Art Inventory and Collection Management Software: Artlogic vs Artwork Archive vs ArtBase vs Collector Systems

Art inventory and collection management software is where a gallery’s consignments, a collector’s provenance files and a museum’s loan records live, and the market for it has consolidated hard since 2022. This guide from the Kurums Startup team compares Artlogic, Artwork Archive, ArtBase, Collector Systems and Masterpiece Manager on what each does, who it suits, published pricing as checked in October 2026 and the limits buyers run into. It sits in the Arts & Creative Economy hub alongside our guides to art as an asset class and museum ticketing and CRM software.

Why has Artlogic become the default for galleries?

Artlogic combines an artwork and contact database, a gallery website, online viewing rooms, sales tools and email marketing in one subscription, and it has bought or merged with most of its rivals. Full-platform gallery plans start at £156 a month; artist studio plans at £95; the Expert tier is quote-based.

The company dates its origins to 1989, when co-founder Peter Chater began building database tools for London galleries, started trading as Artlogic in 1994 and incorporated Artlogic Media in 1999. Growth accelerated after Cove Hill Partners became majority shareholder in 2022, and the following period brought mergers with ArtBase, exhibit-E, galleryManager and ArtCloud. Artlogic now reports more than 6,000 galleries, artists and collectors as clients, over 12,000 users and more than 2,000 live websites, with 100-plus staff in London and New York and presences in Atlanta and Los Angeles. The network effect is the product: a gallery database that speaks natively to its own website, viewing rooms, PDF catalogues, consignment records and offer emails saves the re-keying that used to fill assistants’ weeks.

Published pricing is tiered by role and module. The full-platform Gallery Essential plan, from £156 a month, covers up to 25,000 artworks, unlimited contacts and pages, 200 website artworks, 5,000 marketing emails to 1,000 contacts a month, sales offer emails and the companion app. Professional, from £311 a month, lifts website artworks to 500 and emails to 50,000 a month, and adds sales pipeline, offer tracking, reporting, custom fonts and multilingual sites. Expert, with unlimited artworks, multiple billing entities, gallery firewalling and a dedicated account manager, is priced on request. Artist plans are £95 (1,500 artworks) and £241 (25,000). Modules can be bought alone: database from £42 to £90 per user per month, websites from £53 to £205 a month with a 3%, 2% or 1% e-commerce fee depending on tier, and marketing from £11 to £100 a month. All figures are shown as “from” prices in sterling, and the pricing page directs larger galleries to a tailored quote.

Who it suits: any commercial gallery that shows at fairs, runs a programme of exhibitions and sells through its website, from a single-room space to a multi-city operation. Limits: the sterling-only price list is awkward for dollar and euro budgets, the fixed artwork caps on each tier force upgrades as inventories grow, the e-commerce fee is a separate line that affects direct-sale margins, and the breadth of modules means a small gallery can end up paying for marketing and sales tools it does not use.

Is Artwork Archive good enough for professionals?

For artists, collectors and small organisations, yes. Denver-based Artwork Archive, founded in 2010 as one of the first cloud inventory systems, prices from $9 a month for 100 pieces to $36 for unlimited pieces, and $39 to $156 a month for organisations, all with a 14-day free trial and no card required.

The artist and collector ladders mirror each other: Apprentice or Starter at $9 a month for 100 pieces and 10 locations, Professional or Plus at $18 for 500 pieces and 50 locations, Master or Premier at $36 for unlimited pieces, unlimited locations and three users. Organization plans add sub-locations and more seats: Standard at $39 a month for 500 pieces and three users, Plus at $78 for 1,000 pieces and five users, Enterprise at $156 for unlimited pieces and ten users. Every plan includes inventory records with provenance and condition notes, location tracking, contact management, invoices, consignment and loan tracking, insurance and valuation reports, portfolio PDFs and public or private online collection pages. The company says it serves thousands of users in more than 120 countries, and its organisation customers are typically universities, hospitals, municipalities, corporate collections and small museums rather than commercial galleries.

