The 18 Best Meal Planning Apps 2024 Review

Join thousands of home cooks who are transforming their cooking experience with FoodiePrep. FoodiePrep handles the widest range — vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, halal, kosher, low-FODMAP, nut allergies, and more. Set your preferences once and every generated recipe respects them automatically. If you have kids in school, this organizer is great, because it syncs with the school calendar to show you where everyone is supposed to be at any given time.

Snack ideas for a Mediterranean diet

Paprika is designed with a built-in browser so you can search recipes from anywhere on the internet and save them to your recipe box. It also generates grocery lists, which can be sorted by aisle. Smart recipes and built-in timers help to make cooking easier.

AI-optimized Nutrition

  • It combines a robust recipe database with an intuitive meal planner, making it a great choice for both novice and experienced home cooks.
  • Get a full nutrition breakdown and learn how to track them for your diet.
  • Meal planning apps are beneficial for planning meals throughout the week which can help you save time in the kitchen.
  • Planning your meals ahead can also simplify the meal prep process and save you time.
  • Everyone has that one friend they can count on to make the perfect menu suggestions when you’re eating out.
  • Stay in sync with family and friends by sharing a list with them.

She currently covers study and productivity hacks, as well as household and digital decluttering, and oversees the freelancers on the sex and relationships beat. She spent most of her pre-Lifehacker career covering media and politics for outlets like Us Weekly, CNN, The Daily Dot, Mashable, Glamour, and InStyle. In recent years, her freelancing has focused on drug use and the overdose crisis, with pieces appearing in Vanity Fair, WIRED, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, and more. Her story for BuzzFeed News won the 2022 American Journalism Online award for Best Debunking of Fake News. Most of these apps offer free versions or trials, so there’s no risk in testing a couple before committing.

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Its Alexa integration also offers a convenient, hands-free way to follow recipes in the kitchen. Meal planning can be a struggle—especially when you’re already juggling so many things! Thankfully technology has your back with these easy-to-use meal prep apps.

What are the benefits of meal-planning apps?

best recipe meal planning app

Looking for the best recipe app but overwhelmed by the options? We tested over 50 recipe apps across iOS, Android, and web—rating each on how well they save recipes, plan meals, and generate grocery lists. Below are the 12 that actually delivered, ranked from best to good, with honest pros, cons, and pricing unimeal app reviews for every budget. Here are some meal-planning apps that can suggest recipes based on your dietary preferences, put together shopping lists, and even walk you through the cooking. They can’t box up leftovers or wash the dishes, but maybe one day in the future, we’ll get there, too.

best recipe meal planning app

$200–$250 Two-Week Budget (Moderate Comfort)

• Seamlessly create and access your shopping list across devices. She’s created hundreds of recipes and appeared on Netflix’s Easy-Bake Battle. If “what should I cook tonight?” is a question you answer the same exhausting way every time — scrolling Instagram, texting a family member, Googling vaguely — you’re not alone. Decision fatigue around food is real, and it’s why AI recipe tools have become genuinely useful rather than just a novelty. Nathaniel Lee is an avid cook, drawing on his decades of home cooking and fine dining experience.

Lifesum – Best for Meal Planning and Macro Tracking Combined

Eat This Much also searches based on your diet preferences, including the ketogenic diet, vegan meals, and Mediterranean-style options. Each recipe is fully customizable to help you maintain a healthy weight and avoid disliked ingredients. There are numerous options for meal planning apps to support you in your weight loss journey — all of which have different features and options. After you’ve added your recipes, you can incorporate personalized menus and meal plans into a calendar-style planner complete with grocery lists.

The Best Meal Plan Apps to Save Time & Money (Paid / Free Trials)

While the free version is functional, the most powerful features, like unlimited pantry tracking and advanced price comparisons, are locked behind a Pro subscription. The app’s overall utility is also heavily dependent on the quality of data from its integrated grocery partners. Plan to Eat is for people who have a general sense of what they like or want to eat, but just need a little push on the organization. You can clip recipes from the internet or browse recipes in the app, add them to the built-in calendar, and create grocery lists that are specified by category, making shopping easier. The app’s cooking view even comes with step-by-step instructions that include timers, walking you right through everything you need to do down to the minute.

Day 2 Lunch: low FODMAP Smoked Mackerel Potato Salad

This subscription service delivers curated weekly meal plans directly to you, based on your chosen eating style. Many of us are finding ourselves cooking a lot more meals at home these days, and if you’re looking for inspiration, the right meal planning app can give you a tremendous set of resources. Meal planning apps offer everything from recipes and grocery shopping lists to nutritional tracking; some even offer grocery delivery, which can save you time. Amongst the pages and pages of meal planning apps out there, few offer everything you need for free, but thankfully, some free tiers are efficient enough. First, there’s Recipe Keeper,, which is like a digital recipe box.

Grocery shopping gets personal

At $12-16/month, PlateJoy was among the priciest meal planning options, and still could not cover the cost of producing genuinely personalized content at scale. When AI-powered planners emerged offering the same level of personalization at $5-8/month with zero human curation overhead, PlateJoy’s business model became untenable. The service ceased operations in 2025, and user accounts are no longer accessible. The workflow moves effortlessly from selecting your weekly menu to populating your digital grocery cart in seconds. This significantly reduces the time spent on both planning and shopping.