StuffHutt
All posts
3 min read

Encircle and Centriq Are Gone: The Best Home Inventory App Alternatives in 2026

Two of the best-known consumer home inventory apps disappeared within a year of each other. Centriq shut down in January 2025, and Encircle discontinued its free consumer home-inventory app in December 2025 to focus on its insurance-industry business. If you relied on either, your inventory needs a new home — and if you were about to start one, the shortlist just changed.

Here's what to look for in a replacement, and an honest rundown of the options.

Before you switch: get your data out

If you still have access to an account on a discontinued service, export everything you can now — apps in wind-down don't keep their export endpoints alive forever:

  • Download any CSV/spreadsheet export offered
  • Save photos to your own storage; screenshots beat nothing
  • Note serial numbers and purchase details for high-value items — they're the hardest data to reconstruct

What actually matters in a home inventory app

Having watched two well-liked apps sunset, the checklist for the next one should include survivability:

  1. Your data stays exportable. If the app dies, your inventory shouldn't. Look for CSV/PDF export you can run any time.
  2. Photos, values, and serials in one record — the three things a claim needs.
  3. Low-friction capture. The #1 reason inventories fail is tedium. AI product recognition, email-receipt import, or barcode scanning are the difference between "done in a weekend" and "abandoned in a drawer".
  4. Cloud storage off-site by default. An inventory stored only on your phone burns with the house that phone is in.
  5. Values that stay current. Replacement costs drift; an app that tracks values keeps your coverage math honest.

The alternatives in 2026

StuffHutt (that's us — bias declared): built specifically around the insurance use-case. Photo capture with AI product matching and valuation, serial/warranty tracking, email-receipt import, and insurance-ready exports. Free for your first 100 items, which covers most apartments.

Sortly: polished, business-oriented inventory tool that many households use. Strong organization features; home/insurance features and pricing are geared more to small business.

HomeZada: broader home-management platform (maintenance, projects, finances) with inventory as one module. Good if you want whole-home management; heavier if you just want an inventory.

Itemtopia: consumer-focused with a free tier; covers the basics of items, photos, and documents.

A spreadsheet + cloud photo album: genuinely fine if your needs are simple and your discipline is strong — we wrote an honest comparison in app vs. spreadsheet. The catch is upkeep: photos, values, and the list itself live in different places, and nothing updates automatically.

Your insurer's own app: some carriers offer inventory tools. Convenient, but your data lives with one insurer — awkward if you switch carriers, and these tools get sunset too.

Migrating an old Encircle or Centriq inventory

However you exported, the rebuild is faster than the first build was:

  1. Import or re-enter your high-value items first (the top 20 items usually carry most of the value)
  2. Re-photograph anything whose photos you lost — wide room shots first
  3. Let the new app's capture features (AI matching, receipt import) fill in the long tail over a few weeks

The lesson of 2025's shutdowns isn't "don't use apps" — it's own your data and pick tools that let you leave. Whichever way you go, don't let the switch become the excuse for having no inventory at all: the average claim doesn't care which app you used to have.