Femente vs Vivino
The short version: Vivino tells you what a large community of drinkers thought of the bottle in your hand. Femente tells you what professional critics scored a producer, and which wineries and tables are worth planning a trip around. They answer different questions, so the better tool depends on what you are trying to do.
What Vivino is good at
Vivino is a crowd-rating app. Scan a label, and you see the average of a lot of user ratings, roughly what it costs, and where to buy it. If your question is “I am standing in a shop holding this bottle, is it any good,” Vivino answers that quickly and well.
The rating is a popularity signal: wines that many people drink and rate tend to surface.
Where Femente is different
Femente does not average the crowd. It aggregates professional critic scores into one number per producer, its femScore, drawing on the guides that rate wine for a living: Decanter, Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and others for wine, and Michelin and Gault&Millau for the restaurants nearby. It covers 1,200 wine regions, 54,000 wineries and 65,000 restaurants.
So instead of “what did other drinkers think,” you get “what did the critics score,” which is a different and often narrower set of wines.
Critics or crowds: which signal you want
A crowd average rewards wines a lot of people buy. A critic score rewards wines that a specialist judged closely, and those are frequently bottles most people never taste. Neither is wrong.
If you want the popular, easy-to-find pick for a Tuesday, crowd ratings are fine. If you want the producer a Decanter panel singled out, or the estate a region is quietly known for, you want the critics. That is the gap Femente is built to fill.
Planning a trip, not just rating a bottle
Femente is map-first. Save the wineries that catch your eye and it plans a route between them, drops in a critic-rated table for lunch or dinner, and you navigate the whole thing on the day.
Vivino is built around the single bottle, not the region you are about to visit. If your next wine decision is a trip rather than a purchase, that changes which app helps.
Which should you use
Honestly, both, for different moments. Scan and buy a bottle with Vivino. Decide which producers the critics rate and which tables are worth the detour with Femente.
If you had to keep only one for a wine trip, keep the one organised around regions, critics and the map.
- Is Femente a good Vivino alternative?
- It depends what you need. For scanning a label and buying a bottle, Vivino is strong. For critic-rated producers, restaurants and trip planning, Femente is the better fit.
- Does Femente use critic scores or user ratings?
- Critic scores. Femente aggregates professional guides into a single femScore per producer rather than averaging community ratings.
- Does Femente cover restaurants too?
- Yes. It maps critic-rated restaurants, including Michelin-starred rooms, next to the wineries worth visiting.
- Is Femente free?
- Yes, on iPhone via the App Store.
See the critics' pick, not the crowd's.
