Best Alternatives to Brickit for LEGO Scanning

You just bought a bulk lot of LEGO. There are minifigures in there worth real money, but you have no idea which ones. So you download Brickit, point your camera at the pile, and wait for the magic.

Nothing happens. Or rather, something happens, just not what you needed. Brickit scans your bricks and suggests builds. Cool. But you didn't buy this lot to build a spaceship. You bought it to flip.

You needed minifigure identification. You needed prices. You needed to know that the clone trooper buried under a pile of 2x4s is worth $85 on BrickLink. Brickit doesn't do any of that.

So now you're searching for a Brickit alternative. Something that actually solves the reseller problem: scan a minifigure, find out what it is, and learn what it's worth. All in one shot.

I've tested every option out there. Here are the five best Brickit alternatives, ranked by how useful they actually are for people who buy and sell LEGO.

Quick Comparison

Before we get into the details, here's how each option stacks up on the things that matter most to resellers:

Why Brickit Doesn't Work for Resellers

Let's be fair first. Brickit is a genuinely good app. It scans loose bricks, identifies individual pieces, and suggests builds you can make with what you have. For families with a big tub of random LEGO, it's perfect. The scanning tech works. The UX is polished. The build suggestions are creative and fun.

But Brickit was built to answer one question: "What can I build with this?"

Resellers need to answer a completely different question: "What do I have and what is it worth?"

Brickit doesn't identify minifigures as complete characters. It doesn't show BrickLink IDs. It doesn't pull market prices. It doesn't track inventory. If you're holding a $200 Captain Rex and a $3 generic City cop, Brickit treats them both the same way: as a collection of parts that could go into a build. That's a problem when your entire business depends on knowing the difference.

#1: brick'em (Best Overall for Resellers)

Full disclosure: this is our tool. But the reason it exists is because nothing else solved this specific problem. Every other LEGO app was built for builders. Resellers were left toggling between five browser tabs trying to identify and price minifigures one at a time.

brick'em does three things that no other scanning tool combines:

1. Minifigure identification from photos. Point your camera at a minifigure or an entire tray of them. Image recognition matches torso prints, head designs, and accessories against the full BrickLink catalog of 18,600+ figures. You get an exact BrickLink ID for each one.
2. Automatic pricing. Every identified figure comes with current market prices pulled from BrickLink sales data. No extra tabs. No manual lookups. The price shows up right next to the identification.
3. Inventory tracking. Add scanned figures to your inventory with one tap. See your total collection value. Track what you own and what you've sold.

Bulk scanning is where it really pulls ahead. Spread 20 minifigures on a table, take one photo, and brick'em detects each figure individually. Every box gets numbered on the photo so you can match results to the physical figures in front of you. The whole tray gets identified and priced in under a minute.

Best for: Resellers who buy bulk lots and need to identify and price minifigures fast. Collectors who want to track their portfolio value. Anyone who deals in volume.

Limitations: Image recognition works best with decent lighting and figures assembled with their correct parts. Heavily disassembled or modified figures may need manual verification.

#2: Manual BrickLink Lookup (Free but Slow)

BrickLink's price guide is the gold standard for LEGO market data. Every serious reseller ends up on BrickLink at some point. The question is whether you're spending 30 seconds there or 30 minutes.

How it works: You go to BrickLink's catalog, search for a minifigure by description or set number, find the right listing, and check the price guide tab. You get six-month average sold prices for both new and used condition. It's accurate. It's free. And it's painfully slow when you have 50 figures to look up.

The process for each figure looks like this:

1. Type a description into BrickLink search ("clone trooper phase 2 blue")
2. Scroll through results trying to match photos to your figure
3. Click into the right listing
4. Navigate to the price guide tab
5. Note down the value
6. Repeat for the next figure

For one or two figures, this is fine. For a 40-figure bulk lot, you're looking at an hour or more of manual work. And that's assuming you can describe each figure well enough to find it on the first search. Obscure themes and generic-looking characters can eat up 5-10 minutes each.

Best for: Verifying a single high-value figure. Double-checking a scan result. Researching variants when you need the full price history.

Limitations: You need to already know roughly what you're looking at. Searching "guy in black" returns hundreds of results. Doesn't scale to bulk lots at all.

#3: Google Lens (Quick but Unreliable)

Google Lens is free, already on your phone, and surprisingly decent at recognizing things. You take a photo of a minifigure, and Google's image search tries to match it against everything on the internet.

Sometimes it works great. You photograph a well-known Star Wars figure and Google Lens pulls up the exact BrickLink listing or a Brickipedia page. You get a name, and from there you can look up the price yourself.

But "sometimes" is the operative word. Here's what actually happens in practice:

• Popular characters: Google Lens does a reasonable job with iconic figures like Darth Vader, Batman, or Harry Potter. But it rarely tells you which variant you have, and that matters. There are 30+ Darth Vader minifigures. The price range is $5 to $80+.
• Obscure figures: Anything outside the top 50 most recognizable characters is a coin flip. Google might return a random eBay listing, a Pinterest board, or a completely unrelated result.
• No pricing: Even when Google Lens correctly identifies a figure, it doesn't show you a market price. You still need to go to BrickLink or eBay and look it up manually.
• No bulk support: One figure at a time. Every single one requires a separate photo and a separate search.

Best for: A quick sanity check when you think you recognize a figure but want to confirm. Not a real workflow tool.

