Brickify vs the Spreadsheet: Collection Tracking in 2026

A spreadsheet can absolutely track your collection. The problem is that every price you type into it starts rotting the moment you hit enter. Brickify replaces the typing with a two-second scan and replaces the stale numbers with live comps from real recent eBay sales, so the total at the top is actually true today.

To be fair, plenty of serious collectors run beautiful spreadsheets. Some have tabs for themes, conditional formatting, purchase dates, the works. This isn't a takedown of the spreadsheet. It's an honest look at what each approach does well, and where the hours actually go.

What is a spreadsheet genuinely good at?

Total control. A spreadsheet holds whatever you want it to hold: where you bought a set, what you paid, who you'd sell it to, a note about the missing wing piece. No app matches that flexibility, and if you love the ritual of maintaining one, that's a real reason to keep it. Spreadsheets are also free, private, and yours forever.

Where does the spreadsheet fall apart?

Two places: data entry and price decay. Entry first. Every item has to be identified and typed by hand, and with a binder of cards or a wall of sets, that's a weekend. Get one minifig variant wrong and the value column is wrong too, and you'll never know.

Price decay is the quieter problem. The values you looked up in January are January's values. Sets retire, cards get graded, hype comes and goes, and your sheet doesn't hear about any of it. Most collection spreadsheets are really a snapshot of the day they were last updated, which is usually a long time ago.

• Manual entry: minutes per item, and every item is a chance to misidentify
• Prices go stale the day you type them and nobody updates them weekly
• No condition context: one 'value' cell hides the raw vs graded spread
• The total at the top quietly becomes fiction over time

What does Brickify change about the workflow?

It removes the two weak points. Identification happens by camera: point at a set, a minifig, a card, or a whole shelf, and Brickify names the exact item in under two seconds with a confidence score. Pricing happens continuously: every item is valued from live comps of real recent eBay sales, with raw and PSA-graded prices side by side for cards. Your total updates itself, and you can watch value over one-day, one-week, one-month, and one-year windows by theme or set.

Bulk scan is the piece spreadsheet keepers usually feel first. A binder page or a pile of loose figs gets identified and priced in one pass with a running total. That's the weekend of data entry, done before lunch.

Can you use both?

Honestly, yes, and some collectors should. Keep the spreadsheet for the things only you know: provenance, purchase prices, sentimental notes. Let Brickify handle identification and live valuation, then check your sheet's assumptions against the app's numbers when you're deciding whether to sell. The sheet keeps the memories. The scanner keeps the market.

Which one should you pick?

Pick the spreadsheet if your collection is small, slow-moving, and you genuinely enjoy maintaining it. Pick Brickify if you want the value number to be true without doing the work: 100,000+ collectors run it, it holds 4.6 stars on the App Store with over 5,000 five-star reviews, and 25+ of the top LEGO and Pokémon YouTubers use it. And if you're somewhere in between, run both and let each do what it's best at.