Mealime Alternatives: Eight Apps Compared

What Changes When Mealime Closes

On October 21, 2026 the app stops. Mealime’s closing page says personal data is deleted at that point, and Mealime has never offered an export, so there is no button that gives you a file.

Two things get mixed up here, and separating them makes the decision easier. The recipes are a catalog, and the catalog carries on: the same closing page says the recipes move to Meals Hub inside the Albertsons Companies apps and websites. Your own layer sits on top of that catalog, and that layer is what goes. The meals you marked, the dinners you cooked over and over, the answers you gave to Mealime’s personalization questions, of which it advertised more than 200. None of that is in the catalog, and none of it is exported.

So the week before the date is worth a short session of manual work.

• Write down the ones you actually repeat. Not the whole saved list. The dinners that show up in a normal month, by name, in a note you will still be able to find.
• Screenshot any ingredient list you have modified. A recipe you cook with half the chili and no cilantro is your recipe now, and the version that survives in the catalog is the original.
• Put your exclusions into plain words. Every planner you look at will ask again. Typing “no shellfish, no peanuts, dairy only in small amounts” takes a minute when you already have the sentence and much longer when you are reconstructing it from memory.

The problem underneath has not moved. You still have to decide what to eat on a Wednesday and buy it in one trip. Mealime was one answer to that, and it advertised recipes built to cook in about 30 minutes and grocery lists sorted by category. Plenty of apps cook in half an hour and sort a list. It is the product that is going away, and you still have to feed people on Wednesday.

What Counts as a Mealime Alternative for You

People used Mealime for different reasons, and the reason decides where you should go. Work out which of these was yours.

If you were there for the speed, the appeal was a weeknight recipe you could cook without reading ahead, and a list that told you what to buy. You want another app that decides for you. Meals Hub and Simmerset both do that. A recipe manager will not, because it waits for you to bring recipes.

If you were there for the personalization, the appeal was that first questionnaire. Mealime advertised more than 200 personalization options, and once you answered them the suggestions stopped including the things you will not eat. What you want now is an app that treats an allergy as a hard rule rather than a preference, and that keeps asking about it.

If you were there because it was free, that is a real constraint and not a small one. Meals Hub costs nothing. Several of the apps below have free tiers with limits on them, and the rest want a subscription or a one time payment.

If you were there for the grocery list, look closely at what each app’s list actually does, because the phrase “shopping list” covers very different behavior. Some sort by category. Some merge duplicate ingredients across dinners. Some tell you which dinner a line belongs to, which is the thing you need when Wednesday falls through.

There may also be something you wanted that Mealime never gave you: a list you and your partner both edit, a pantry that knows what is in the cupboard, calorie targets, recipes from your own saved links instead of a catalog. A shutdown is an annoying time to be shopping for software. It is also the only time most people look.

The Alternatives at a Glance

The table below is a summary, and the sections after it say who each app suits. Every competitor row comes from that vendor’s own pages, read on September 20, 2026, except Meals Hub, which comes from Mealime’s closing page, read on September 21, 2026. Those pages are US pages, so a price where you live may differ. “Works with any store” means the app does not tie the list to one chain; where a vendor advertises store filters or retailer links, the cell says so.

Meals Hub or an Independent Planner

This is the first fork, and most people can settle it in a minute.

Meals Hub is free and it keeps the catalog. Mealime’s closing page says the recipes move there, inside the Albertsons Companies apps and websites, and that it works for households with no Albertsons store nearby. If what you will miss is the recipes themselves, that is the shortest path by a wide margin: the food you were cooking last month is the food you can cook next month, at no cost, with nothing to learn. Anyone telling you to ignore that because it belongs to a grocery company is selling you something.

The case for going independent is about where the product sits. Meals Hub lives inside a retailer’s apps, which is a sensible place for a retailer to put it and a slightly awkward place for a household that shops at three different shops. A planner that sells software has one job in front of you, and it tends to show: exports, sharing, filters, offline use, platform coverage.

Then there is the question of what each one asks of you. A planner you pay for asks for money. An app inside a store’s ecosystem asks for something less obvious, and how much that bothers you is a personal question with no wrong answer. Just notice that you are answering it.

Our switching guide walks through what carries over from Mealime and what you have to copy by hand, whichever direction you go. Read it while the app still opens.

