CLZ Movies alternative
Thinking about leaving CLZ Movies?
CLZ knows barcode scanning cold. Arkiv is free, imports the collection you already built there, and writes you a Collector Portrait from what is on your shelf. Here is an honest look at both.
Free · no credit card · import your CLZ export in minutes
Side by side
CLZ has real strengths. So does Arkiv.
CLZ has been cataloguing collections for decades and it shows. Arkiv is newer, free, and built around what a collection means to the person who owns it.
- Price
- About $4/month or $40/year, trial only, no permanent free plan (as of writing; check CLZ’s own pricing page for the current figure).
- Free. No trial clock, no card, nothing held back behind a paywall.
- Barcode scanning
- Deep and mature, built over two decades. Genuinely the fastest way to catalogue a tall stack of discs.
- Scanning exists, but CLZ’s scanning depth is still ahead here, worth being upfront about.
- Metadata depth
- Decades of accumulated data and edge-case coverage most catalogues never build up.
- Backed by TMDB: solid for mainstream film and TV, narrower than what CLZ has amassed.
- Importing a CLZ export
- No CLZ-to-Arkiv path, naturally: CLZ has no reason to build one.
- Reads a real CLZ CSV export directly. A typical export maps deterministically; an unusual column layout gets routed to a quick review step rather than silently mismapped or dropped.
- Getting your data back out
- The app’s only export is a backup file in CLZ’s own format, built for CLZ to read back into CLZ, not a spreadsheet.
- Full collection export as CSV or JSON, any time, in full. Nothing about your collection is held hostage.
- Getting to know your own collection
- Not really the goal. CLZ organizes and catalogues; it doesn’t interpret what a collection says about the person who built it.
- A Collector Portrait, a Collection DNA map, and a Collector Rank built from what’s actually on the shelf. More on this below.
One more honest caveat, since it cuts against Arkiv’s own advertised copy-counting: titles that arrive through a CSV import, from CLZ or anywhere else, land as individual copies. Grouping them into a box set after the fact isn’t automatic yet in either product. It’s on our list, not a win for either side.
Beyond the catalogue
This isn’t just inventory. It’s a living record of you as a collector.
CLZ tells you what you own. Arkiv reads it back to you, and keeps a record of who you’ve become as a collector, not just what you’ve bought.
Collector Portrait
Half your collection is from the 2010s, which tells you something about your tastes and timing: you came of age or came back to film during a decade of technical mastery and genre ambition.
Action and Adventure dominate, but never alone. Drama and Thriller sit alongside them, which means you're after films where spectacle serves character, where the scale of the world matches the size of the stakes. Spielberg leads your directors, but you've balanced him against Villeneuve, Scott, Bay, and Fincher: filmmakers who share his command of image but pursue different kinds of emotional truth. Over 800 copies in, the pattern is clear. You collect films that treat audiences as intelligent, that trust movement and sound and production design to do the heavy lifting.
This is a living room built for cinema that earns its budget.
Arkiv, on a 798-title collection. Unedited.
Your portrait starts writing itself once there are ten items on the shelf, and it rewrites itself as the collection grows.
Collection DNA
Once there are ten items on the shelf, Arkiv maps the shape of a collection: the genres, decades and directors it actually leans on, rather than just listing what’s in it.
Collector Rank & Archetypes
Every disc added, watch logged and review written earns XP toward a Collector Rank, from Newcomer to Legendary Collector, alongside an archetype earned from how the shelf is actually built.
Before you switch
The questions CLZ collectors actually ask.
Will my CLZ export import cleanly?
Export a CSV from CLZ Cloud and Arkiv maps title, year and format for a typical export automatically. Any column layout it doesn’t recognize is routed to a quick review step before anything is added, not silently mismapped.
Does it handle box sets properly?
Yes for items added directly in Arkiv: a box set or combo pack is one copy, classified by the highest format inside it. One honest caveat: titles that arrive via CSV import land as individual copies today, and grouping them into a box set after the fact isn’t automatic yet.
Can I get my data back out?
Any time, as JSON or CSV, in full. Nothing about your collection is held hostage.
What does it cost?
Arkiv is free, and everything here today stays that way: no trial period, no card, no paywall on what already exists. Running costs are small enough that free works, and charging for something already free would break the trust the whole project depends on. If a future feature carries a real running cost (barcode scanning, for example, since lookup providers charge per scan), it would launch as an optional premium add-on, never a toll on anything already here.
Bring your collection over.
Export a CSV from CLZ Cloud and Arkiv shows you how it mapped before anything is added. Free, no credit card, no lock-in.
Read one collector’s move from CLZ to Arkiv·See all features