Who it suits: a working artist who needs to know what is where and who owns what; a collector with a few hundred works who wants insurance schedules and a private catalogue; a corporate or public-art collection that needs location tracking across buildings. Limits: no integrated gallery website or viewing rooms of the Artlogic kind, no point of sale, piece caps that make the $9 and $18 tiers tight for prolific artists, and sales tools that stop at invoices and inquiries rather than a pipeline. For a two-person gallery it can work; for one with a fair calendar it usually cannot.

What happened to ArtBase and what should its users do?

ArtBase, the FileMaker-based gallery database sold since the 1990s, merged into Artlogic in 2022 and is no longer available to buy. Artlogic continues to support ArtBase 10 through 12, ArtBase Go: Live and SalesBook with no stated end date, and runs managed migrations into its own platform.

For two decades ArtBase was Artlogic’s principal rival in the gallery market, particularly in New York, and its FileMaker foundation gave technically minded galleries the ability to customise layouts and scripts themselves. That flexibility is also why migration is not trivial: ArtBase installations tend to carry years of bespoke fields and workflows. Artlogic’s ArtBase resource page describes the transition offer as a team-managed migration of inventory, contacts and documents, a step-by-step onboarding with import checks, templates and guides for organising client, financial and artwork data, bespoke data analysis and testing, training through guides, videos and webinars, optional one-to-one sessions and a free 30- or 60-minute consultation. The page states there are no current plans to stop supporting ArtBase, but new licences are not sold.

Who it concerns: galleries still running ArtBase on in-house Macs and servers, who face three realistic paths. The first is to stay, accepting that FileMaker versions, macOS updates and staff who know the system will all age out. The second is to migrate to Artlogic, which is the path of least data loss because the vendor controls both ends. The third is to use the forced move to run a fresh selection against Collector Systems, Masterpiece Manager or Artwork Archive. Limits of staying: no new features, no cloud access, and a shrinking pool of consultants. Limits of migrating: Artlogic’s quote-based Expert tier is where most legacy ArtBase galleries land, so the monthly cost after migration is rarely the £156 entry price.

Who is Collector Systems built for?

Collector Systems is a New York-based cloud collection-management system for private collectors, family offices, advisers, museums, foundations and corporate collections. CS Core costs $95 per user per month with unlimited object records and 10 GB storage; CS Enterprise costs $185 per user per month with 50 GB and unlimited sub-accounts.

Where Artlogic is built around selling, Collector Systems is built around holding. Its published feature set covers acquisition, valuation, insurance and sale details for every object, financial tools for collection value and expenses, more than 130 user-defined fields and over 1,000 specialised fields across disciplines from fine art to archaeology and geology, condition and conservation records, exhibition and loan histories, location tracking, document storage, a public API, WordPress and Drupal integrations with a WordPress theme, and iOS and Android apps. Security certification is unusual at this price point: the company states SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 compliance, which matters to family offices whose collections are a line in a balance sheet and whose auditors ask. Support is included at no extra charge. Extra storage is priced in bands from $20 a month for 10–100 GB to $225 for 1–2 TB, data conversion is quoted per project, registrarial services cost $195 an hour, and set-up fees may apply to family-office and corporate accounts.

Who it suits: a collector or adviser managing a seven- or eight-figure collection across homes, storage and loans; a university or foundation collection that needs museum-grade fields without a museum-grade budget; a family office that wants the collection in the same governance framework as other assets. Limits: no demo-free trial (the site offers a scheduled demo), per-user pricing that climbs with a larger registrar team, no gallery website or consignment sales tools, and a list of named clients that the company does not publish. For the lending and insurance side of holding art, see our guide to art insurance and auction economics.

Where does Masterpiece Manager fit?

Masterpiece Manager is a US gallery and museum management system that bundles inventory, contacts and point of sale in every plan, with set-up fees and live support on the higher tiers. Published monthly prices run from $39 for artists to $89 for collectors, $169 for galleries and $299 for museums.

