Please state here which features in Untappd are better than RateBeer. No bitching, only facts please. In hope RB will listen.
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Size of userbase - more complete database (not a feature, though, just a reality that impacts site usability)
Menu linkage with many bars/breweries - easy to see whatâs available and what youâve already had at a glance without looking up each individual beer
Quicker rating when desired (no required text) - way better for festivals, socializing at bars, etc. - while still âcounting fullyâ to your own stats (ticks arenât second-class citizens the way they are on RB)
The app
List of trending beers/places
Easier to tag your location when rating a beer (because the app is watching you!)
Uploading a pic for any rating you want in real-time
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I donât think itâs better, thatâs why Iâm still here, but there is a lot to learn from them.
- A perfectly working app.
- All features working as intended and as far as I know hardly any new releases have bugs
- Ease of use.
- Itâs getting pretty active support from a lot of venues and brewers.
- Up to date tap list for some venues.
- Strength in numbers (users)
- Never encountered downtime
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I read a âratingâ on the UT this morning and they actually used the word, hop. Woohoo!
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- app which does its job 99% of the time
- beer menus at venues
- larger beer database
- lists
- more users, more rates per beer
- average scores for good beers are higher than those @ RB
- venue subscriptions
- breweries handling their profiles
- money wise it seems sustainable
- theyâve been changing for the better
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Iâm a heavy user of both, thereâs space for both to co-exist and each can learn from the other. I think thereâs far more for RB to learn from UT so Iâm glad this thread is here to counter the other one, where we concluded that stats, and to a certain degree places, were pretty much the only things RB does better.
Itâs gonna be a long list, and 90% of these Iâve talked about here in the past in various threads, to varying degrees of interest from other members, and usually no interest from RB staff. So donât hold your breath for anything to come from this thread but I guess we shouldnât lose hope either.
- Both the website and app are very fast
- Rapid development of the app - app is stable and frequently updated. Beta testers usually receive new builds multiple times per week, bugs are fixed soon after they are reported.
- Proper vintage and variant handling - the âfake vintageâ problem still exists but is now finally being addressed and brewers can now say how they want these vintages dealt with (when a year is not visible on the label).
- Streamlined corrections/dupe reporting system. The current data is presented in a form where users can simply edit the data and submit for admin review. For dupes, you can search for the duplicate beer and submit for admins to confirm/reject the merge. Merges that affected your checkins are shown under your account page along with the reason.
- Collaborative brews a brewery was part of are shown on the brewerâs page even if it wasnât brewed at their site.
- Ability to checkin a beer with serving type, location, photo
- Ability to âtickâ without review or rating, just to say youâve had a beer (ok so I donât care about this personally but some people want this here so we can call it a feature I guess)
- Incredibly powerful wishlist and custom lists feature for beers, brewers and venues with detailed filtering, sorting, and searching options on them.
- Live taplists/stocklists for verified venues/shops
- Thousands of breweries manage their pages/beers themselves, reducing the need for user input where errors are more likely to occur.
- Venue subscriptions for notifications of new beers and/or events
- Venue database is provided by Foursquare which itself has millions of active users and a similar correction submitting procedure, so the accuracy and completeness of the database is arguably better than RB.
- Beer subscriptions can tell me when a beer is at a venue near me
- If you mark yourself as going to an event you can add it to your calendar app on your phone for ease of reminders/planning. (aside from this, RB actually does events better since any user can create)
- Localisation handled properly and not forced to American ideals. I can choose the date/time format, distance units, set the radius of the area I consider to be âlocalâ to me.
- I can allow breweries to comment on my checkins if they wish, so they can request additional feedback if they so desire (rarely see this happening to be honest but itâs a useful feature).
- Sustainable business model. Income generated from verified venues, merch store, partnered badges/offers⊠much better than relying on advertising.
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The ability to rate beers that pre-date the site and things like Grote Dorst and h.ertie blends. Thatâs the only reason I also joined untappd. I also like the ability to rate vintages separately. I think itâs a bit too much to have a new entry for each vintage, but a sub menu or something under the main entry where you could tick each vintage with a separate score would be helpful. I know you can technically write notes for each vintage in your post here if you want to, but I like the other way better.
