Cigarro is a cigar tracking web app built around a structured review discipline. The Cigarro Method is Cigarro’s review-by-thirds framework, and it is the detail that separates Cigarro from a simple digital humidor. Cigar Scanner is a band-recognition app built by The Cigar Lab Co., first released in 2015, with a database it puts at roughly 13,000 cigars.
Both apps live in the same shelf space online. Type “cigar tracker app” or “cigar scanner alternative” into a search bar and one or the other tends to surface, and they are not, in truth, solving quite the same problem. The honest answer to which one you should use depends on what you actually want an app to do for you.
This is not a takedown. Cigar Scanner has been quietly useful to a large community of smokers for close to a decade, and a 4.4-star rating across more than 2,500 Google Play reviews is not nothing. What follows is a plain, feature-by-feature look at where each app earns its keep, where it does not, and which sort of cigar enthusiast each one actually suits.
What Each App Is Actually Built For
Cigar Scanner’s founding idea, going back to 2015, is recognition. Point your camera at a band or a wrapper and the app tries to match it against its own catalogue, then hands back the manufacturer, origin, strength, wrapper colour, blend, and a retail price. By its own account on Google Play, that catalogue runs to roughly 13,000 products, and the app has logged more than 1.5 million scans and over half a million user reviews since launch. It is, at heart, a lookup tool with a journal bolted on: My Journal, Favourites, and a Wish List let you file away what you have scanned, and a virtual humidor tracks how many of each you are holding and where.
Cigarro starts from a different question. Instead of “what is this cigar,” it asks “what did you actually think of it, and can you say why.” The Cigarro Method breaks a review into three acts, first third, second third, final third, so a review captures how a cigar changed rather than a single average impression. Cigarro also scales humidor capacity by tier rather than acting as a scan-and-lookup catalogue, and pairs every entry with The Lounge, a members’ feed where reviews and photographs travel further than a private journal ever could.
Neither approach is wrong. This comparison would rather say so plainly than pretend one app should embarrass the other. A smoker who mainly wants to identify sticks and log a running inventory will feel at home in Cigar Scanner. A smoker who wants their notes to mean something six months later, and to compare thirds across a hundred cigars, will feel the gap Cigarro was built to close.
Feature by Feature, Side by Side
| Feature | Cigar Scanner | Cigarro |
|---|---|---|
| Core purpose | Band and cigar identification via camera scan | Structured review and collection tracking |
| Review structure | Free-form rating and written notes | The Cigarro Method (review by thirds) |
| Catalogue | Roughly 13,000 cigars, self-reported | Curated brand and vitola catalogue with pick-first autofill |
| Humidor tracking | Multiple virtual humidors, unlimited entries | Humidor entries scaled by tier, 30 to unlimited |
| Humidity monitoring | Optional paid hardware sensor (Cigar Scanner Gateway) | Software only, no hardware sensor |
| Social feed | Built-in network for sharing scans and reviews | The Lounge: public profiles, nods, comments, follows |
| Platforms | Android app; iPhone via a Safari web app only since September 2025 | Web app and PWA on any device, no app store dependency |
| Pricing | Free app, hardware sold separately | Free tier plus four paid tiers, $4.99 to $29.99 CAD monthly |
| Shop finder | Built-in cigar shop locator | Not a current feature |
A table like this flattens a lot of nuance, so treat it as a starting point rather than the verdict. The next two sections do the actual arguing.
Where Cigar Scanner Genuinely Wins
Cigar Scanner’s identification catalogue is its strongest asset, and a decade of scanning has clearly deepened it. If you are standing in a shop holding an unfamiliar band and want a fast answer on origin, wrapper, and blend, that is squarely what the app was built to do. A nine-out-of-ten writeup from the cigar podcast Simply Stogies, written by a reviewer who had used the app for years, singles out the inventory tracking and the identification catalogue as the reasons to keep it installed, while flagging that performance can slow down once a humidor holds a few hundred entries.
The hardware option is a real differentiator too. Pair the app with the Cigar Scanner Gateway and Sensor, sold through Neptune Cigar, and you get live temperature and humidity readings from inside your own humidor, with alerts when either drifts out of range. Cigarro has no equivalent hardware product and no plans to build one. If a connected sensor matters to you more than a review framework, our guide to what a serious digital humidor app should and should not try to do is worth reading before you choose.
