Best Sewing Stash Apps in 2026: All 7 Compared Honestly
Not another list of Trello templates. Seven real sewing apps, compared on price, platform, and what they actually track.
How this list is different
Most "best sewing app" roundups pad the list with Trello, Notion and Google Sheets. Those are general tools you can bend into a sewing database, and we have covered that comparison separately in our pattern organizer app roundup.
This one only includes software actually built for sewists, and it states prices and gaps plainly — including gaps in our own app.
The full comparison
| Stash Hub | Threadloop | Sewist Studio | Cora | Sewbench | Quiltography | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | ~£3.49/mo | Free + Plus | Free + Pro | ~$6.99 once | Free | Paid |
| iOS | Native | Browser | Browser | Native | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Native | Browser | Browser | No | Yes | Varies |
| Desktop | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Limited | Limited |
| Syncs devices | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Offline-first | Varies |
| Fabric + yardage | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Patterns | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited | Yes | Some |
| Notions | Yes | Partial | Yes | No | Yes | Some |
| Threads | Some | Partial | Yes | No | Some | Some |
| Machines | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Measurements | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Embroidery designs | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Smocking & heirloom | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Books & magazines | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Shopping list | Yes | Wish list | Yes | No | Some | Some |
| Import from shop URL | Yes | No | No | No | No | No |
| Barcode scanning | No | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| AI photo cataloging | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Community database | No | Yes ~113k | No | No | No | No |
| Cost / price tracking | Yes | Some | Machines only | Yes | Some | Yes |
| CSV / PDF export | Some | Some | No | Yes | Some | Some |
Verified against what each app published as of August 2026. These apps ship often — check before you pay.
1. Stash Hub — best for garment sewists who shop online
Price: roughly £3.49/month or £34.99/year. Platforms: iOS, Android, web.
The most polished all-rounder. It stores fabrics, patterns, projects, notions, measurements, vouchers and shopping lists, with search and advanced filters over the lot.
Two features stand out. Magic Input lets you paste a URL from a fabric shop or pattern listing and builds the record automatically — details, price, photos — with a chance to pick the images and edit fields after. Magic Mockup combines your fabric photos with pattern line drawings so you can visualize a make before cutting into anything.
Pros: genuine native apps, best-in-class data entry, mature and actively developed.
Cons: no permanent free tier; nothing for embroidery, smocking, machines or books.
2. Threadloop — best free option
Price: free, with an optional Plus tier. Platforms: web.
Free with no limit on fabrics, patterns or projects. Barcode scanning for bolt ends, yardage tracking, and search by fiber, color and weight. Its community-built pattern database has passed 113,000 entries, which is the closest thing sewing has to Ravelry's pattern pages.
Pros: free and unlimited, real community, barcode entry, honest stats.
Cons: garment sewing only; no embroidery, smocking, machines or library.
3. Sewist Studio — widest studio coverage
Price: free tier, with Pro. Platforms: web, mobile-first.
Covers the standard stash — fabric with yardage and color families, patterns, threads, notions, measurements, a project kanban — and then keeps going into territory nobody else touches:
- Machines, with accessories and maintenance history
- Embroidery designs, including PES and DST files, in a dedicated workspace
- A smocking and heirloom encyclopedia — plates, stitch library, pleater guides, symbol reference
- Your sewing library — books, magazines and catalogs with an indexed contents search
- AI tools — photo-scan a pattern envelope to catalog it, semantic search across everything, mashup and recreate tools, and a stash planner that proposes projects from fabric you already own
Pros: by far the broadest coverage, strong AI cataloging, free to start with no credit card, and the only serious option for embroidery or heirloom sewists.
Cons, stated plainly: no shop-URL import, no barcode scanning, and no CSV export yet. If those are core to how you work, Stash Hub or Cora will suit you better today.
4. Cora — cheapest, and the most limited
Price: around $6.99 one-time after a 5-fabric trial. Platforms: iOS only.
A focused fabric catalog with a devoted following. Sorts by price paid, and exports to CSV and PDF — a rare and genuinely useful pair.
Pros: no subscription, clean interface, real export.
Cons: does not sync across devices; iOS only; fabric only.
5. Sewbench — best offline
Price: free. Offline-first, which matters more than it sounds: cataloging a bolt end in a fabric shop basement is exactly when your signal dies.
6. Quiltography — best for quilters
Stash color auto-tagging, a yardage calculator, and cost, source and purchase-date tracking. Built around quilting rather than garment sewing.
7. My Couture — stash plus wishlist
Covers stash, a wishlist, and linked supplies. Worth a look if wishlist-driven shopping is how you plan.
How to choose in 30 seconds
- You sew garments and buy fabric online → Stash Hub
- You want free forever and a community → Threadloop
- You embroider, smock, or own reference books → Sewist Studio
- You want a cheap iPhone fabric list → Cora
- You catalog without signal → Sewbench
- You quilt → Quiltography
The advice that matters more than the app
Whichever you pick, the same three things decide whether it sticks:
1. Photograph everything. A stash without photos is a spreadsheet, and you will not open it.
2. Catalog as you go, not all at once. Nobody survives entering 300 fabrics in a weekend. Add items as you use them and your working stash catalogs itself in about a month.
3. Record yardage honestly, after preshrinking. Optimistic yardage is how you end up 40cm short at 11pm.
Do those three and almost any app on this list will pay for itself the first time it stops you buying a pattern you already own.
