12 Best Pinterest Alternatives: Apps Like Pinterest for Visual Inspiration
Quick Answer: the closest working Pinterest alternatives are We Heart It (aesthetic collections), Dribbble and Behance (design and portfolio work), Houzz (home design), Tumblr (mixed media), and Designspiration (search designs by colour).
Every platform below was checked on 10 August 2026. Three that appear on most "apps like Pinterest" lists, including an earlier version of this one, have since shut down. They are listed at the end so you do not waste time looking for them.
Related: Find People on Pinterest | Pinterest Board Ideas | Pinterest Tools
Contents
- The 12 working alternatives
- Comparison table
- Choosing by use case
- Three alternatives that no longer exist
- Using more than one platform
- Frequently asked questions
The 12 working alternatives
1. We Heart It
Best for: aesthetic collections, mood boards, personal inspiration
Key features:
- Clean, minimal interface
- Collections and hearts, the equivalent of boards and saves
- Browse feed and creator following
- Strong mobile app
How it differs from Pinterest: more personal and emotional in tone, far less e-commerce integration, and a younger user base. It is the closest thing to early Pinterest still running.
2. Dribbble
Best for: design professionals, UI and UX inspiration
Key features:
- Showcase design work as "shots"
- Professional networking and a designer job board
- Community feedback on work in progress
Pricing: there is a free tier. Paid plans are Lite at $4/month, Standard at $8/month and Plus at $99/month, all billed yearly (checked 10 August 2026). Note these are the annual-billing rates; month-to-month costs more. An earlier version of this page quoted a single "Pro ($5/mo)" tier, which no longer matches Dribbble's lineup at all.
3. Behance (Adobe)
Best for: creative portfolios and full project showcases
Key features:
- Complete project presentations rather than single images
- Multiple images and video per project
- Adobe Creative Cloud integration
- Professional networking and job listings
Why choose it: you need portfolio hosting plus visibility, not just a place to save things. Behance is where the finished work goes; Pinterest is where the references go.
4. Houzz
Best for: home design, interior decoration, architecture
Key features:
- Ideabooks, which work almost exactly like Pinterest boards
- Direct contact with local professionals
- Shop home products
- Verified professional reviews
Who it suits: homeowners mid-renovation, interior designers, architects. For home and interiors specifically it is a better tool than Pinterest, because the saved image connects to a person who can build the thing.
5. Tumblr
Best for: mixed media, blogging and visual posts together
Key features:
- Text, images and video in one feed
- Reblog system, the nearest equivalent to repinning
- Tags for discovery
- Customisable blogs
How it differs: more varied content types and a blogging hybrid, with strong niche communities rather than mainstream reach.
6. Mix (formerly StumbleUpon)
Best for: general content discovery beyond images
Key features:
- Algorithmic recommendations by interest
- Articles, images and video
- Collections
- Free tier plus a paid tier that removes ads and view limits
StumbleUpon closed in June 2018 and migrated its accounts here. Mix is still running and still accepting new curators, which makes it one of the few survivors of that generation of discovery sites.
7. Pearltrees
Best for: organising and sharing any kind of content
Key features:
- Visual tree structure rather than a grid
- Organise websites, files and photos together
- Collaboration features
- Widely used in education
Unique approach: the tree visualisation is genuinely different from a board, and it suits research and reference work better than mood boarding.
8. Designspiration
Best for: design inspiration searchable by colour
Key features:
- Search by colour, specifying up to five shades at once
- Combine colour search with keywords
- Browser extension for saving as you browse
- Free browsing and search; a subscription adds a structured personal library
Why it earns a place: the colour search does something Pinterest does not do at all. If you are matching a palette, it is the better tool.
9. Muzli
Best for: design news alongside inspiration
Key features:
- Curated daily design content
- Browser extension that replaces your new-tab page
- News, articles and trending work
Note the address is muz.li. Older write-ups, including this page previously, list a different domain that does not resolve.
10. Flipboard
Best for: magazine-style reading and curation
Key features:
- Magazine layout
- News aggregation by topic
- Build and share custom magazines
- Available across platforms
Broader content: considerably more text-heavy than Pinterest, so it suits topic curation better than visual mood boarding.
11. Bookmark OS
Best for: professional bookmark and reference management
Key features:
- Bookmark, tab, task and file management in one desktop-style interface
- Visual bookmarks using page screenshots
- AI-assisted folder organisation
- Notes with web clipping
- Cross-device access
Who it suits: people organising work references rather than collecting inspiration. It is the least Pinterest-like entry here and the most useful if what you actually wanted was a better bookmark manager.
12. Wanelo
Best for: shopping, with an important caveat
What it is now: Wanelo has left the social bookmarking category. It launched as a follow-brands, save-products social shopping app, which is what most articles still describe. Today it presents itself as an AI shopping marketplace: describe what you want in plain language and it finds, compares and ships it.
