Best Miniature Painting Apps (2026)

Quick verdict: the market is fragmented and that's fine

paintRack for paint inventory and cross-brand matching. Figure Case for tracking painting progress through stages. Costumary for full project management with budget tracking. Skip Citadel Colour unless you only buy Citadel paints and need official painting guides.

No single app does everything. You'll probably use two. This guide tells you which two to pick.

Why nobody agrees on the best app

The miniature painting app market splits across at least six different jobs: paint inventory, recipe recording, model progress tracking, virtual color testing, army list building, and project management. Most apps do one or two of these jobs. None of them do all six.

The Bolter and Chainsword forums have recurring threads about this. Community members consistently report that the Citadel app disappoints them, that paintRack is solid but limited in scope, and that most people cobble together a workflow from multiple tools. I've painted over 2,000 miniatures since 2015. I've tried every app on this list. Here's what I actually think.

If you want to see how your paints and budget stack up before buying anything, the Paint Scheme Planner is worth running first.

Why the Citadel Colour app disappoints

The Citadel Colour app is the most-downloaded app in this category because Games Workshop bundles the download with new product instructions. But it has real problems that the community talks about openly.

You can't import photos from your camera roll. You can use the in-app camera to scan a paint pot or a miniature, but you can't pull in a photo you already took. On iPhone, the UI sometimes renders blacked-out sections where buttons should be, requiring a restart. This isn't a minor bug for an official app from a billion-dollar company.

The before/after comparison photos are misleading. Several painting step photos in the "Contrast vs Classic" technique guides use the same image for both the before and after states. This is sloppy enough that multiple Bolter and Chainsword members have posted side-by-side screenshots showing the identical images.

Navigation is confusing. Switching between paint ranges, technique guides, and your collection requires multiple taps with unclear back-button behavior. The information architecture doesn't match how painters actually think ("I want to find a specific color" vs. "I want to follow a tutorial").

It only covers Citadel paints. If you use Vallejo, Army Painter, or Contrast-adjacent products from other brands, the app is essentially useless for your inventory.

It's not worthless. The official GW painting guides are genuinely good, and the step-by-step Warhammer model guides have real tutorial value if you're following official recipes. But as your primary painting tool, it'll frustrate you within a week.

paintRack

Best for: paint inventory and cross-brand color matching

paintRack is the most respected pure inventory tool in the community. You can log your paint collection, search by color family, and find cross-brand equivalents ("what Vallejo color is closest to Macragge Blue?"). The equivalent-finder alone is worth the download.

The free version covers basic inventory. The premium tier adds recipe saving, which is the feature I use most. If you've ever stared at a finished model wondering what combination of colors you used six months ago, you'll understand why recipe saving matters.

paintRack's cross-brand database covers Citadel, Vallejo, Army Painter, Scale75, Andrea, and a dozen other brands. It's community-maintained, which means coverage is excellent for popular brands and thin for obscure ones.

Weakness: paintRack doesn't track model progress. It knows your paints, not your projects.

Paint Pad

Best for: recording painting steps cleanly

Paint Pad is a recipe-first app with a noticeably cleaner interface than paintRack. The focus is on building step-by-step records of how you painted something, with space for notes on technique alongside the paint names.

The UI is good enough that I genuinely prefer it to paintRack for recipe recording specifically. The step ordering is drag-and-drop, you can add photos at each stage, and the finished card looks like something you'd actually want to reference later.

Weakness: Paint Pad doesn't have the cross-brand equivalent feature that makes paintRack so useful. It's a recipe notebook, not an inventory manager.

MiniPaints

Best for: a different UI take on the same problem as paintRack

MiniPaints does the same core job as paintRack (paint inventory, cross-brand matching) with a different visual approach. Some people prefer it, some prefer paintRack. Try both and keep the one whose UI feels natural to you.

The database coverage is similar to paintRack. Community feedback suggests paintRack has a slight edge in cross-brand equivalents, but MiniPaints is more actively updated as of mid-2026. Neither is dramatically better than the other.

