Apps like Merlin Bird ID: honest alternatives

Merlin Bird ID is the one to beat: free, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it names birds by sound, photo or a few questions. The alternatives each do a narrower job. BirdNET is a free research app that listens, and its newer BirdNET Live runs offline on the phone. The Audubon Bird Guide is a field guide that does not listen. Seek by iNaturalist identifies birds, plants and bugs from photos. eBird records what you saw rather than naming it. Warble turns live sound identification into a collecting game for US birds on iPhone.

Merlin first, because it earns it

Merlin Bird ID is made by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and costs nothing. It gives you four ways in: answer a few simple questions, upload a photo, record a singing bird, or explore the birds of a region. Sound ID can identify more than 2,000 species, and Photo ID was trained on more than 6 million practice photos. You can download a whole region for offline use and save birds to a life list, and the app is powered by eBird's enormous store of sightings, sounds and photos. Its iPhone listing shows 4.9 out of 5 from about 114,000 ratings.

Weak spots are hard to find. On iPhone it requires iOS 18 or later, and it is a reference tool rather than something that pulls you outside on a slow Tuesday. If you install one bird app, make it this one. The rest are for jobs Merlin was not built to do.

The alternatives at a glance

BirdNET: the research app

BirdNET is a collaboration between the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell and Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. The BirdNET app is free on the App Store and Google Play: hold up the phone, record, and it suggests the species. You can then choose to share the observation so scientists can monitor biodiversity. Shared clips are used only for non-commercial research and model development, human speech is filtered out, and sharing your location is optional.

A newer app, BirdNET Live, identifies birds continuously in real time with the model running on the phone, and works with no internet. Its makers built it for field researchers, conservationists and serious birders.

Better than Merlin if you want your recordings to go straight to research, or an app that listens nonstop on a survey walk. Worse if you also want photo identification or a field guide; BirdNET is built around sound.

Audubon Bird Guide: the field guide

The National Audubon Society's app is a free field guide to more than 800 North American species, with over 3,000 photos, multi-season range maps, more than eight hours of songs and calls, and text by Kenn Kaufman. Its Bird ID asks what you noticed, such as color, size and tail shape, and narrows the matches for your location and date. It keeps your sightings and a life list, and shows nearby hotspots and recent eBird sightings.

Better than Merlin for reading about a bird once you know its name, and for playing its calls next to its song. Worse for the moment a bird is singing: its App Store listing describes no sound or photo identification, so it cannot listen for you.

Seek and iNaturalist: for photos

Seek by iNaturalist is free and comes from the nonprofit iNaturalist. Point the Seek camera at a living thing and image recognition suggests what it is, from plants and fungi to insects and birds, about 80,000 species after a recent update. The model learns from observations that the iNaturalist community has identified. Seek awards badges for new species, runs monthly challenges, needs no registration and collects no user data by default.

Better than Merlin when the mystery is a mushroom, a flower or a beetle, and for kids who want badges. Worse for birds you can only hear: the listing describes camera identification and says nothing about sound, so a warbler singing high in an oak is out of reach.

eBird: for keeping records

eBird is the Cornell Lab's free app for recording what you find in the field, and it is the database Merlin itself draws on. It builds a checklist of the birds likely at your location and time of year, tracks your route by GPS, flags rare species as you enter them, and points you to hundreds of thousands of eBird hotspots. It works fully offline, and a recent update added sound recordings to checklists. Your lists go straight to your eBird account.

Better than Merlin for counting carefully and contributing to science. Worse as an identifier, because it is not one: you need to know what you saw, often with Merlin's help, before it goes on the list.

Warble: for a reason to go back outside

Warble is a free iPhone game built around live sound identification. You tap the button while a bird sings, the phone compares the sound against 800 US species, and a named bird becomes a card in an album of 100 birds for your state; there is one for each state and DC. Cards are common, uncommon, rare or legendary, set per state from GBIF observation data. It works offline after a one-time download of about 100 MB, on iOS 17 or later, with no ads, no accounts, and no sound ever uploaded.

Better than Merlin at making birding a daily habit, especially for kids and beginners, because a half-filled album and one free catch a day give you a reason to step outside. Worse at almost everything else Merlin does: no photo identification, no Android, US birds only, and a smaller catalog. Unlimited catches cost $3.99 a week or $19.99 a year with Warble Pro.

Which one should you pick?

• One free app that does it all: Merlin.
• Recordings that help researchers: BirdNET, or BirdNET Live for continuous offline listening.
• A field guide to read once you have a name: the Audubon Bird Guide.
• Photos of everything, not just birds: Seek by iNaturalist.
• Careful lists that count for science: eBird.
• A game that gets you outside every morning: Warble, with Merlin on the same phone.

All six are free to start, and most people end up with two: Merlin plus whichever one matches the way they like to bird.

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Questions people ask

Warble is a game, not a field guide. Where this page states a fact about a bird, it comes from the sources above.