A fair look at the recipe apps worth your time: what each is great at, what it costs, and who it's really for.
There's no single best recipe app, only the best one for how you cook and what you value. Some people want the biggest feature list; others want their data to stay on their own device; others just want to stop paying subscriptions.
Below is an honest shortlist. Full disclosure up front: Gratin is our app and we ranked it first, so treat that placement with suspicion. Every other pick here is genuinely good, and we've been specific about where each one wins so you can decide for yourself.
We make Gratin, so putting ourselves at the top is about as biased as it gets. With that said: it's a free, local-first recipe book. Your data lives on your device, there are no ads and no account, and sync is an encrypted relay you can self-host. Newer and more focused than the veterans below.
The polished all-rounder. Mature apps on every platform, a great built-in web clipper, and a one-time price. The catches: you pay per platform and sync is locked to Paprika's cloud.
The most beautiful of the bunch, with flexible import and a lovely cook mode. Apple-only and iCloud-based, so it's ideal if your whole kitchen runs on Apple gear.
Playful, modern, and Apple-native, with a clever hands-free cook mode and a friendly one-time unlock. Apple ecosystem only.
Best-in-class AI import. It can pull recipes from websites and even social video, on-device. Centred on Apple devices, with a free-recipe cap before Pro.
Really a grocery-list app with recipes attached, and superb at shared household lists. The best features need the Complete subscription.
A brilliant, ad-free web clipper with a generous-ish free tier (capped at 40 recipes). Account-and-cloud based, web-first.
Open source, ad-free, and self-hostable, the closest to Gratin in spirit. A web/PWA app built around an account, with no native iOS app.
It depends on what you value. For polish across platforms, Paprika. For Apple design, Mela or Crouton. For open source, RecipeSage. For a free, private, own-your-data app, we'd point you to Gratin, but we're biased.
Gratin (free), Paprika, Mela, Recipe Keeper, and Crouton are one-time or free. AnyList, Plan to Eat, Samsung Food, and BigOven lean on subscriptions for their best features.
Gratin, Mela, Crouton, Paprika, and Recipe Keeper all store recipes locally. Cloud-first options like BigOven, Samsung Food, and Plan to Eat keep your data on their servers.
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