Include it if you wanted the shopping half of Pinterest. Skip it if you wanted the saving and curating half, because that is no longer the product.
Comparison table
The previous version of this table rated each platform's mobile app, e-commerce and community size out of five stars. Those ratings had no measurement behind them, so they are gone. What replaces them is what you can actually check: content type, whether you can buy inside the app, and which Pinterest feature it maps onto.
Choosing by use case
Personal inspiration and mood boards: We Heart It first, then Tumblr for more varied content, then Mix if you want discovery beyond images.
Professional design work: Dribbble for shots and visibility, Behance for full portfolios. Designspiration if you are working to a palette.
Home and interiors: Houzz, without much competition. The professional directory is the reason.
Shopping: Houzz for home goods, Wanelo for general shopping, keeping in mind it is now a marketplace rather than a social app.
Organising research and references: Pearltrees or Bookmark OS. Neither is a Pinterest replacement for inspiration, and both are better than Pinterest at keeping things findable.
Staying current with design: Muzli, which is a news feed with a browser extension rather than a saving tool.
Three alternatives that no longer exist
Most "apps like Pinterest" lists, including the earlier version of this page, still recommend these. All three were checked on 10 August 2026.
Ello. Shut down in July 2023, deleting nine years of posts. It had been sold to Talenthouse in 2018 and declined from there. The ello.co domain now redirects to an unrelated gambling site, so do not follow old links to it. If you wanted its selling point, an ad-free space for artists, Behance and Designspiration are the nearest working options.
Fancy. Fancy.com serves a holding page reading "We're working hard to bring you a new experience. Check back soon." There is no shop and no browsing. For curated product discovery, Wanelo or Houzz are the working substitutes.
Juxtapost. The domain still resolves in DNS but the server does not answer on either juxtapost.com or www.juxtapost.com. For simple visual bookmarking without complexity, We Heart It or Bookmark OS cover the same job.
Why this section exists: roundup articles are rarely rechecked after publication, so dead products accumulate in them for years. If a list recommends a tool without saying when it was last verified, assume some of it is gone. Our guide to the top 100 social media platforms keeps a running list of which ones have shut down or been renamed.
Using more than one platform
Why people do it:
- Different audiences on each platform
- Cross-promotion between them
- Testing what resonates where
- Less dependence on any single algorithm
A workable split:
- A primary platform for your main audience
- A secondary platform for a niche community
- A professional platform for networking and portfolio work
- A shopping platform, if you sell products
The practical difficulty is consistency. Posting to several visual platforms by hand is where multi-platform plans usually collapse. Scheduling tools let you plan once and publish across channels; if you are comparing them, our Buffer alternatives guide covers the main options, and best Pinterest scheduler tools covers Pinterest specifically.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the best free alternative to Pinterest?
We Heart It, which offers the closest match to Pinterest's core loop: visual bookmarking, collections, a browse feed and mobile apps, at no cost. For design work specifically, Dribbble and Behance both have free tiers.
Is Ello still available?
No. Ello shut down in July 2023 and deleted nine years of posts. Its domain now redirects to an unrelated gambling site, so avoid old links. Many lists still recommend it.
Are there Pinterest alternatives with fewer content restrictions?
Tumblr has historically been more permissive than Pinterest, though it does enforce restrictions. Every platform here has content guidelines, and any article promising an unmoderated alternative is either describing something very small or something that will not last.
Which Pinterest alternative is best for businesses?
It depends on what you sell. Houzz for home services, because it connects you directly to customers. Behance for creative agencies showing full portfolios. Wanelo for general product discovery, bearing in mind it now works as a marketplace rather than a social platform.
Can I import my Pinterest boards to another platform?
Not directly. None of these platforms offers a Pinterest import. You can export your Pinterest data from account settings, then recreate collections manually or use a browser bookmark import where the platform supports one, which Bookmark OS and Pearltrees do.
Which of these is closest to Pinterest?
We Heart It, by some distance. Collections work like boards, hearts work like saves, and the browse feed behaves similarly. It is smaller and has far less commerce built in, which is either the drawback or the point depending on why you left.
Conclusion
Pinterest still dominates visual inspiration, and none of these replaces it wholesale. What they do is beat it in a specific lane: We Heart It for the closest overall experience, Dribbble and Behance for professional design work, Houzz for anything to do with a home, Designspiration for colour, and Pearltrees or Bookmark OS if what you needed all along was better organisation.
Pick by primary use case rather than by feature count, and check any list's verification date before you trust it. This one was checked on 10 August 2026, and three of the fifteen entries it used to carry had disappeared since it was written.
More Pinterest guides: How to get traffic from Pinterest, Best times to post on Pinterest, Pinterest board ideas, Read Pinterest analytics, Find people on Pinterest, Pinterest tools.
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