Miniature painting has a tracking problem

I've been painting minis for 11 years. At last count I own somewhere north of 200 paint pots across Citadel, Vallejo, and ProAcryl. I have a pile of shame that would make a Hoarders producer weep. Half-built Combat Patrol boxes. A Leviathan Dreadnought that's been "in progress" since 2023. Start Collecting kits I bought on sale and haven't opened.

You probably have a similar situation. Paints you forgot you own, kits buried in a closet, no clear picture of what you've spent on the hobby this year. Most painters track this in their head, a spreadsheet, or not at all.

I've tried every app that claims to solve this. Here's what actually works in 2026, what doesn't, and where the gaps still are.

Quick verdict

Short on time? Here's who should use what:

• Best paint inventory tracker? paintRack. 15,000+ paints, 50+ brands, solid color matching.
• Best for Games Workshop painters specifically? Citadel Colour. Free paint guides and step-by-step recipes.
• Best backlog tracker? Pile of Potential. Purpose-built for your grey tide.
• Best for painting consistency? Hobby Streak. Gamifies your daily painting habit.
• Best all-in-one project tracker? Costumary. References, materials, budget, timeline, and build log in one workspace.
• Looking for a MiniPaints replacement? paintRack is the closest thing.

1. paintRack

• Platforms: iOS, Android
• Price: Free / Premium $3.99
• Best for: Tracking your paint collection and finding color matches across brands

paintRack is the dominant paint inventory app and it's earned that spot. Over 15,000 paints from 50+ manufacturers. Citadel, Vallejo, The Army Painter, Scale75, ProAcryl, Kimera, AK Interactive. If a paint exists, paintRack probably has it.

What it does well:

Collection tracking is the core feature and it works. Mark paints as owned, on your wishlist, or running low. The color matching tool is genuinely useful. Need a Vallejo equivalent for Retributor Armour because your local store is out of Citadel metallics? paintRack will find you the closest match across every brand in its database.

The premium tier at $3.99 (one-time, not subscription) unlocks unlimited collections, barcode scanning, and advanced search filters. That's a fair price for what you get.

Where it falls short:

paintRack is a catalog, not a project manager. It knows what paints you own but nothing about what you're building with them. No project tracking. No budget calculation. No timeline for your army project. No build log for documenting your NMM attempts or that wet blending technique you finally nailed.

Worth noting: Brushrage is a free alternative with a similarly large paint database, session timers, and barcode scanning. It's more feature-dense than paintRack's free tier and includes photo attachments per project. If you want paint tracking without paying anything, Brushrage is worth trying.

If you're painting a single model, paintRack is plenty. If you're planning a full Kill Team or a display piece with 30 paints across multiple sessions, you'll end up pairing paintRack with a spreadsheet or a second app. Which is fine, but it means your hobby data lives in two places.

2. Citadel Colour

• Platforms: iOS, Android
• Price: Free
• Best for: Games Workshop painters who want official paint recipes and tutorials

Games Workshop built this app and it shows. The paint guides are excellent. Pick a model (Ultramarines Intercessor, Nighthaunt Chainrasp, whatever), and it walks you through every step. Basecoat with Macragge Blue, wash with Nuln Oil, layer with Calgar Blue, edge highlight with Fenrisian Grey. The step-by-step format is clear and beginner-friendly.

What it does well:

The color recipes are the real value. Want to paint bone armor? Here's Zandri Dust, Agrax Earthshade, Ushabti Bone, Screaming Skull. Want glowing green? Warpstone Glow, Biel-Tan Green, Moot Green. Each recipe includes the technique (basecoat, wash, drybrush, layer) so you're learning method alongside color choice.

The "Colour Wheel" feature helps you explore complementary schemes. If you're new to color theory for miniatures, it's a solid starting point.

Where it falls short:

The big one: GW paints only. If you use Vallejo Model Color, Army Painter Speedpaints, ProAcryl, or Scale75 (and a lot of experienced painters do, because the price-per-ml is better), half your collection is invisible to this app. No cross-brand matching. No way to add non-GW paints.

There's also no project tracking, no budget features, no backlog management. It's a paint guide, not a hobby planner. And the app occasionally pushes you toward buying more Citadel paints, because of course it does.

3. MiniPaints

• Platforms: Was iOS, Android
• Price: Was free
• Best for: Nothing, unfortunately. It's dead.

I'm including MiniPaints because people still search for it. It was a paint collection tracker that did the basics. Mark paints as owned, browse by brand, track what you need. Simple and functional.

Then it stopped getting updates. The app won't open on recent versions of iOS or Android. The developer appears to have moved on. No announcement, no sunset notice. It just stopped working.

If you're looking for a MiniPaints replacement: paintRack is the closest equivalent with a much larger database and active development. If you had your collection logged in MiniPaints, you'll need to rebuild it manually. There's no export or migration path.

4. Pile of Potential

• Platforms: Web
• Price: Free
• Best for: Tracking your grey tide and feeling slightly less guilty about it

The name alone tells you this was built by a hobbyist. Pile of Potential is a miniature backlog tracker. Add your kits, mark them as unbuilt, work-in-progress, or complete, and watch your grey tide slowly (very slowly, in my case) shrink.

What it does well:

The concept is perfectly targeted. Every miniature painter has the same problem: buying faster than you build. Seeing your backlog laid out with clear status tracking creates a mild accountability that spreadsheets don't. It's new, niche, and built specifically for this one pain point.