The pricing page is clear about the structure. The Artist plan, $39 a month with no set-up fee, gives one user, one artist and unlimited items with email support. Collector, $89 a month plus a $500 set-up fee, allows three users, 50 artists or vendors and 600 items, with reporting included. Gallery, $169 a month plus $1,000 set-up, unlocks unlimited users, artists and items, unlimited live support, email marketing and reporting. Museum, $299 a month plus $3,000 set-up, carries the same unlimited allowances with the museum-oriented modules. A dynamic website add-on costs $19, $39, $69 or $99 a month by tier, and optional shopping-cart ($750) and auction ($1,500) modules are one-time purchases with possible additional fees. Subscriptions can be billed monthly or annually.

Who it suits: a US gallery or regional museum shop that sells from the floor and wants a till, a consignment ledger and a mailing list in one system, with a human on the phone. Limits: the set-up fees make the first-year cost materially higher than the monthly figure suggests ($3,028 for a gallery, $6,588 for a museum, before the website add-on), the 600-item cap on the Collector plan is low, the design and web presence are plainer than Artlogic’s, and the brand has little footprint outside North America.

How do the platforms compare on websites, sales and security?

Only Artlogic and Masterpiece Manager sell an integrated public website; Artwork Archive and Collector Systems offer public collection pages or WordPress integration instead. Sales pipelines are strongest in Artlogic, point of sale in Masterpiece Manager, and audited security certifications are published only by Collector Systems.

Website and e-commerce: Artlogic’s website plans range from £53 to £205 a month and take a 3%, 2% or 1% fee on online sales by tier, with viewing rooms and multilingual sites on the higher plans. Masterpiece Manager’s dynamic website add-on costs $19 to $99 a month, plus a $750 one-time shopping-cart module. Artwork Archive gives every account a hosted public profile and embeddable collection pages at no extra cost. Collector Systems provides WordPress and Drupal integrations and a theme, which suits foundations publishing a catalogue more than galleries selling.

Sales and consignment: Artlogic’s Professional and Expert tiers add a deal pipeline, offer tracking, consignment management and fair-ready PDF offers; it is the only one of the five designed around an art-fair sales day. Masterpiece Manager’s POS handles floor sales and gift-shop retail. Artwork Archive tracks invoices, consignments and inquiries. Collector Systems records sales as part of object history rather than as a sales workflow.

Security and data: Collector Systems publishes SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001; Artlogic offers two-factor authentication, user management, gallery firewalling and 90-day or two-year cloud backups by tier; Artwork Archive and Masterpiece Manager rely on standard cloud hosting with daily backups. For a collection whose insurer or bank asks for evidence of controls, that difference decides the shortlist. In Türkiye, where galleries such as those on Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan and Karaköy axes increasingly show at international fairs, Artlogic’s fair tools and multilingual websites are the practical draw, while VAT invoicing and lira pricing have to be handled outside all five systems.

Which one should you pick?

Choose by whether you sell, hold or both, then by budget. Selling galleries belong on Artlogic; holders with governance needs on Collector Systems; artists and small collections on Artwork Archive; floor-sales galleries and regional museums in the US on Masterpiece Manager; ArtBase users on a migration plan.

• Commercial gallery with an exhibition programme and art-fair calendar: Artlogic, starting at the £156 Gallery Essential plan and expecting to move to Professional (£311) once website artworks pass 200 or you need the sales pipeline.
• Artist studio managing editions, consignments and a mailing list: Artlogic Artist (£95) if you want a website in the same system; Artwork Archive Professional ($18) or Master ($36) if you do not.
• Private collector, adviser or family office: Collector Systems CS Core ($95 per user) for one or two users; CS Enterprise ($185 per user) when multiple entities or advisers need sub-accounts and the auditors want SOC 2 evidence.
• University, hospital, corporate or municipal collection: Artwork Archive Organization Plus ($78) or Enterprise ($156) for location tracking and public pages; Collector Systems if you need loan management and specialised cataloguing fields.
• US gallery or museum shop with floor sales and gift retail: Masterpiece Manager Gallery ($169 plus $1,000 set-up) or Museum ($299 plus $3,000), budgeting the website add-on and shopping cart.
• Gallery still running ArtBase: request Artlogic’s migration consultation now, export a full backup first, and compare the resulting quote against a Collector Systems or Masterpiece Manager rebuild before signing.

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