Before you install anything: the app sitting at number four on the highest-ranking list for this search closes in seven weeks.

Mealime’s own site says it shuts down on 21 October 2026. Personal data is deleted at that point. Almost none of the roundups currently ranking for this query mention it, because they were written before the notice went up and nobody has been back since.

So this list starts with what not to install, then sorts the rest by the one question every other roundup skips.

We make one of these, which you should weigh accordingly. The best-value pick below is not ours and costs $4.99.

Start with the one to skip: Mealime closes in October

Mealime has been a standard recommendation in this category for years, and it deserved to be. It is free, it plans well, and it builds a decent grocery list. It is also finished.

The notice on mealime.com says the app shuts down on 21 October 2026. Pro features have been switched on for everybody in the meantime, Pro subscribers will not be billed again, and all personal data is deleted when the app closes. The recipe catalogue itself moves to Meals Hub, which lives inside the Albertsons grocery apps, so Safeway, Vons and Jewel-Osco.

A free app you are going to spend a Sunday filling is not free if it deletes the lot in October.

If you already use it, the export question matters more than the replacement question. Get your saved recipes out before the date. If you have not installed it, the seven weeks of free Pro are not worth the migration you will be doing at half term.

The question the other lists skip

Every roundup in this category ranks apps as if they were doing the same job at different quality levels. They are not. There is a fork right at the top, and which side you are on decides four of the five things that will annoy you later.

Do you want an app that gives you recipes, or one that keeps yours?

A supplier hands you a catalogue and a plan built from it. That is excellent when you are bored of your own cooking and terrible when your household eats eleven dishes and always has, because you spend the first month deleting suggestions.

A keeper is a recipe box that also plans and shops. It is worthless on day one, because it is empty, and it gets better every week for years.

Answer that before you compare features. Saving and organising recipes you will actually cook goes through what makes a recipe box worth keeping, and the answer is mostly about culling rather than saving.

If your collection starts on paper, the feature most of these apps lead with is the photo import, and it is worth knowing what it does and does not give you before you pay for it: adding a recipe from a photo compares what CookBook, Plan to Eat and Recipe Keeper charge for the scan, with prices checked on their own sites.

“I have the recipes. I want to pay once and own it”

Buy: Paprika. $4.99 on a phone, $29.99 on a desktop.

Paprika is a recipe box with a browser built into it. You open a recipe page inside the app, press a button, and it strips the life story and the ads and keeps the ingredients and the method. From there it plans onto days and rolls the ingredients into a grocery list sorted by aisle.

The pricing is the unusual part in 2026. Each platform is a separate one-off purchase and cloud sync between your own devices is included at no extra charge. A Windows licence covers five PCs.

There is no web version, so a household where one person is on a work laptop all day will find the second purchase annoying. The interface also looks its age next to the subscription apps. Neither of those costs $49 a year.

That model is changing. Paprika’s own support site now says the features added in version 4 will need a subscription once it leaves beta, with cross-platform family sharing among them, so a household weighing a Paprika recipe manager alternative should read what that changes before buying a second licence.

“It has to work on whatever device I am holding”

Buy: Plan to Eat. $49 a year.

Plan to Eat covers the same four links in the chain as Paprika: it keeps your recipes, clips new ones, drags them onto a calendar of days, and turns the week into a shopping list. The difference is that it runs in a browser, so the work laptop, the phone and the tablet all reach the same plan without a second purchase.

$49 a year on the site, or $54.99 through the App Store, because Apple takes a cut and Plan to Eat says so plainly on its own help pages. There is a 60-day refund window.

“The plan has to sit next to everyone’s week”

Buy: Cozi Gold. $39 a year.

For a lot of households the dinner problem is really a scheduling problem. Thursday is impossible because of swimming, and no amount of recipe organisation fixes a Thursday you did not know about.

Cozi has run the shared family calendar since 2005 and hangs lists, recipes and a meal planner off it. The free tier carries ads and Gold removes them at $39. It is the right answer when the meal plan needs to be readable in the same place as everybody’s week. We compare ourselves to Cozi properly here, including where it beats us.

“Dinner is the least of it”

Buy: a household app. Chirpy is free to start.

For some houses the meal plan is a symptom. One person knows what is for dinner on Thursday, and also when the car is due, what the insurance renewal costs, which document expires in March and whose parents are visiting in October. Fixing the kitchen leaves that person holding everything else.

Chirpy’s Kitchen keeps your recipes, plans them onto days, and builds the grocery list from the plan in one press, so nothing gets copied across by hand. Tell it what you feel like eating and it writes a recipe to your household’s allergies and diets, which is the supplier half of the fork without the catalogue you have to keep deleting from.

The part the others cannot do is the next room. The same app holds the shared calendar the plan has to survive, the spending it produces, and the documents nobody can find. Free to start, $59 a year for Plus, $89 for Pro.

Where it loses: Paprika has thought harder about the recipe box itself than we have, and if the kitchen is genuinely your only problem, $4.99 beats us on value and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The five, side by side

The free answer, which is often the right one

Before any of this: plan four cooking nights instead of seven, name the other three in advance, and write the shopping list once from the plan. That is free, it takes twenty minutes on a Sunday, and it is most of the benefit.

How to meal plan for the week sets out why seven planned dinners collapses by Wednesday and what shape survives. No app on this page fixes a plan that is the wrong shape. And if the hard part is simply choosing, our guide on what to cook this week decides the dinners from the calendar and the fridge in about ten minutes.

The other free move is reading the freezer before writing the shop, so two of the week’s dinners are already bought and paid for. Keeping a freezer inventory list that is still true in week three is a smaller problem than it looks, and it is worth more than any subscription on this page. The same habit is the heart of how to stop wasting food at home, where the EPA’s own figures show the money is in the meat, not the salad.

Software earns its place at exactly two moments. When copying ingredients from recipes into a list becomes its own chore, and when a second adult needs to see the week without asking you what is for dinner. If neither has happened yet, keep your $49.

Common questions