Where it falls short:

Backlog tracking is all it does. No paint inventory. No project planning. No budget tracking (which might be a feature, honestly, because I don't want to know my total spend). No timeline management. No build logging.

If you want a focused tool for one specific problem, Pile of Potential does that well. If you want a complete hobby management system, you'll need to pair it with other tools.

5. Hobby Streak

• Platforms: Web
• Price: Free
• Best for: Painters who need motivation to stay consistent

Hobby Streak gamifies your painting habit. Log that you painted today, build a streak, try not to break it. The same psychology that makes Duolingo effective, applied to basecoating Intercessors instead of learning Spanish.

What it does well:

It works for motivation. Seeing a 14-day streak makes you think twice about skipping a session. The community aspect (other painters posting their streaks) adds social accountability. If your main problem is consistency rather than organization, Hobby Streak addresses that directly.

Some painters swear by the "just 15 minutes a day" approach, and having a streak tracker reinforces that habit. Even a quick drybrush session or basing three models counts. Liber Pigmenta takes a similar approach with gamified painting stages and achievements, if you want streaks plus a Kanban-style progress board.

Where it falls short:

It's a habit tracker, not a project manager. No paint inventory. No backlog tracking. No budget. No timeline. No build log. It answers "did I paint today?" but not "what should I paint next?" or "how much have I spent this quarter?" or "what paints do I need for this project?"

Good as a supplement. Not a standalone solution.

6. Costumary

• Platforms: Web
• Price: Free (2 active projects) / $9/mo (unlimited)
• Best for: Painters who want references, materials, budget, timeline, and build log in one connected workspace

Full disclosure: this is us. I'll be straightforward about what we do well and where we're still catching up.

What we do well:

Everything lives in one project workspace. Here's what that looks like for a miniature painting project:

Reference board. Pin box art, color schemes, conversion inspiration, other painters' work you're referencing. If you're painting a display piece and pulling OSL references from four different sources, they all live on one board. Unlimited uploads on the paid tier (200 per project). You can share a public link so other painters can see your references or finished work.

Materials list with status tracking. Every paint, brush, basing material, and supply gets a status: need, ordered, arrived, owned, tested, used. When you're planning a zenithal prime into contrast paint scheme and need to check whether you actually own Basilicanum Grey or just thought about buying it, the answer is right there.

Budget that auto-calculates from your materials. Add a Citadel Combat Patrol box at $160, six new paints at $4.90 each, basing supplies at $15, and the workspace totals it automatically. You'll finally know how much that "quick little side project" actually cost. We also have a free budget calculator that works without an account.

Timeline with hobby-specific phases. Assembly, priming, basecoating, layering, detailing, basing, varnishing. Set deadlines for each phase. Useful if you're painting an army for a tournament or finishing a display piece for a competition.

Build log with structured entries. What you worked on, what technique you tried, what worked, what failed, what to try next session. After 11 years of painting I still can't remember how I achieved a specific effect three months ago. The build log fixes that.

Build assistant. It reads your paint list, budget, timeline, and build log before answering questions. Ask "what should I work on next?" and it references your actual project state, not generic advice.

Collaboration. Bring other painters into a workspace for group army projects or painting challenges.

PNG/PDF export of reference boards. Templates for common project types (army project, single display mini, kill team).

Where we're still catching up:

No paint database like paintRack's 15,000+ color catalog. We track what you add to your project, but we don't have a browsable database of every paint from every brand with color matching. paintRack does that better right now.

No native App Store or Google Play listing. The web app is a full PWA (progressive web app) that you can install to your home screen from your browser. It runs standalone with offline-capable caching, so it feels closer to an app than a bookmark. No social feed or community features. We're focused on the build planning experience first.

Comparison table

What about spreadsheets?

Let's be honest. The most common miniature painting tracking tool in 2026 is Google Sheets. Head over to r/minipainting and you'll find dozens of shared spreadsheets for paint inventories, army trackers, and budget logs. Some of them are genuinely impressive. Notion templates exist too, and a few are quite good.

The problem: spreadsheets don't handle images, and miniature painting is maybe the most visual hobby that exists. You can't pin reference photos of color schemes next to your paint list. You can't show a zenithal reference alongside your layering plan. Sharing a Google Sheet of your paint collection with your painting group isn't exactly inspiring.

Spreadsheets also can't track project phases, generate budget totals from your materials, or log build sessions in a structured way. You can build all of that with formulas and formatting, but at that point you're spending hobby time building a spreadsheet instead of painting minis. And I say this as someone who maintained a 47-tab Google Sheet for three years before admitting it was insane.

The real problem: none of these talk to each other

Here's what most painters' workflow actually looks like in 2026:

• paintRack for paint inventory
• A spreadsheet for budget and backlog
• Instagram or Reddit for WIP photos and community feedback
• Their memory for what they're working on next and what technique they used last time
• Maybe Hobby Streak to stay consistent

That's five tools (six if you count your brain, which is unreliable after Nuln Oil fumes). None of them share data. Your paint list doesn't connect to your project plan. Your budget doesn't auto-calculate from your materials. Your build notes from last session don't inform what you do next.

The value of an all-in-one workspace isn't that any single feature is revolutionary. It's that everything is connected. Your reference board, your materials list, your budget, your timeline, and your build log all live in the same project. When you add a $4.90 pot of Contrast paint to your materials, the budget updates. When you log a session, it's attached to the project with your references and your paint list.

That's what we're building with Costumary. We're not there yet on every front (the paint database gap is real), but connected hobby data is the goal.