Grocery List Apps, Judged on the List

What a Grocery List Has to Do

A shopping list has a hard job. It has to be correct, readable while you are moving, and able to change when the week changes. Five things separate a list you trust from one you rewrite in the notes app.

• Merge what repeats. Two dinners that each want half a bag of spinach should come out as one line with the amounts added up. Otherwise you buy two bags, or you see the second line, assume you grabbed it, and come home with none.
• Group it so you walk the shop once. Recipe order is written for the cook. In a shop it sends you from baking to produce and back past the checkout. Aisle order empties the list from the top, and our guide to writing one by hand covers the order.
• Say what each line is for. “Two peppers” tells you nothing when Thursday falls through. “Two peppers, for the traybake” tells you what to leave on the shelf.
• Survive a swap. Change one dinner when half the list is ticked, and the other ticks should stay put. A list that resets on every edit gets abandoned in week two.
• Open on a second phone. Whoever plans and whoever shops are often different people, and the second one is usually already in the aisle.

Nearly every app claims the first two. The third is rare, the fourth is rarely tested before you need it, and the fifth is where the marketing goes quiet.

The Apps at a Glance

Every row traces to that vendor’s own US page, listed under this article. Where a cell says a vendor does not publish something, we could not find it stated and are not inventing it.

AnyList

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

For a pure shared list, AnyList wins, and it is not close. When the hard part in your house is keeping one list straight between two people, AnyList is cheaper than Simmerset and better at that job. The store filters help: at the dairy case you want the four dairy lines on screen, not the whole page. What it will not do is decide what you cook.

Simmerset

Simmerset is ours. It is a weekly dinner planner, so the list is what the planned week leaves behind.

You answer a few questions, it proposes three to seven dinners, and the list comes out of the ones you keep. Quantities are merged across those dinners wherever the units allow, every line sits under an aisle, and every line names the dinner that needs it. Drop Wednesday and you see what to leave on the shelf. There is no retailer account and no store to pick, and you can export everything as JSON and delete the account yourself.

The claim is narrow on purpose. AnyList wins on a shared list you type by hand. Simmerset hands you one you never wrote.

Limits, plainly. There is no pantry tracking, and it does not plan to calorie or macro targets. There is no native iOS or Android app yet, so it is an installable web app. The aisle grouping uses broad categories, not your branch’s layout. The free tier shares with one other adult, so six adults need Plus, at USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included. The free tier has no time limit.

It comes from the Spoonacular team, who have worked on recipe and ingredient data since 2013, which is why the merging works at all.

Paprika

Paprika captures recipes from websites, aggregates ingredients into a list, and keeps everything on the device so it opens with no signal. Each platform is sold separately: USD 4.99 on iOS, USD 29.99 on Windows, once, with Android and macOS versions too.

A shop with thick walls is where a cloud list stops being a list. Paprika’s does not, because it was never anywhere else, which is the case for buying it if you shop where the signal dies or you are done renting software. Its pages do not describe a live shared list, so do not assume two phones are solved.

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.

Pick it when the recipes have to be yours. A folder of bookmarks, a card index from a grandmother, the four things you genuinely cook: it turns them into a planned week and a clean aisle list. Sharing is not described on the page we read.

Meals Hub

Meals Hub is free, keeps the Mealime recipe catalog, and lives inside the Albertsons family of grocery apps and websites. Mealime’s closing page says it works for households with no nearby Albertsons store, that you should sign in to an Albertsons store account, and that some preferences have to be set up again there.

Take it when price decides and you were already cooking from Mealime. The plan to list path is the one that team built, and it costs nothing. The trade is where it sits: inside a grocer’s app, which is a reasonable thing to mind and a reasonable thing not to.

Samsung Food

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

It is the broadest app here, and shared lists are part of what it sells. For one app that imports from the web, plans with another person, tracks nutrition and sends a list to a shop, nothing else goes as far. You pay for that breadth in setup, and in decisions you did not know you had.

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.

Sorting by recipe rather than by aisle sounds like a downgrade until the week you are buying for two dinners at two shops. Its limit is the shape of the product: it organizes what you feed it, so the list holds whatever you saved.

Cooklist

Cooklist advertises importing purchases from grocery loyalty cards, a pantry with expiry information, recipes matched to what the kitchen already holds, missing ingredient lists and household sync.

Every other list here starts from zero and assumes the cupboard is empty, which is how you end up with four jars of cumin. Cooklist starts from what you already bought and lists the gap, which is the one thing nothing else here does. Weigh two things: it reads your loyalty card purchase history, a real trade, and its consumer price is not on the pages we read.

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, billed annually.

The list here is downstream of arithmetic. You give it a protein number and a budget, it builds the week, and the list is whatever that week requires. When the targets are the point, nothing else here competes. When they are not, you are typing constraints in to be handed a list of vegetables.

Mealie

Mealie documents recipe imports, calendar planning, shopping lists, groups and households, backups, exports and a REST API. It is self-hosted, so what you pay is a server rather than a subscription.

What you get here is control. The list lives on hardware you chose, groups and households are in the model, and there is an API when you want it elsewhere. The cost is that somebody has to run it, including the evening it stops answering while you stand in the shop.

Lists That Are Shared, and Lists That Are Just Synced

Syncing means your phone eventually matches the server. Sharing means two people can both be inside the list at once, from different aisles, and the result still makes sense to both. The shop is where you find out which one you bought.

Some vendors say so. AnyList’s Complete page advertises instantly shared lists with store filters. Samsung Food advertises shared plans and lists. Mealie documents groups and households. Cooklist advertises household sync. Simmerset’s free tier shares with one other adult, and six adults need Plus.

Then there is the part nobody advertises. What happens when two people edit the same line in the same second? You tick the milk while the other person changes it to two litres. One edit wins, or they merge, or the tick lands on the wrong quantity. We went looking, and for the apps here the vendors do not publish what happens then. Not AnyList, not Samsung Food, not Cooklist, not us either. It is a gap in the documentation, and it means you buy that behavior on faith.

So test it in the first week. Stand in two rooms with both phones open, tick the same line at the same time, and see what the list says.

Free Lists and What They Cost You

Free is a reasonable answer for a shopping list, as long as you are clear about what each kind of free asks for instead of money.

Meals Hub costs nothing at all, and Mealime’s closing page says you should sign in to an Albertsons store account to use it. Mealie is free to install because you run it, so the bill arrives as a server and the odd evening of maintenance. ReciMe’s free tier is metered at five imports a week: fine if you save the occasional recipe, tight if it is where all your cooking lives.

Cooklist is free to start and pays for itself by reading your grocery loyalty card history. Simmerset’s free tier has no time limit and shares with one other adult, and past that, sharing is paid.

The cheapest paid list here is AnyList at USD 9.99 a year, which is small enough that a free option has to win on something other than price.

Which One Should You Use

• A shared list for two adults and nothing else. AnyList, on price and on behavior.
• A list that falls out of a planned week of dinners. Simmerset.
• No signal in the shop, and no subscription. Paprika.
• Your own recipe collection, on a calendar. Plan to Eat.
• Free, and you were already cooking from Mealime. Meals Hub.
• One app for imports, nutrition and sharing. Samsung Food.
• Recipes that live in saved posts and screenshots. ReciMe.
• A list that subtracts what the cupboard already holds. Cooklist.
• A week built to calorie and macro targets. Eat This Much.
• Your own server, your own data, an API. Mealie.

Nothing above is ranked. These products overlap on one screen, and the right one depends on which part of the week you find hardest. Our comparison of meal planners by how usable their list is covers the deciding side.