The built-in shop finder is a smaller point in its favour. It is not always precise. By its own reviewer’s account it can surface tobacco retailers that are not really cigar-focused, but for a smoker travelling somewhere unfamiliar, having any locator built in beats having none.
Where Cigarro Earns Its Place
The clearest gap is structure. Cigar Scanner lets you rate and note a cigar, but it does not ask you to notice how a cigar changed from light to nub. The Cigarro Method does exactly that, and the difference shows up in the reading, not just the writing: a review by thirds tells you whether a cigar opened peppery and settled into cocoa, which is the kind of detail that actually helps you choose your next stick. It is the same gap explored at length in our wider look at cigar review apps, where structure repeatedly separates the apps people keep using from the ones they quietly abandon.
Platform is the second gap, and it is not a small one. Apple removed Cigar Scanner from the App Store in September 2025 on the grounds that displaying a cigar counts as tobacco promotion, an application of the same policy that cost Cigar Aficionado’s own Where To Smoke app its listing back in 2017. iPhone users are now routed to a Safari-based home screen shortcut instead of a proper app. Cigarro was never exposed to that risk in the first place. It has always been a web app and a PWA by deliberate design, so there is no app store gatekeeper who can decide overnight that a cigar photograph breaks the rules.
The Lounge is the third gap. Cigar Scanner’s social feed is built for sharing scans; Cigarro’s is built around public profiles, follows, and nods on a review someone actually took the time to write by thirds. And because Cigarro’s tiers scale with how seriously you collect, thirty entries free through to unlimited on Private Reserve, the app grows alongside a humidor rather than asking every user to pay for the same ceiling.
Pricing, Platforms, and the Apple Problem
Cigar Scanner is free to use on Android, with its optional Gateway and Sensor hardware sold as a separate purchase through Neptune Cigar. There is no published in-app subscription tier, so the honest comparison is a free app with paid hardware against Cigarro’s free tier with paid software tiers.
Cigarro runs five tiers, all monthly, all in Canadian dollars, and reviews are unlimited on every one of them; the full breakdown lives on Cigarro’s pricing page. Pocket Humidor is free for thirty cigar entries. Desk Humidor is $4.99 for two hundred. Cabinet Humidor is $9.99 for seven hundred and fifty. Walk-in Humidor is $19.99 for two thousand. Private Reserve is $29.99 with unlimited entries. Capacity is the only real lever between tiers, deliberately, so nobody pays more for a feature that should have been free on every tier.
The platform question deserves its own paragraph because it changed materially in the last year. Cigar Scanner’s Android app keeps receiving updates, its Google Play listing shows a change log dated as recently as October 2025, but the iPhone version is gone from the App Store, with users redirected to a browser-based workaround. That is a real inconvenience for the roughly half of smokers carrying an iPhone. Cigarro sidesteps the question entirely: it was built web-first, with no App Store submission ever planned, so there is no removal risk and nothing that behaves differently depending on which phone is in your pocket.
Five Questions Worth Asking
If your main job is identifying an unfamiliar band in a shop and logging a running inventory alongside a monitored humidor, Cigar Scanner’s decade of scanning data and its hardware option are hard to argue with. It suits the collector who wants a lookup tool first and a journal second, and if you would rather browse the wider field before settling on either app, this wider list covers more than just these two.
If your main job is becoming a more specific taster, and you want your own words to mean something when you read them back in a year, the Cigarro Method is built for exactly that. It suits the reviewer who wants notes that hold up, and who would rather an app worked the same on every phone in the house than gamble on an App Store policy that can change without warning. If the journal is the part you care about, our cigar journal app comparison weighs the dedicated options side by side.
Plenty of serious collectors could use both. Cigar Scanner for the shop-counter identification, Cigarro for the considered review once the cigar is home and lit. There is no rule against running two apps for two different jobs, and no reason to feel disloyal for doing it.
Try the Method on Your Next Cigar
Cigar Scanner and Cigarro were built to answer different questions, and neither app is pretending otherwise. One earns its keep at the shop counter and beside a connected humidor sensor. The other earns its keep in the quiet minutes after a cigar goes out, when you are trying to work out what you actually just smoked. Choose on that basis rather than on a feature count, and you will likely end up happier with either one. Cigarro is free to try at cigarroapp.com.
