Short answer: Tinybeans is the better pick if your main goal is sharing a photo feed with relatives, especially relatives who will never install an app. Keepsies is the better pick if you want to capture the stuff photos can't hold — the quotes, the milestones, the voice recordings, the crayon masterpieces — without hitting an upload cap or watching ads.
Full disclosure before we go any further: Keepsies is our app. This is the Keepsies blog, published by the people who make it. We're going to be honest anyway, because Tinybeans genuinely does some things better than we do, and pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence.
What's the actual difference between them?
Tinybeans, around since 2012 (it's an Australian public company, ASX: TNY), is a private chronological family journal built around photo sharing. You post to a feed, relatives follow along, and you can tag milestones as you go. Photo books are orderable right in the app.
Keepsies is a memory journal first. Photos are in there, but the app is organized around milestone tracking, kid quotes with context, an artwork gallery, audio recordings, and age-matched daily prompts that give you something specific to write down when your brain is running on four hours of sleep.
Both are trying to save your kid's childhood. They just disagree about what a childhood is made of.
Which is better for grandparents?
Honestly? A toss-up — it depends on what you want landing in grandma's inbox. Tinybeans' email digest is genuinely great: relatives get a curated email of new photos with no app to download, no password to reset over the phone at Thanksgiving. They've been refining it since 2012, it's the feature that made them famous, and they earned it.
Invite a relative to Keepsies by email and the weekly digest starts arriving immediately — no app, no account, no password to reset over the phone at Thanksgiving. Each week they get the new milestones, kid quotes, and memories for each child, right in their inbox, and the invitation to join the app never expires — grandma can stay email-only forever or join with one tap the day she's ready. The real difference is what's inside the email — and it's a philosophical one. Tinybeans' digest delivers the photos themselves. Keepsies deliberately doesn't: email is forwardable, unencrypted in transit more often than you'd think, and sits in inboxes you don't control — so your kid's photos never travel over it, period. The recap carries the words — the milestone, the exact quote — and the photos stay behind your family's sign-in, one tap away in the free app. If you want photos landing in inboxes with zero friction, Tinybeans does that well. If the thought of baby photos bouncing around email servers is exactly why you left social media, our trade-off is the one you were looking for.
Which free tier is more usable?
This one goes to Keepsies, and it's not close.
Tinybeans' free tier caps you at 20 uploads per month and shows ads. Twenty uploads sounds fine until your kid does something adorable on the 21st, which — babies being babies — they will. Tinybeans+ (paid, with a 2-week trial) removes the cap, adds videos up to 5 minutes, and drops the ads.
Keepsies is free on iOS and Android with no ads and no monthly upload cap on the free tier. You get milestone tracking, quotes, memories, the artwork gallery, audio recording, video clips up to a minute, daily prompts, and family sharing without paying anything. Keepsies Pro adds unlimited photos, videos up to five minutes, and unlimited family sharing, with Memory Books, On This Day lookbacks, and Smart Collections coming soon — but the free version is a complete tool, not a demo.
What can Keepsies capture that Tinybeans can't?
The words and sounds, mostly. A photo feed is wonderful, but it can't hold the moment your toddler explains, with total confidence, that the moon follows the car because it likes you.
- Quotes with context. Keepsies has a quotes feature built so logging a quote takes about as long as the quote took to say.
- Audio. First words, belly laughs, the way they said "spaghetti" wrong for a year. You can record voice right into a memory.
- Artwork gallery. A dedicated home for the daycare art pile, instead of a drawer.
- Age-matched prompts. Daily questions matched to your kid's age, so the journal never stares blankly back at you.
- Milestones with attachments. Built-in age-based and custom milestone tracking with photos, audio, and notes attached.
- Up to 10 kids per account. Big families, foster families, aunts documenting a whole flock — covered.
Where does Tinybeans still win?
Beyond the grandparent email, Tinybeans has fourteen years of history. That's real. Keepsies is the newer app with the smaller track record, and if longevity is your top concern, we understand picking the company that's been at this since 2012. Tinybeans also has in-app photo books today; our Memory Books are still in the coming-soon column.
Keepsies vs Tinybeans at a glance
| Keepsies | Tinybeans | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | No ads, no monthly upload cap | 20 uploads/month, ads |
| Grandparent access | Weekly email digest, no signup needed + free app access anytime | Email digest, no signup needed |
| Photos in email | Never — photos stay behind the family's sign-in | Yes — photos travel by email |
| Kid quotes | Yes, with context | No |
| Audio recording | Yes | No |
| Video | Free ≤1 min; Pro ≤5 min | Tinybeans+ only, ≤5 min |
| Artwork gallery | Yes | No |
| Journal prompts | Age-matched daily prompts | No |
| Milestone tracking | Built-in + custom, with attachments | Milestone tagging |
| Children per account | Up to 10 | — |
| Photo books | Memory Books coming soon | Orderable in-app |
| Track record | Newer app | Around since 2012 |
| Languages | English + Spanish | — |
So which one should you pick?
Pick Tinybeans if the mission is "get photos to Grandma with zero friction" and you're fine paying to escape the 20-upload cap. Pick Keepsies if you want a real memory journal — quotes, milestones, voices, artwork — with a free tier that doesn't nickel-and-dime the cute moments. Some families could reasonably run both. Your kid only says "black duck" at the zoo once, though, so whichever app you choose, have it open.
Start capturing moments that matter
Keepsies is a free memory journal for parents. Milestones, quotes, artwork, and everyday moments — saved in seconds, kept forever.
From The Keepsies Team
