Or you can select a plan that is specially designed for a small fee. You can discover real recipes created by a community of over 30 million home cooks. Finally, with this app, you can save time by watching video tutorials on how to prepare certain dishes or even see how-to videos by professional chefs. Perhaps you’ve followed a vegan diet for years or are just getting started. No matter where you are on your plant-based eating journey, you will want to check out Veganized. The app also allows you to organize food by type (vegetables, meats, and cheeses), which makes it easier to find all the items needed for cooking.
It’s a true set-it-and-forget-it solution for anyone tired of making daily food decisions. We’ve tested and reviewed the top contenders to see how they stack up. Here are our picks for the ten best meal planning apps to make your life easier this year. We also looked for apps with extensive recipe libraries already built into the app at the time of download, which helped to make meal planning and shopping much easier. Then, for each meal, you can choose from a list of recommended meals.
- You can also add notes to each recipe so you don’t forget what ingredients are needed or how much time a recipe takes to prepare.
- Cooklist will send you a notification when something in your kitchen is nearing its expiration date, so you can prioritize your ingredients and avoid wasting your groceries.
- Select the recipes you’d like to cook, and you’ll receive a complete grocery list, and you can easily update serving info to adjust the recipes.
- Finally, with this app, you can save time by watching video tutorials on how to prepare certain dishes or even see how-to videos by professional chefs.
- It automatically refreshes your menu weekly to prevent recipe fatigue and adapts based on your feedback, ensuring the plan evolves with you.
- Best meal planning apps on a budget help families control grocery spending by planning meals before shopping.
The Best Meal Plan Apps to Save Time & Money (Paid / Free Trials)
Look for apps that don’t require a steep learning curve and let you get started right away. Look for apps that create automated grocery lists that update as you change your plan. Even better are apps with a virtual pantry, which tracks what you already have on hand to help you reduce food waste. Our tester noticed that Mealime’s grocery list is a bit different from the other apps on our list. “The shopping list is helpful in the sense that it pulls automatically from the meal plan you’ve selected,” Pete said.
The Best Meal-Planning Apps (for When You’re Sick of Doing It Yourself)
To get started, you’ll import your purchases from grocery stores or add them manually. Cooklist will send you a notification when something in your kitchen is nearing its expiration date, so you can prioritize your ingredients and avoid wasting your groceries. The main benefits are saving time, saving money, and reducing stress.
Its interface is heavily focused on numeric data, which is perfect for users who thrive on tracking numbers but may be less appealing for those seeking culinary inspiration. The Premium version unlocks weekly planning, leftover automation, and grocery delivery integration. The initial setup requires you to populate your recipe library, but once complete, planning becomes incredibly efficient. It’s built for power users who want a long-term solution without monthly fees. If you have ever tried to hit 160 grams of protein while staying under 2,200 calories, you know how tedious manual planning can become. With Eat This Much, you simply put in your height, weight, age, dietary preferences, and activity level, and the app generates a complete meal plan for you.
How We Tested and Selected the Best Meal Planning Apps
Plan to Eat is designed for structured weekly meal planning with a drag-and-drop calendar. AnyList is stronger for grocery lists, while Plan to Eat is better for structured planning. Paprika is a powerful recipe organizer that helps you save recipes, plan meals, and create grocery lists in one place. Best meal planning apps on a budget help families control grocery spending by planning meals before shopping. When meals are planned in advance, households buy only the ingredients they need.
MealPlan+ also wins points for extra portability since it’s compatible with Apple Watch. Plans start at just $8 a month, and you can sign up for a free trial to test out Platejoy today. If you want more info, check out my friend’s thorough platejoy review. 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.
This data-driven approach is ideal for athletes, bodybuilders, or anyone focused on weight management who needs precise nutritional control without manual calculation. Each recipe includes precise portion sizes and a full macronutrient breakdown, removing the tedious guesswork of calorie counting. The platform also generates a categorized grocery list designed to minimize shopping time and reduce food waste, a significant advantage for busy individuals and families.
Best Meal Planning App for Families: eMeals
This is good news for families who want to focus on tasty food and health. Their ProScore system highlights the nutritional content in each meal and offers scores to help you hit your nutritional goals, while saving time and money. You can add your grocery list right into the app and sync it with your Google Calendar so that your schedule is always up-to-date with your grocery shopping lists. Not only does BigOven offer half a million recipes for users to search through, it spotlights recipes in unique and helpful ways. Eat This Much then generates a weekly meal schedule for you based on those numbers.
Best Meal Planning Apps on a Budget by Category

AI creates the perfect meals for your goals, lifestyle, and taste. You want a free starting point → Samsung Food offers the most capable free tier. Eat This Much and Mealime also have solid free versions, but with more limited features. Whether you’re following a specific diet like keto or vegan, have allergies, or need to track your calories and macros with precision, the right app should make it effortless. You can choose from three free programs that are determined by the number of calories you want to consume.
Best Meal Planning App Overall: Prepear
You can also ask the app to avoid a hundred or so ingredients (perfect for picky eaters), which is a great way to customize your meals. Meal planning apps help families save money by planning meals before shopping. This reduces impulse purchases, prevents duplicate ingredients, and helps households stick to a weekly grocery budget. This app is easy to use and is fully capable of taking care of all the details.

Cheap Sheet Pan Meal Prep Recipes for an Easy Sunday Prep
Paprika supports many special diets such as dairy-free, gluten-free, low-calorie, paleo, keto, vegan, and vegetarian. When asked about customization, Pete noted that “you can’t customize or modify the recipes that are already included in the app. Your shopping list will automatically adjust based on what you already have at home, which we love. While the app doesn’t suggest meals, you can filter the recipes by meal type, cuisine, cook time, special diets, audience, and allergies. The app supports special diets like vegan, vegetarian, paleo, low-calorie, gluten-free, and dairy-free.
Our Thoughts on Prepear
An extension of the influential Forks Over Knives movement, this app removes the guesswork from vegan eating by delivering weekly meal plans curated by chefs and nutritionists. It focuses on nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods, making it a powerful resource for anyone following this specific dietary path for health or ethical best food tracking app for weight loss reasons. BigOven is a long-standing and robust contender among the best meal planning apps, appealing to users who value a massive, community-driven recipe database. Its strength lies in its sheer volume, offering over one million recipes that can be easily saved, organized, and added to a calendar-style meal planner. Features like the RecipeScan tool, which digitizes handwritten recipes, and a web clipper make it a powerful hub for all your culinary inspiration.
The 18 Best Meal Planning Apps [2024 Review]
Keeping your grocery list at hand while you shop has never been easier. For example, if you don’t like eggs for breakfast, just drag them into another meal later in the day! MealPlan+ supports multiple users, so the whole family can use it without each person needing to set up their own account. Long-time users (the app’s been around for 10 years!) are loyal to this app and their subscriptions and for good reason. Paprika is a recipe manager with downloads available for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS.