An honest comparison of Baitprint and Fishbrain, written by the person who made one of them — including the parts where the other one wins.
The short version. If you want a community, a catch feed, waterbody maps and species data gathered from millions of anglers, Fishbrain is the better product and it is not close. It has fifteen million users and we have almost none.
If you want a forecast built out of your own trips — including the ones where nothing bit — then Fishbrain structurally cannot give you that, and this can. That is the whole of the difference, and everything below is detail.
Fishbrain's forecast is a crowd model. It learns from millions of logged catches and produces an answer for a place — which means every angler standing on the same shoreline gets the same number. That is genuinely useful, and with that much data it is often right.
Baitprint's personal layer is a model of you. It reads the exact conditions of every outing you log — wind and its direction, pressure and its trend, waves, cloud, moon phase, how far it was from first light — and scores the coming week by how often your trips in conditions like that actually produced a fish. Two anglers on the same pier get two different numbers, because they have fished different hours and caught different things.
A catch log is a numerator with no denominator. "You caught nine fish in a south wind" means nothing until you know how many times you went out in one. Nine out of eleven trips is a pattern. Nine out of ninety is a coincidence — and the same nine catches support both conclusions.
Catch-logging apps do not ask about the days nothing happened, because a catch log has no reason to. Baitprint does: logging a blank is one tap — fished, caught nothing — and the app fetches the conditions of those hours itself. You type nothing. That is the data the personal model is actually made of, and it is why this could not simply be added to an existing app as a feature.
| Fishbrain | Baitprint | |
|---|---|---|
| What the forecast is built from | Millions of catches from millions of anglers | Your own outings, catches and blanks |
| Does it log trips where you caught nothing? | Not as a first-class record | One tap, and it is the point |
| What two anglers at the same spot see | The same number | Different numbers |
| When it has too little data | Still shows a forecast | Shows no percentage at all, and says so |
| Community, catch feed, waterbody maps | Extensive — the main reason to use it | None. Deliberately not built. |
| Cold start | Works on day one from the crowd | Import a year of old fishing photos and it reconstructs the real conditions of each one |
| Price | Free tier; Pro publicly listed around $10–13 a month | Free today, all of it. See pricing for what Pro will cost. |
| Works with no account | No | Yes — nothing leaves the phone until you sign in |
| Offline | Limited | Logging works with no signal at all |
| Platforms | iOS and Android | Android and the web. iOS is built but not yet shipped. |
| Export your data | Limited | Whole log to CSV or JSON, any time |
Written plainly, because a comparison that only flatters its author is worth nothing to the person reading it.
A feed, other anglers, gear reviews, local reports. If seeing what is being caught near you is what you want from a fishing app, we do not offer it and are not going to — see the app for what we build instead.
Depth, contours, mapped spots, species distribution across a lake. Genuinely valuable, genuinely expensive, and out of reach for one person.
Their crowd model works the first time you open it. Ours has nothing to say until you have logged about four outings — unless you import old photos, which is why that feature exists.
Support, a roadmap, and it will still be there in five years. Baitprint is one person in Karlovac, Croatia. Your log exports to CSV and JSON precisely so that fact is your choice rather than your risk.
Below four logged outings, Baitprint shows no percentage at all. It says it does not know yet.
That is a bad first impression and it was tempting to remove roughly forty times. It stayed because the entire claim of this product is that the number in front of you came from evidence. A confident figure invented from one trip would be a lie in exactly the place the app says it is being honest — and once you have done that, nothing else on the screen means anything.
It runs in the browser, needs no account, and logging works offline. If it is not for you, nothing was created and nothing was collected.