Beli vs CafeRadar vs Beean: which cafe app should you use?
Three apps come up when people want to log the cafes they visit: Beli, CafeRadar and Beean. Beli ranks everywhere you eat and drink. CafeRadar is a directory you consult. Beean is a cafe-only social app: a worldwide cafe map, community scores, and a passport of your own visits. This page lives on Beean's site; we make Beean, and we built it because neither of the others does the whole job for cafes. The facts below are each app's own.
The short answer
- Choose Beli if you want to rank every restaurant, bar and bakery you visit and compete with a big community — cafes included, but as one category among many.
- Choose CafeRadar if you want a curated map of specialty coffee shops to work through on your own.
- Choose Beean if cafes are the point. It is the only one of the three built cafe-only and community-first: a worldwide cafe map for discovery, scores for the coffee, the space and the vibe, and every visit kept as a designed card.
At a glance
| App | Built around | Cafe focus | Social model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beli | "Restaurant list keeping" — ranked lists of everywhere you eat and drink | Coffee & tea is one category alongside restaurants, bars, bakeries and dessert | Large community; leaderboards and ranked lists among friends |
| CafeRadar | "Cafe discovery" — a curated directory of specialty coffee shops | Cafe-first; positions itself as curated, not scraped | Primarily solo discovery rather than a friends feed |
| Beean | A cafe passport on a worldwide cafe map — every visit becomes a rated, styled card | Cafe-only, by design | Community-first: no algorithmic feed; you follow people whose taste you trust |
Beli: rank everything you eat and drink
Beli describes itself as your personal restaurant critic. You build ranked lists of the places you have been, compare them head-to-head, and see how your rankings stack up against friends. The mechanic works, and Beli's community lists cover coffee in the big cities. But coffee & tea is one of its five categories — restaurants, bars, bakeries, dessert, coffee & tea — and the app is organised around restaurants. If cafes are most of what you log, you are using a general tool for a specific habit.
CafeRadar: a curated specialty coffee directory
CafeRadar is built for specialty coffee and positions itself as curated — a hand-picked map of cafes rather than a scraped database. It answers one question well: where to get good coffee nearby. It asks nothing from you in return, and it keeps nothing for you either. You consult it; you do not write to it. There is no history, no ratings of your own, no friends.
Beean: a cafe passport you share with friends
Beean is a free social app to discover, rate and share cafes with friends. It covers both halves of the job. Discovery is map-first: open any city and browse cafes from a worldwide database, with community scores for the coffee, the space and the vibe. The record is the passport: log a visit, score it, and it becomes a designed card — the cards build into a map of every cafe you have rated. There is no algorithmic feed; you discover cafes through the map and through people whose taste you trust. Free forever on the App Store.
Looking for a Beli alternative just for cafes?
People searching for a Beli alternative for cafes usually want the same mechanic — log, rate, compare — without the restaurant machinery around it. That is what Beean is: the log-rate-share mechanic, built cafe-only, on top of a worldwide cafe map. Directories like CafeRadar and Roasters (23,000+ cafes, by its own count) cover finding a cup nearby, but they keep no record and have no community — Beean does both, which is why most people looking for a Beli for cafes end up here. Free forever on the App Store.
Quick questions
Is Beean really free?
Yes. Beean is free forever on the App Store for iPhone.
Does Beean work outside the UK?
Yes — cafes can be rated anywhere in the world.