Buyer's guide
There is no single best tool, only the right one for how you work. Here is an honest rundown.
We make one of these tools, so read this with that in mind, we have tried to be fair and say plainly where each one fits and where another would serve you better. A few are polished apps for organizing formulas you compose by hand; one is a deep professional desktop archive; ours leans on generating and analyzing from a curated, physics-modeled catalog. Pick by the job you actually need done.
Last updated August 2026
| Tool | Platform | Price | Generates a formula? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fragrance Engine | Web, any device | Free, or $20 once | Yes, from a brief |
| Silage.ai | Web, any device | Free | No, manual |
| Perfume Workbench | Web | Free | No, manual |
| Formulair | Apple only | ~$40 once | No, manual |
| PerfumeLab | Apple only | $4.99/mo | No, manual |
| The Perfumer's Workbook | Desktop | Free / ~$159 once | No, manual |
| Perfumer's Vault | iOS / Android / web | $6.99/mo | AI assist (Gemini) |
| SillagePro | Web | Free | No, manual |
| The Aroma Forge | Web | Paid | No, manual |
| Perfumer's Companion | Web / app | Calculator | No, calculator |
| A spreadsheet (Excel / Sheets) | Any | Free to ~$20/mo | No, manual |
A deterministic perfumery engine: describe a scent and it composes a buildable formula from a hand-curated, physics-modeled catalog, then reads it back (pyramid, projection, longevity, sillage, cost, radar). Live supplier prices, a cost optimizer, reformulation, and a community library, the Formulary.
Best for perfumers who want to go from a brief or idea to a lab-ready, analyzed, sourceable formula in the browser, on any operating system.
A free web formula builder with a large raw-material list, live concentration and cost figures, inventory and IFRA limits, and a Making Mode that walks you through weighing a formula step by step. Placed top three for the Digital Technology Award at the Barcelona Perfumery Congress.
Best for perfumers who compose by hand and want a fast, free, cross-device builder with guided weighing.
A free browser workspace for managing ingredients, building formulas, calculating percentages, and putting accords together, with IFRA compliance checks built in.
Best for hobbyists and students who want a no-cost place to keep materials and formulas organised.
A polished, well-loved native app for storing raw materials and formulas, scaling batches by weight or concentration, tracking dilutions, and reading fragrance-pyramid stats. Bought once, used offline.
Best for Apple-ecosystem perfumers who compose at the bench and want a clean, offline, buy-it-once organizer.
Fragrance Engine vs Formulair →A capable mobile/iPad app for building percentage formulas with automatic scaling, structure and longevity analysis, ingredient data, limit monitoring, versioning, and PDF export.
Best for Apple users who want a clean app to build, analyze, version, and export percentage formulas at the bench.
Fragrance Engine vs PerfumeLab →A mature, long-standing desktop program with a very deep professional material database (thousands of materials), real-time costing, odour and tenacity analysis, and a refinement wizard.
Best for professionals who want an offline desktop archive with a deep material database and a one-time or institutional licence.
Fragrance Engine vs The Perfumer's Workbook →A cross-platform vault for building and versioning formulas, managing materials and multiple suppliers, tracking inventory, and an AI generator wired to Google Gemini. (The M24 Media app, not the unrelated open-source ParfumVault.)
Best for mobile-first perfumers who want a vault with inventory and supplier management and a general-AI assist.
Fragrance Engine vs Perfumer's Vault →A clean, free, web-based manual builder with a large material list, real-time concentration and cost tracking, inventory, CSV/PDF import, formula sharing, and a step-by-step making mode.
Best for perfumers who want a capable manual formula builder on the web at no cost.
Fragrance Engine vs SillagePro →A logistics-focused platform built around batch tracking, global inventory management, and costing a formula down to the penny. It runs the operations side of a perfume bench rather than composing or analyzing a new formula.
Best for makers who need to manage batches, inventory, and cost at scale once their formulas already exist.