Where Simmerset Fits

Simmerset is a weekly dinner planner, and it is ours. Read this section as a description of what we built and who it is for, held to the same sourcing as everything above. Several of the apps in that table beat us outright at things we do not do.

How It Works

You answer a handful of questions about your household, and Simmerset proposes three to seven dinners for the week. You keep the ones you want and swap the rest. The grocery list comes out of the dinners you kept, grouped by aisle, with quantities merged across dinners wherever the units allow it, and every line names the dinner that needs it. Change the plan and the list changes with it.

It is built by the Spoonacular team, who have been working on recipe and ingredient data since 2013. The reason the merging works at all is that the ingredient side is old, careful work: knowing that half a bag of spinach on Tuesday and half a bag on Thursday is one bag.

Allergies, Diets and Dislikes

Allergies and diets are asked separately from dislikes. An allergy or a diet takes a recipe out of the plan, even when few recipes are left. A dislike only moves a recipe down the ranking, so you can say you are tired of salmon without banning fish forever.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of planners treat every preference the same way, which is fine for a dislike and unacceptable for an allergy. If someone in the house has one, ask any app you are considering how it handles the difference, and do not accept a vague answer.

Your Data

You can export everything as JSON whenever you want, and you can delete the account yourself without writing to support. That is available on the free tier too.

We built it that way partly because of what is happening at Mealime this month. A planner that cannot hand back your work can strand you, and you tend to discover that on the day you try to leave.

Price

Simmerset is USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included. There is a free tier with no time limit on it, so you can use it through a few weeks of real cooking before deciding whether Plus earns its keep.

That is more than Meals Hub, which is free, and less than some of the subscriptions in the table. Paprika will be cheaper over three years if you only ever use one platform.

What It Does Not Do

Plainly, because you will find out in week one anyway:

• No pantry tracking. Simmerset does not know what is in your cupboard and will not subtract it from the list.
• No planning to calorie or macro targets. You cannot plan a week to hit a protein number. Eat This Much is built for exactly that.
• No native iOS or Android app yet. It is an installable web app. It works on a phone and you can add it to the home screen, but it is not in the app stores.

If any one of those is the reason you are looking for a planner at all, take one of the others. An app without a pantry cannot be the pantry app you need, however nicely it writes a list.

The Other Alternatives and Who They Suit

Meals Hub

Free, and it keeps the Mealime recipe catalog. Mealime’s closing page describes it inside the Albertsons Companies apps and websites, on iOS, Android and the web, and says it works for households with no Albertsons store nearby.

Go here if the recipes are what you will miss, if paying nothing matters, or if you would rather not learn a new app in the month a familiar one closes. It is the only option here where the food on your table next month is the same food as last month. The trade is that it lives inside a grocer’s ecosystem, which is a reasonable thing to mind and a reasonable thing not to mind.

Plan to Eat

Plan to Eat collects recipes you choose, schedules them on a calendar, and builds the shopping list by aisle. It advertises USD 5.95 a month or USD 49 a year, with a 14 day trial, on iOS, Android and the web.

This one is for a household that already knows what it cooks. If you have a folder of family recipes, a stack of bookmarks, a grandmother’s card index, Plan to Eat turns them into a planned week and a clean list. Where it beats Simmerset is the case where the recipes have to be yours. It never tries to decide dinner for you, and if that is the whole point, its calendar is the better home for your collection.

Paprika

Paprika captures recipes from websites, aggregates ingredients into a grocery list, and keeps everything on the device so it works offline. Each platform is sold separately: USD 4.99 on iOS and USD 29.99 on Windows, as a one time purchase, with versions for Android and macOS too.

Buy it if you dislike subscriptions, if you cook where the signal is bad, or if you want your recipes in a file on your own hardware instead of on somebody’s server. Any time offline is not negotiable, or you are done renting software, Paprika is the better call and Simmerset is the worse one. The cost to weigh is that putting it on your phone and your laptop means paying twice.

AnyList

AnyList is the shared list done properly. Complete is USD 9.99 a year for one person or USD 14.99 a year for a household, and it advertises instantly shared lists, recipe import, calendar planning and store specific filters, on iOS, Android and the web.

