgeable.
AI-Powered Menu Scoring
At a restaurant, Vivino can tell you a wine’s community rating. Sommo Premium’s menu scoring lets you scan the entire wine list and get AI-powered insights on quality and value, a game-changer for ordering wine at restaurants.
WSET Exam Prep
If you’re pursuing WSET certification, Sommo provides dedicated exam prep with flashcards using SM-2 spaced repetition, practice quizzes, and mock exams. Vivino has no educational features.
Wine Character Analysis
After enough journal entries, Sommo generates an AI-powered character analysis, a personality profile of your wine preferences that reveals patterns you’d never notice yourself. It’s like having a personal sommelier who’s been watching your palate evolve.
Can You Use Both?
Absolutely. Many wine enthusiasts use Vivino for quick price checks when shopping and Sommo for the deeper experience: understanding wines, training their palate, and getting increasingly personalised recommendations as their journal grows.
But if you want a single wine app that gets smarter the more you use it, one that understands your palate rather than the average of millions, Sommo is the one that transforms how you experience wine.
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, especially if you want more than crowd-sourced ratings. Sommo's AI analyses wines across hundreds of parameters, far deeper than a 1-5 star average. It also learns your taste over time and offers structured wine education, WSET exam prep, and personalised recommendations.
Yes. Sommo uses AI-powered label scanning (Google Gemini 2.0 Flash) that not only identifies the wine but provides a comprehensive analysis including region, grape variety, winemaking style, food pairings, and what to expect in the glass. It goes well beyond showing a rating number.
Sommo has a generous free tier that includes 5 free wine scans, learning fundamentals, and a 30-day wine journal. Sommo Premium unlocks unlimited scans, all learning modules, WSET prep, menu scoring, and permanent journal storage.
Sommo takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of crowd-sourced star ratings, Sommo's AI evaluates wines across hundreds of parameters for a deeper, more nuanced analysis. As you log wines in your journal, the AI learns your preferences and delivers increasingly personalised insights.