A focused dilution and bottle-volume calculator: it does the lab math reliably, without composing or analyzing a formula.
Best for anyone who mainly needs quick, dependable dilution and concentration math.
Fragrance Engine vs Perfumer's Companion →The DIY baseline. Total control and zero opinion: you type every formula, every cost, and every check yourself.
Best for perfumers who already know exactly what to type and want full manual control with no guardrails.
Fragrance Engine vs A spreadsheet (Excel / Sheets) →There is no single best one, it depends on the job. For a clean place to store and scale formulas you compose by hand, Formulair (Apple) or SillagePro (free web) are excellent. For a deep offline professional archive, The Perfumer's Workbook. If you want the software to draft a formula from a brief, read its structure back, and price it from live suppliers in any browser, that is what Fragrance Engine does.
Yes. Fragrance Engine composes a buildable formula from a plain-language brief using a deterministic, physics-modeled catalog, then shows the pyramid, projection, longevity, sillage, and cost. Perfumer's Vault offers a general-AI assist via Google Gemini. Most other tools are manual builders where you enter every material yourself.
SillagePro is a capable free web builder. The Perfumer's Workbook has a free desktop version. Fragrance Engine has a free tier (ten formula briefs a month plus free dilution and parts-to-percent calculators) and runs in any browser with no install.
Fragrance Engine and SillagePro are fully web-based and work on any operating system. Perfumer's Vault also has a web version. Formulair and PerfumeLab are Apple-only, and The Perfumer's Workbook is a desktop install.
Fragrance Engine offers free dilution and parts-to-percent calculators that need no account, and it tracks IFRA category references inside a formula. Several soap-and-candle suppliers also publish free fragrance-load calculators for finished products.
Fragrance Engine asks which scale you weigh on, a milligram balance, a 0.01 g bench scale, or a 0.1 g jeweller's scale, and recalculates the whole sheet against it. Any line too small to weigh honestly on that scale is printed as a standard dilution instead, showing both the dilution mass and the neat equivalent, and the solvent those dilutions carry into the batch is counted so the stated batch total is true. Silage.ai has a Making Mode that walks you through weighing step by step. Most other tools print grams and leave the rest to you.
Fragrance Engine keeps a lot-level inventory, and on any formula at your chosen batch size it reports per material whether you own enough, are short, or are not tracking it, with a shopping list of the gaps. When you record the batch it can subtract the materials from your lots, oldest lot first, with a preview beforehand and one-click undo after. Silage.ai and Aroma Forge also handle inventory and cost. The enterprise formulation suites do this as full traceability, at enterprise pricing.
Fragrance Engine will, to four decimal places, because the composition is computed by a deterministic engine over a fixed catalog. A language model only reads your plain-English brief; it never chooses the chemistry or the percentages. Tools built on a general AI assistant will usually return something different each time you ask, which is fine for ideas and awkward when you need to rebuild a formula a client approved six months ago.
Fewer than the marketing numbers suggest, if the data behind them has to be right. Some builders list well over a thousand materials. Fragrance Engine carries a little over three hundred, each keyed to a CAS number with hand-curated boiling point, molecular weight and density, because the engine reads those figures to decide how a material behaves over time. Bulk-filling that data from public chemistry databases was tried here early on and abandoned: reduced-pressure boiling points made tenacious base materials read as volatile top notes. A larger list is genuinely better for browsing and for finding a name you already know. A curated one is what lets software tell you when a formula is top-heavy.
Fragrance Engine can. When you name a fragrance, it grounds the request in documented public data and composes an honest homage built toward that profile, clearly labelled as an approximation, never sold as the original. It will say plainly when it cannot confirm a specific release rather than inventing one.
If you compose at the bench and want a clean place to store and scale that work, a good manual app may be all you need, and we have linked the ones worth a look. Reach for Fragrance Engine when you want the software to draft a formula from a brief, read its structure back, price it from live suppliers, and let you publish into a community library, in any browser.
No card for the Free tier · 10 briefs a month