Vivino vs Hello Vino: Two Ways to Be Told What to Buy

Most people’s first wine app is bought to solve one specific embarrassment: standing in front of 200 bottles with no idea which to pick.

Vivino and Hello Vino both solved it, from opposite directions. Vivino says: show me the bottle and I will tell you what people think. Hello Vino says: tell me what you are eating and I will pick for you.

Both are reasonable answers. Neither, it turns out, is a good long-term relationship.

The Short Answer

Vivino is bottle-first. Scan a label, get a crowd verdict from around 70 million users and 16 million wines as of mid-2026. Free and ad-supported, with a Premium tier at $4.99 a month or $47.90 a year in the US.

Hello Vino was meal-first. Tell it the dish or the occasion and it suggested a style and specific picks, aimed squarely at beginners rather than enthusiasts. It has historically been free, though its availability and feature set have shifted over time, so check the current store listing.

What Vivino Does Well for a Beginner

It removes the fear of a bad bottle. That is not a small thing. When you do not yet know a Côtes du Rhône from a Chianti, a 4.2 average across thousands of ratings is a genuine safety net, and the scanner works on almost anything.

It also builds a rough history. Scan enough bottles and you can look back at what you rated well, which is the beginning of self-knowledge even if the app does little with it.

The ceiling arrives quickly, though. Ratings compress into a narrow band, so once you have learned to avoid the 3.4s, the difference between a 4.0 and a 4.2 stops meaning anything useful. The average is identical for every user, so it cannot account for the fact that you find heavy oak unpleasant. And reviews are unstructured free text, so nothing accumulates into an understanding of your own taste.

What Hello Vino Did Well for a Beginner

It asked a better question. “What are you eating?” is a far more useful prompt than “what bottle are you holding,” because the beginner’s real problem is not judging a specific wine. It is not knowing which category to look in at all.

Guided picks by food, occasion, and mood meant you could walk into a shop with nothing and leave with something sensible. For a nervous buyer, that is exactly the right shape of help.

The limits were structural. Scanning was never the focus. There were no tasting notes and no journal historically, so nothing you learned was retained. And beyond basic beginner guides, there was no education. It answered the question in front of you and then forgot you existed.

Head to Head

Standing in a Shop With a Bottle

Vivino, easily. This is the exact moment it was designed for.

Standing in a Shop With a Recipe

Hello Vino’s model, historically. Vivino can surface pairing information on a wine page and its Premium assistant will answer pairing questions, but the flow assumes you already have a candidate in hand.

Ordering in a Restaurant

Vivino, with a caveat: wine-list scanning is genuinely useful and now sits behind Premium after years of being free. Hello Vino’s occasion-based picks were not really built for reading a specific list in front of you.

Remembering What You Liked

Vivino, weakly. It keeps a history of your scans and ratings. Hello Vino historically kept nothing. Neither turns that history into a usable picture of your palate.

Learning Anything

Hello Vino offered basic beginner guides, which is more than Vivino’s none. But neither has structured learning, a tasting framework, or anything resembling a curriculum. Both are answer machines.

Still Being Developed

Vivino, clearly. It ships updates and its user base keeps growing. Hello Vino’s trajectory has been much quieter, which matters if you plan to rely on an app for years.

Who Should Pick Vivino

You want a safety net and you want it free. You buy bottles from shops and supermarkets, you are not chasing anything rare, and a quick sanity check before spending £20 is all you are after. Vivino is the right first wine app and probably the right free one indefinitely.

Who Would Have Picked Hello Vino

You want to be told what to buy rather than judge what you are holding. You cook, you entertain, and you think in meals rather than grapes. That framing is genuinely more beginner-friendly, and it is the thing worth carrying forward when choosing a replacement.

The Beginner Trap Both Apps Set

Here is what happens after a year with either app. You have scanned or been recommended a hundred wines. You have drunk them. You are no better at wine than when you started.

That is not an accident. Both apps are built so the app does the knowing. Every time you face a decision, you ask the phone, the phone answers, and the transaction closes. There is no mechanism by which you accumulate anything, because there is nowhere for what you noticed to go.

Sommo was built to be the beginner-first app that does not leave you a beginner.

The entry point is the same low-effort promise: scan a label, get an answer. But the answer is a briefing rather than a score, covering the region, the grape, what to expect in the glass, and what to eat with it, so the scan itself teaches you something. Rating a bottle is one tap on a three-tier scale, “not for me”, “solid choice”, or “would buy again”, which is honest about what beginners can actually judge.

From there it opens up at your pace. When you want more, SAT-style tasting notes guide you through appearance, nose, palate, and conclusions with AI feedback on what you missed. Character analysis reads your journal back to you as a palate profile. Learning modules run from fundamentals through to full WSET preparation for Levels 1 to 4 if you ever want to formalise it. And Hello Vino’s better question, start from the meal, is answered too: describe what you are cooking and the cellar picks from the bottles you own, or use the wine pairing finder when you are shopping.

Where it does not compete: no crowd average, no marketplace, no price comparison. If your only question is “will strangers approve of this bottle,” Vivino answers that better and free.

All Three, Side by Side

The Bottom Line

If you are picking between these two today, pick Vivino. It is the living app, the database is unmatched, and the free tier does the job.

But notice what you are actually buying: a permanent subscription to not knowing. The apps that ask you what you are eating and the apps that tell you what strangers thought are both, in the end, doing the thinking for you.

The alternative is an app that expects you to get better, and helps. Try Sommo free, or start with the beginner’s guide to wine.

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