Looking for a Beli alternative? First, what do you miss?

Credit first

What Beli is great at.

Beli describes itself, on its App Store page, with one subtitle: “Your top restaurants, ranked.” You keep ranked lists and maps of places you’ve been and places you want to try, add tags, notes and favorite dishes, and see a feed of where friends are eating. A Taste Profile shows what you tend to love, a Match Score compares your taste with friends’, and recommendations are personalized from all of it. It’s on the App Store and Google Play.

That’s a strong answer to “where should we eat on Friday?” — especially in a city where your friends are already on it. If that’s your question, Beli may be all you need.

The search behind the search

Why people look for something else.

• “I remember the restaurant, not the dish.” A ranked place doesn’t tell you that the thing to order at that Lebanese spot in Sydney is the toum-drenched chicken, not the shawarma.
• “I want it to be just mine.” Some people love a social list. Others want a diary nobody else reads, without an account to make.
• “I want to remember who was there.” The night with Lena’s parents, the first dinner with a new team — the people are half the memory.
• “I don’t want to rank.” Putting every meal in order is fun for some and pressure for others.
• “I eat out abroad, offline.” A diary that needs no signal suits a basement izakaya in Osaka or a market stall in Mexico City.

The real difference

Restaurants ranked vs dishes remembered.

Beli’s unit is the restaurant: where it sits in your ranking. PlateDiary’s unit is the dish: you take one photo of the table, and each plate and glass is cut out on your phone into its own save, in about a second. Saves gather on their own into a moment — the same place, within about 90 minutes.

Open a restaurant in PlateDiary’s Places and it reads like your own menu: your usual, every dish you’ve had there with a count, every visit, and who you usually go with. It answers “what did we order last time?” rather than “is this place better than that one?”.

Who sees it

Social by design vs private by default.

Beli is built to be shared: its own site frames it as keeping and sharing your favorite restaurants with friends. PlateDiary has no PlateDiary account, no feed and no followers. Your saves, notes, places and companions live on your phone, and backups go to your own iCloud Drive or a Google Drive file you pick.

Companions in PlateDiary are names you add to a night — “with Jonah and Mei” — and each gets a page of every meal you’ve shared. Nothing is sent to them and no contacts are read. When you do want to show a night off, you export it as a picture.

At a glance

Beli and PlateDiary, side by side.

Better together

Using Beli and PlateDiary together.

1. Find it in BeliUse friends’ picks and your want-to-try list to choose Friday’s dinner.
2. Snap the tableWhen the food lands, one photo in PlateDiary. Every dish is cut out; put the phone away.
3. Rank it laterOn the way home, rank the restaurant in Beli for your friends.
4. Keep the nightName the dishes and add who was there in PlateDiary whenever you like — or never. Next visit, its place page shows your usual.

Pick yours

Choose Beli if… choose PlateDiary if…

• Choose Beli if… your friends are on it, you enjoy ranking, and your main question is where to eat next.
• Choose PlateDiary if… you want to remember what you ate, where and with whom — privately, with no account, and with a photo of every dish instead of a score.
• Choose both if… you want discovery with friends and a diary that’s only yours.

Fine print

How we checked, and who we are.

We make PlateDiary, so weigh that in. Everything about Beli on this page comes from its App Store page, its Google Play page and beliapp.com as they read on 19 October 2026. We left out prices and ratings on purpose. If Beli has changed, its own pages win.

Sources

Where the facts come from