A Ravelry alternative? Honestly, no — and that is on purpose.
YarnScope is a stash-first companion to Ravelry, not a replacement. The Ravelry pattern library is still the best in the world. What we add: a modern mobile UI, OCR ball-band scanning, EN · DE · PL — without asking for a Ravelry account.
What Ravelry does well
Ravelry has been the fibre community's living room since 2007. The pattern library is unmatched; the project notes, queues, and friends graph form the social layer of modern knitting. If you have a Ravelry account, keep it. Nothing in YarnScope competes with that.
Where Ravelry shows its age
The cracks are mobile. Ravelry's stash UI is a long table that was never redesigned for a phone screen. The image grid is dense and the search filters live three taps deep. There is no OCR scan, no dye-lot reservation per project, no offline mode at a yarn shop with no signal. And the localisation, in 2026, is still patchy.
What YarnScope adds on top
- Stash-first design — the home screen is your stash, sorted by weight, fibre, or shelf
- OCR ball-band scan — point the phone at a label, the rest fills in
- Project reservation — reserve skeins to a WIP so you never start a sleeve from the wrong dye lot
- Multilingual native — EN · DE · PL, with French / Norwegian / Japanese / Dutch on the localisation roadmap
- Offline-first mobile — works in basements and yarn-shop stockrooms
- No social layer — by design. Ravelry already has the best one
Importing your Ravelry stash
Open Ravelry → Settings → Export your data → Stash CSV. You receive a file with one row per skein. Open YarnScope → Import → upload the CSV. Brand, colourway, weight, yardage, and dye lot map automatically. Photos in Ravelry can be downloaded as a ZIP and bulk-attached on import. The whole flow takes under ten minutes for a 200-skein stash. We never write back to your Ravelry account.
When YarnScope is the wrong tool
If your priority is row-by-row pattern markup, look at KnitCompanion or row counter apps. If you want a pattern marketplace, stay on Ravelry. If you only have eight skeins and a single WIP, a notebook is honestly fine. YarnScope earns its keep when the stash crosses fifty — when you can no longer remember whether you already bought fingering-weight rust last spring.