Those are the only features on Untappd I like. I also like that most beers are on there already so you donât have to add beers constantly but that has more to do with the sheer number of users rather than a âfeatureâ of the site.
Disagree, at least on my phone the app is pretty slow, entering a rating (without writing a review) takes almost the same amount of time as entering a rating on RB via Ericâs app.
In what way is this better than on RB? I pretty much like the RB way here. Having vintages of the same beer is mostly pretty unnecessary, even though they are sometimes different, but thatâs just the same as batch variation and shouldnât legitimate new entries every time.
Totally disagree. If we would allow that on ratebeer, some breweries would have been deleted completely after the âtakeoverâ. Besides, I have seen several entries on UT which were managed by breweries and contained mistakes, especially style-wise, but there is no option for me to propose an edit. What if a brewery loses its interest in it? A user-based DB monitored by admins is still superior in my opinion.
Why would you even have the option to disallow a brewery commenting on your rating? When you rate a breweryâs product, why should they not be allowed to comment on your rating afterwards? True, RB doesnât have that option at all, but at least they can send you direct messages which occasionally happens. On UT, breweries mostly âtoastâ your check-ins, sometimes even weeks after checking in, which is totally pointless.
Thatâs what I really like(d) about RB that itâs hardly commercial and that it doesnât have to rely on such things. Premium membership on UT is also much more expensive. I would rather contribute to community with (a bearable amount of) bugs than to a shiny website and app which is way more anonymous to me.
I mostly agree with the other points, but some of them are not just relevant for the way I use RB and very often I doubt that those points are something RB could learn from because of the different approach of the two sites.
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I canât say I understand exactly what the RB policy is (as the âOur Special Aleâ seems to not follow any discernable pattern), but I have no familiarity with the untappd policy at all - what do they do thatâs good/bad/different?
You made lots of good points, but I felt like there is a somewhat important response to this. Breweries are allowed to do that here, you can associate yourself with your brewery and then edit your own listings. It is not a good thing. The admin forum is full of âlook what this mad brewer did to their page, can somebody ban them so they donât do it againâ.
RB: different beer, different vintage (as with the early Our Special Ales). Same beer, one entry/vintage (as with the later Our Special Ales). Not saying theyâre all correct, I donât know, but thatâs how it should be.
UT: Leffe Blond (2014) Leffe Blond (2015) Leffe Blond (2016) etc. Apparently theyâre now finally tackling this, but I doubt they will ever catch up. It also requires input from the breweries.
They allow everything as a new entry
Good responses.
Speed - Yeah I guess itâll vary from user to user. In my experience both the RB app (official one) and website have been slower than Untappd, the new beer pages on the website especially are much slower to load for me now. Prior to that the website was fine when the servers were running well.
Vintages - I should have reworded/explained this a lot better. Will explain in a separate post because now that I think more about it neither Untappd or Ratebeerâs handling of vintages is ideal in my opinion. RBâs is inconsistent at times, UT has a well functioning system but policy on what is allowed is far too lax.
Brewery management - as others have pointed out this is actually a thing on RB too itâs just that hardly any brewers care to do it. UT is a âuser-based DB monitored by adminsâ just like RB is, UT has the added benefit of having a lot of breweries interested in it too. Mistakes are always going to happen be it from a user or a brewery, but I find 99% of the time mistakes are from users. I think itâs a small percentage of brewers that arenât following guidelines and/or arenât paying attention to what theyâre doing.
Also⊠breweries donât have the option to delete all their beers (or the brewery itself). If thatâs something that they can do on RB then that would be joetâs fault for making it like that. Do admins not have ways to lock beers/breweries against future edits? Requiring an admin to unlock first? If RB doesnât have this then they should do so to protect against any breweries deciding to go rogue.
Brewery comments - Itâs enabled by default, I doubt many users even know you can disable it. Some people just like to remain private I guess. Thatâs more of a difference in philosophy between RB and UT usage though I think (you can make your account completely private on UT if you want). I just think it would be nice if breweries were able to add a public comment to our reviews.
Business model - fair point. Canât argue with that. And RB premium does offer more for your money than the equivalent UT does.
I just feel the benefit of Untappdâs way is that it is more sustainable in that there is no real need to accept investment from ABI or the like, and the negative visible commercial aspect of it is limited to badges/promotions which I just ignore anyway, much like I ignore regular ads on websites.