Limitations: No pricing. No BrickLink IDs. No variant differentiation. Unreliable on anything that isn't a mainstream character. One figure at a time.

#4: Reddit and Community Forums (Free Crowdsourced ID)

The LEGO community on Reddit is massive and genuinely helpful. Subreddits like r/lego and r/legoidentification exist specifically for people who need help figuring out what they have. You post a photo, and within a few hours (sometimes minutes), someone who has encyclopedic LEGO knowledge tells you exactly what it is.

This works surprisingly well for unusual or rare figures that automated tools might miss. The human eye, backed by decades of collecting experience, catches things that algorithms overlook. Custom prints, promotional exclusives, regional variants. The community has seen it all.

The problems:

• Speed. You post a photo and wait. Maybe you get an answer in 10 minutes. Maybe it takes a day. Maybe nobody responds at all. For a single mystery figure, the wait is manageable. For a 30-figure lot, you're not going to post 30 separate threads.
• Consistency. The quality of answers depends on who happens to see your post. Most responses are accurate. Some are wrong. You have no way to verify unless you already know the answer.
• No pricing. People will tell you what a figure is. They rarely tell you what it's worth. And when they do, it's usually a rough estimate from memory, not current market data.
• Not repeatable. This isn't a workflow. It's a favor. It works for occasional questions, not daily operations.

Best for: One-off mystery figures that you genuinely can't identify any other way. Rare finds. Oddball pieces with no clear catalog match.

Limitations: Slow. Inconsistent. No pricing data. Not scalable. Not a tool you can rely on for day-to-day reselling.

#5: BrickLink Catalog Browsing (Thorough but Time-Consuming)

This is different from the "manual BrickLink lookup" above. That method assumes you can describe the figure in words and search for it. This method is for when you have zero idea what you're looking at and need to browse visually.

BrickLink's catalog lets you browse minifigures by theme. You select "Star Wars," then scroll through every Star Wars minifigure ever made, comparing the photos to the figure in your hand. It's the most thorough method there is. If the figure exists in LEGO's history, it's in this catalog.

The problem is obvious: there are over 18,600 minifigures across hundreds of themes. If you don't know the theme, you could be scrolling for a long time. Even within a known theme, some categories have hundreds of entries. Star Wars alone has over 1,000 minifigures.

When does this actually make sense? When you've narrowed it down to a specific theme and a small range of years. If you know you're looking at a Ninjago figure from 2015-2017, that's maybe 50 entries to scroll through. Manageable. But without that context, you're hunting for a needle in 18,600 haystacks.

Best for: Variant matching when you already know the theme and approximate era. Confirming exact IDs for high-value figures where getting the variant right means a big price difference.

Limitations: Extremely slow for unknown figures. Requires prior knowledge of LEGO themes to narrow the search. Not practical for bulk lots. No automation.

So Which Brickit Alternative Should You Use?

It depends on what you're doing.

If you're a builder looking for creative inspiration from your existing bricks, stick with Brickit. It does that job well and nothing else here replaces that specific feature.

If you're a reseller working with bulk lots, brick'em is the only option that handles the full workflow: scan, identify, price, and track. Everything else on this list requires you to piece together multiple tools and do significant manual work.

If you need to verify a single high-value figure, a manual BrickLink lookup gives you the most detailed data. Use it alongside a scanning tool, not instead of one.

If you have a complete mystery figure that nothing can identify, post it to Reddit. The community knowledge is unmatched for edge cases.

If you need to pin down the exact variant of a figure you've already roughly identified, browse BrickLink's catalog visually.

Google Lens is a quick shortcut when you're curious. Don't build a workflow around it.

The reality is that most serious resellers end up using a combination. But the core tool that handles 90% of the work should be something purpose-built for identification and pricing. That's the gap Brickit leaves open, and it's exactly what brick'em was built to fill.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a free alternative to Brickit?

Several free options exist. Google Lens is free and already on your phone, but it's unreliable for LEGO identification. Reddit communities are free and surprisingly accurate, but slow. BrickLink's catalog is free to browse. For scanning with automatic pricing, brick'em offers a free tier that lets you scan and identify minifigures.

What does Brickit do that these alternatives don't?

Brickit's unique feature is build suggestions. It scans your loose bricks and tells you what you can build with them. None of the alternatives here replicate that feature because they're solving a different problem: identification and pricing rather than creative building.

Can any app identify LEGO minifigures from a photo?

Yes. brick'em uses image recognition to identify complete LEGO minifigures from photos. It matches torso prints, heads, and accessories against the full BrickLink catalog and returns exact IDs with market prices. It works with individual figures and bulk trays.

Why doesn't Brickit show minifigure prices?

Brickit was designed as a building tool, not a reselling tool. Its purpose is helping people find builds from loose bricks. Pricing and inventory management fall outside that scope entirely. It's not a missing feature. It's a different product for a different audience.

What is the fastest way to price a bulk LEGO lot?

The fastest method is a scanning tool that combines identification and pricing in one step. With brick'em, you photograph a tray of minifigures and get names, BrickLink IDs, and market prices for every figure in the photo. A 20-figure tray takes under a minute. Manual lookups on BrickLink would take an hour or more for the same count.

Related Reading

• Brickit App Review: Is It Worth It?
• Best LEGO Scanning Apps for Resellers in 2026
• BrickScan vs Brickit: LEGO Scanning App Showdown