Weakness: Same scope limitation as paintRack. It manages paints, not projects.

Figure Case

Best for: tracking the pile of shame

Figure Case solves a specific problem: you have a lot of miniatures in various states of completion and you can't remember where everything is. The app lets you log each model or unit and assign it to a stage.

The stages are: Wishlist, Purchased, Unassembled, Assembled, Primed, In Progress, Painted, Based, Finished. That granularity is actually useful. The difference between "assembled" and "primed" is often three weeks on a real shelf.

If you have what the community calls a "pile of shame" (unpainted backlog you feel guilty about), Figure Case makes it visible and therefore manageable. Seeing 60 models in the "Assembled" column next to 40 in "Finished" is clarifying in a way a vague sense of "a lot of grey plastic" is not.

Weakness: Figure Case doesn't track paint recipes or manage your paint inventory. It knows your models, not your paints.

impcat

Best for: testing color schemes before you commit

impcat is genuinely unlike any other app on this list. You upload a 3D model (or choose from the included library), then paint directly on the digital surface to test color schemes before picking up a brush. It's $3.

This sounds like a novelty, but it's actually a useful planning tool. Choosing between a red and a blue scheme for a new army takes ten minutes in impcat versus an hour painting a test model in real life. The digital paint behavior isn't perfect, but it's accurate enough for scheme planning.

The model library is limited, but it covers most popular Games Workshop faction archetypes. You can import custom STL files if you have them.

Weakness: impcat is a planning tool, not a workflow tool. Once you've picked your scheme, there's no recipe system to carry those color choices forward.

Citadel Colour (for completeness)

Best for: following official GW paint tutorials only

As discussed above, the official Games Workshop app has value for one thing: official tutorials. If you're painting a boxed set by following the included scheme exactly, the app gives you step-by-step painted guides that are genuinely thorough.

Outside that use case, its limitations make it frustrating. No cross-brand support, photo import doesn't work reliably, and the UI has known bugs on iPhone.

I used it for a week when it was first recommended to me and went back to paintRack because I couldn't search by color family or find Vallejo equivalents.

Costumary

Best for: managing multiple projects with budget awareness

Costumary is not a paint inventory app. It's a project management tool for makers, which happens to work well for miniature painters who manage multiple armies, commissions, or projects simultaneously.

You can create a project per army, attach reference photos, track milestones (assembled, primed, painted, based), set a budget, and see what you've spent against that budget. The Paint Scheme Planner integrates with the project view. The Army Cost Calculator helps you plan before you buy.

Costumary doesn't know which paints you own or track cross-brand equivalents. It's not competing with paintRack. It's filling the gap that paintRack and Figure Case leave open: project-level tracking with financial visibility.

For a broader overview of how these apps fit into the miniature painting workflow, see Miniature Painting Apps (2026).

Comparison table

What's missing from all of them

No app in 2026 combines paint inventory, recipe saving, model progress tracking, army management, and budget tracking in a single workflow. You'll use two or three apps. That's not a failure of any individual app, it's just where the market is.

The closest thing to a complete workflow I've found is paintRack for inventory and recipe storage, Figure Case for tracking where each model is in the painting process, and Costumary for project-level management and budget awareness. Three apps, three jobs, none of them overlapping in a way that creates friction.

If you want the full picture of how to set up a tracking system for miniature painting, the Miniature Painting Tracker and the minipainting hub both have resources organized by what you're trying to accomplish.

My actual workflow

I use paintRack for my paint inventory and to save recipes. When I finish a scheme I'm happy with, I record each step in paintRack with notes about thinning ratios and application methods. If I need to match a color six months later, it's there.

I use Costumary for project tracking because I'm usually working on 2-3 armies simultaneously and I need to see overall completion percentages, what I've spent against my budget, and what's blocking each project. The reference photo attachment is useful for comparing my painted models against the source art.

I tried impcat once before starting my Thousand Sons, chose between a more golden and a more blue scheme, and found it actually changed my decision. Worth $3 for that alone.

For the best physical tools to use alongside these apps, see Best Miniature Painting Tools (2026).