So I just backlogged 44 ratings here on RB - and had to enter 17 of them (~38%) into the database. Thatâs the problem. Itâs bad enough that I have to ignore my friends/family when ticking beers at the bar because I need to force-write a review, but when I also have to take the time to enter it in the database first? Now Iâm that asshole with his face in his phone, ignoring his friends. It doesnât work for real-time rating. I donât mind entering the occasional new beer - thatâs obviously going to happen - its the rate at which it happens thatâs discouraging.
And for context - hereâs the number of UT ratings of the first 7 of these beers that I just added to the RB database: 1080, 32, 457, 23, 75, 177, 123.
How the holy F does a beer get 1000+ ratings on UT before it even hits RBâs radar?
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The speed of UT depends on your phone (my old phone with not a lot of memory available was terribly slow), your settings (try to switch of gps and UT doesnt know what to do anymore), etc. But I think the speed of UT itself in general is pretty good.
They donât have proper local admins for smaller regions (for example Estonia). Untappdâs Estonian database is quite bad and has a lot of incorrect info. I know that some local untappd (premium) users have even asked, if they can be admins, but have been denied by untappd. The correction system doesnât really work without local admins and their knowledge of the beer scene.
This is all in theory. The idea is really great, but if you try to actually use it (for example at the beer festival), youâll soon find that the execution of the list is not really logical and has some really annoying bugs (or maybe they are features, I donât know).
I donât agree. The main problem in untappd is that anything can be venue. Youâre drinking something on the park bench, it is a venue! Youâre getting boosted at the library toilet, another new venue! Add to that the fact that you canât rate venues, and youâll have a lot of clutter and no easy way to filter out the good stuff. Even the untappd users use ratebeers places for travel maps⊠
I have encountered many bugs in untappd, although I agree that it still works a lot better than rb. The most important thing is that the main feature (aka checkin in a beer) (almost) never fails.
By the way untappd actually has a very solid policy about what is allowed and what not, but they donât really enforce it+like I said lack of proper (local) admins means it is impossible to enforce it.
Another thing that I suspect is not enforced on UT is when people rate the wrong beer. On RB, I have been called out⊠not sure how that would happen on UTâŠ
Thatâs true thereâs a quite a few regions like that with low presence on Untappd and few (if any) admins, same problem on Ratebeer too though isnât it (not for Estonia obviously if youâre here)?
Also did they go through the proper application process? Because Iâm very surprised to hear they were denied when theyâre from a region with no moderators. I know theyâve taken on a lot of new people in the last few months and Iâm sure theyâd be more than happy to get some people on board to sort out regions such as Estonia. Premium status has no effect on whether or not theyâd be chosen btw.
Iâve not used it at a beer festival so I canât say if thereâs a problem with using it like that. I do use it for cellar functionality and wishlist though and for that I think itâs fine. If I were at a festival I can open the app, go to my profile, tap my wishlist, search the beer to see if itâs there or not. Thatâs good enough for me, and is more than what I can do on RB. And in fact I think that might be even quicker soon with it marked in search results if itâs in your lists, reducing the number of steps to take.
Only morons do that. Just remove them from your friends list 
Itâs completely irrelevant in any other aspect. Unless you were specifically searching for the best library toilet to get boosted in? 
I put that part in bold because I say it actually is very strongly enforced, especially in the UK where we have so many edge cases to deal with (contract/client breweries, supermarkets, pub chains and whatnot), which thankfully is another area getting changed to make it easier to deal with. But yes youâre right, if thereâs a lack of local admins then yep that area definitely suffers with accuracy issues.
Yep, sadly not enforced there. Though users can edit their checkin to correct it themselves, or if a admin sees it they can too but I know a lot donât bother because thereâs just too many users who are idiots, no other way to say it.
Mind you, Iâve seen people on RB rating the wrong beer before by mistake. I am supposed to send them a message? Or tell an admin? Sometimes itâs not obvious to others to âproveâ theyâve rated the wrong beer so admins might be reluctant to move it.
Yeah why not send them a message. We are sticklers for correctness. Alternatively ask an admin to move the rating or to merge the incorrect listing. I do this whenever I see an issue.
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