The case for it: deciding dinner is the easy part in your house, and keeping one list straight between two people is the hard part. One of you adds milk while the other is already in the aisle, and the filters cut the list down to the section you are standing in. When you already know what you are cooking and only need the list to be right on both phones, AnyList does that job better than we do, for less money. It will help you much less with the deciding.

Samsung Food

Samsung Food advertises website imports, shared plans and lists, detailed nutrition and retailer integrations, on iOS, Android and the web. Food+ shows USD 6.99 a month or USD 59.99 a year in its US App Store listing.

Pick it if you want one app to cover everything: importing from the web, planning with someone else, tracking nutrition in detail, sending a list to a store. It covers more ground than anything else here. The price of that breadth is setup, with more screens before the first list and more decisions you did not know you had to make. If you want nutrition in depth, or one app for the whole job, it goes further than Simmerset ever will.

Eat This Much

Eat This Much generates plans from calorie and macro targets, with budgets, schedules and pantry priority. Premium is advertised at USD 5 a month on an annual subscription, on iOS, Android and the web.

This is the one for a week with a number attached to it. Cutting, bulking, hitting a protein target, eating to a budget, planning around what is already in the cupboard: it starts from the numbers and works back to the meals. If targets are the point, it wins against Simmerset with nothing to argue about, because we do not plan to macro targets and have no pantry at all. What you give up is the loose, cravings first way of planning, since a generated plan is only as good as the constraints you typed in.

ReciMe

ReciMe imports recipes from Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and photos, and sorts its lists by aisle or by recipe. The free tier advertises five imports a week, on iOS, Android and the web.

Worth it if your recipes live in saved posts and screenshots. That is an awkward format to cook from, and ReciMe is built to pull a real ingredient list out of it. When your cooking follows what you saw this week, it fits you and a catalog based planner like Simmerset does not. Its limit is the same as its strength: it organizes what you feed it, so deciding what to cook stays your job.

Four Things That Decide It

Most of the choice comes down to four questions. Answer them in order and the list above shortens fast.

• Where do the recipes come from? If you want to be told what to cook, Meals Hub and Simmerset decide for you. If you bring your own, Plan to Eat and Paprika are built around your collection, and ReciMe is built around the social posts you saved. Samsung Food will take imports from the web too. Getting this one wrong is the usual reason a planner sits unopened after two weeks: an app that waits for recipes you never add is an empty app.
• What do you need from the grocery list? Sorted by category is the floor. Above it sit merged quantities across dinners, which stops you buying two of something, and a line that says which dinner needs it, which is what you want when Thursday gets cancelled at four o’clock. Then there is sharing: if the person shopping is not the person planning, AnyList exists for exactly that. Ask specifically, because every app says “shopping list” and they do not all mean the same thing.
• How hard are your dietary rules? There is a real difference between not fancying mushrooms and a nut allergy. An app that treats both as preferences will eventually put the allergen in front of you. Check that exclusions are collected separately from tastes, and that they are applied as a filter rather than as a hint. In Simmerset an allergy or a diet takes a recipe out even when few are left; a dislike only changes the order. Whichever app you pick, test it with your worst case before you trust it with a Tuesday.
• Which devices have to open it? Paprika is native on iOS, Android, macOS and Windows, and sold per platform. Meals Hub, Plan to Eat, AnyList, Samsung Food, Eat This Much and ReciMe are on iOS, Android and the web. Simmerset is an installable web app with no native app yet, which is fine on a phone and worth knowing before you commit. If you need it offline in a shop with no signal, Paprika is the one that keeps everything on the device.

Which One Should You Choose

• You want the recipes and you want to pay nothing. Meals Hub. It is free, the catalog carries over, and you do not have to learn anything.
• You want to be handed a week and one merged list. Simmerset, or Meals Hub if free matters more than the list behavior.
• Your recipes are already yours and you want a calendar. Plan to Eat.
• You hate subscriptions, or you cook offline. Paprika.
• The problem in your house is one shared list. AnyList.
• You plan to calorie and macro targets. Eat This Much.
• You want one app that does everything, and you will sit through the setup. Samsung Food.
• Your recipes come from Instagram and TikTok. ReciMe.

Nothing here is ranked. These are different products that happen to overlap in one drawer, and the right answer depends on which part of the week you find hardest.