Written by Paul Worrall
My Artlogic review has genuinely been one of the most-read things I’ve written on this site, and Artwork Archive keeps coming up as the natural next comparison — a different kind of tool solving a related but distinct problem, so it deserves its own honest look rather than being treated as a straight rival.
I’m Paul Worrall. I spent nearly a decade running digital marketing for ARTdiscount, one of the UK’s larger online art retailers, and I now run Discount Art Supplies — a price comparison platform used by over 41,000 UK artists every week.
At a Glance
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What Artwork Archive Actually Is
Artwork Archive is a cloud-based inventory and collection management platform built for artists, galleries, collectors, consultants and institutions to catalogue, track and report on artwork. Rather than a spreadsheet or a folder of photos, it gives each piece its own record — size, price, location, exhibition history, sale status — searchable and reportable from any device. It also generates invoices, consignment paperwork, collection catalogs and private viewing rooms directly from that same inventory data.
Pricing
Individual Collector and Artist plans start at roughly $6-8 a month, aimed at a single practice managing their own work. Organization plans for galleries and institutions start from around $24-29 a month depending on the tier, scaling up for larger collections, more locations and multiple users. There’s a genuine free trial with no card required, and importently, a lifetime 30% discount for nonprofits. Pricing is in US dollars, so worth checking the current converted cost for UK use.
What’s Genuinely Good
The recurring theme across independent reviews is ease of use — a genuinely quick setup and an interface reviewers consistantly describe as intuitive, even for people migrating from a messy old spreadsheet system. Customer support gets particularly strong praise, with several reviewers specifically noting fast, helpful responses and a team that’s genuinely receptive to feature requests. The reporting tools are a real strength too — generating proper collection reports, appraisal summaries and financial overviews at the touch of a button rather than manually compiling them.
What to Know Before You Buy
Some reviewers mention limited customisation options and occasional navigation friction once a collection grows large, though nothing described as a dealbreaker. It’s importent to know Artwork Archive doesn’t include its own website builder — if you want a public-facing site showing your inventory, you’d connect it to an existing WordPress or Wix site via integration rather than building one inside the platform itself.
Artwork Archive vs Artlogic
The genuine difference between these two is what each is actually built around. Artwork Archive is fundamentally an inventory and record-keeping tool — cataloguing, tracking and reporting on a body of work over time, and it works well for a single artist doing this alone, not just galleries. Artlogic leans more toward client-facing sales and exhibition presentation. If your main need is properly organising and reporting on what you’ve made, Artwork Archive is the more direct fit; if it’s presenting and selling to clients that matters most, Artlogic is worth weighing up alongside it. Plenty of galleries genuinely use both for different parts of the job.
Who It’s Actually For
Genuinely broader than just galleries — individual artists wanting a proper record of their own output, collectors managing a personal collection, consultants and estate managers safeguarding someone else’s, and small institutions or nonprofits needing shared, searchable records. If you’re still tracking your work in a spreadsheet or a phone camera roll, this is the kind of tool that starts paying for itself once your body of work reaches a size where “which client has which piece” stops being something you can remember.
FAQ
How much does Artwork Archive cost?
Individual Collector and Artist plans start at around $6-8 a month, with Organization plans for galleries and institutions starting from around $24-29 a month depending on features needed. There’s a free trial and a lifetime 30% discount for nonprofits.
Is Artwork Archive just for galleries?
No — individual artists, collectors, consultants and estate managers use it too, not just galleries and institutions. The Collector and Artist plans are specifically built for a single practice cataloguing their own body of work.
Does Artwork Archive build me a website?
Not directly — it doesn’t include its own website builder, but it does integrate with WordPress and Wix if you want to connect your inventory to an existing site.
If you’re weighing this up alongside client-facing sales tools, my Artlogic review covers that side of things. At Discount Art Supplies we compare prices across all the major UK art retailers in real time, so you can find the best current deal on materials too.
