The best Eagle alternatives

Best for: People who want an Eagle-style asset manager without paying anything.

Billfish is the closest free alternative to Eagle. It is a local asset manager for Mac and Windows built for creatives, with folders, tags, colour filtering, image-recognition and reverse-image search, and a browser clipper for saving inspiration. It handles images, design source files, fonts and audio, and it indexes files without the heavy duplication some managers create. The main caveats are that it is made by a China-based team, so English-language support and community are thinner, and it is a little less polished than Eagle.

Best for: Teams who want to collect and share visual collections in the cloud.

Dropmark is a cloud tool for collecting links, files, images, video and text into shareable collections, with a strong focus on collaboration. It has web, Mac and iOS apps, a free Lite plan, and paid Solo and Team tiers. It is less of a deep local asset library than Eagle and more about gathering and sharing, so it suits people who work with others and want their collections online rather than on one machine.

Best for: Artists who want reference images floating on-screen while they work, not a full library.

PureRef is a minimal tool for arranging reference images on an infinite board that can float over your other apps. Illustrators and 3D artists love it for keeping references in view while they paint or model. It stores boards as local files, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and is pay-what-you-want from about $7. It is deliberately not a searchable, tagged library like Eagle, and it is images only, so it is a companion to an asset manager rather than a replacement for one.

Best for: People who want to gather and connect visual research into calm, shareable channels.

Are.na is a visual research tool built around saving blocks into channels and connecting them across projects. It is calm and deliberately non-algorithmic, good for slow research, mood-building and collaboration, with public or private channels. It runs on the web and iOS, is cloud-based, and has a free tier capped at 200 blocks. It is more about connecting ideas than managing a big local library of design files, so it suits researchers and curators more than asset-heavy production work.

Best for: People who mainly want to save links across every device, with images along for the ride.

Raindrop is a cross-platform bookmark manager that also stores and previews images and files. It leans on manual collections and tags, with full-text search and permanent page copies on Pro, and it runs everywhere with a generous free tier. It is a link manager first, so it is not a deep design-asset library like Eagle, but if links are most of what you save and you want them on every device, it fits. See our Muse vs Raindrop page or the full Raindrop alternatives roundup.