7 Best Meal Planning Apps to Try in 2025
This app is a go-to organizer for simplifying a busy family life, and it has great features for meal planning. Once you’ve selected your meal(s) for the day or week, Real Plans creates a timeline and shopping list for you. One of the things I love is that you can input which grocery store(s) you most frequently shop in and organize your shopping list based on what items you buy from certain places. Their recipe + meal planner + grocery list (and general list planning) is killer. I love that I can share all of the above with anybody in my household that I want to. I want to have a list of recipes which I rotate round every 4-6 weeks, which then creates a shopping list each week, minus any ingredients I still have in the fridge.
What are the top rated meal planning apps?
Real‑world usefulness and consistency over time matter more than flashy features. There are plenty of free meal planning apps that can be a helpful kitchen tool by providing recipe libraries, custom recipe creation and import, shopping lists, and more. Yes, I’ve finally given into meal planning apps after much resistance.
8fit is a fitness app that focuses on making healthy choices simple and stress-free. Their app features a wide library of workouts combined with recipes to help you fuel your training goals. EMeals comes with weekly meal options that you can choose from, but there is also a library of meals that can accommodate keto, low-carb, budget meals and other mealtime needs. Another cool aspect of their shopping lists is that you can check off items as you shop. With regards to shopping lists I’m not sure how you imagine keeping an app up to date on what you already have, so I think that would be just as cumbersome regardless.
Follow any eating style or create your own
Meal Planning Apps that are 100% free and will get you organized in the kitchen. Detailed instructions with photos show exactly how to get started using them. You want a free starting point → Samsung Food offers the most capable free tier.
Additional Highlights — there are fields for recipe metadata (like Course, Cuisine, Tags + Nutrition Facts), and Prep Notes. There is also is unimeal legit functionality to create Menus and add leftover servings to your Freezer. If you know anyone else using Plan to Eat (like me!) you can Friend them and share recipes. It’s not just for big families, or busy families, or aspiring Ina Gartens. Anyone — yes, even the living-single-and-loving-it people of the world — should do it and reap the benefits. My focus is making sure that she is fed food that she is not allergic to and is healthy.
Shared Groceries Shopping List
If you need quick weeknight dinners, Mealime’s 30-minute recipes will be your best friend. Simple 7-day vegan meal plan with balanced meals, protein coverage, prep tips, and a practical grocery list for easier plant-based eating all week at home. PlateJoy ($100 per year) is the most customizable service I’ve tried. PlateJoy personalizes the plan to cut down on recipes with ingredients you don’t want, but that personalization means it isn’t as easy to swap between the more generic plans as with eMeals. I found that PlateJoy repeated recipes more often than eMeals, but the customization is worth it for some people. This service is best if you want a meal plan that integrates your specific preferences and if you don’t mind repeat recipes.
Meal kit convenience, grocery price & experience
I don’t have a “pantry” yet but can very easily see that in the future. All the meal planning apps are over complicated, focus on specific diets, and generally can’t seem to do this task. Do you prefer to cook fresh meals every night, or would you rather batch cook on the weekend? If you love meal prep, MealPrepPro is designed specifically for that workflow.
Plan to Eat wins on calendar planning and leftover scheduling. Paprika wins on price (one-time purchase) and offline access. 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. It isn’t perfect — the brand is newer than Mealime or Paprika, and some features sit behind the Nutrition Pro tier.
- It lets you “heart” recipes so you can easily find them later, but you can’t upload your favorite recipes to this one.
- Some people use this to store recipes into different ‘notebooks’ based on recipe type.
- By planning ahead, you eliminate daily decision fatigue, cut down on expensive impulse takeout orders, and reduce food waste by buying only what you need.
- I add all ingredients to my shopping cart with the tap of a button (which automatically populates your Meal Plan tab), and then give it a glance to see if I already have any of the items listed.
- A meal planning service like eMeals or PlateJoy is different from a meal kit service like Blue Apron.
- This app is made for on-the-go eaters who want quick and healthy meals that can be prepared in 30 minutes or less.
Freezer Meals
AnyList started as a grocery list app and it shows, in a good way. If your biggest meal-planning headache is coordinating grocery runs with a partner, roommate, or family, this is the app that fixes it. It’s designed to be the central hub for a household’s shopping and cooking plans. You can create and share grocery lists and meal plans with family members in real-time, so everyone is always on the same page. For $8.99 per month, you can create meal plans for a week, used advanced search features, view your past meals, and generate reports on your eating habits, to name a few.
Best Free Meal Planning App: Mealime
If you’re using the app with someone else—say a partner that’s stopping at the grocery store on the way home—there’s also an option to share the shopping list. Plan to Eat is our pick for the best meal planning app with a grocery list. The grocery list and shopping aspects are the best part of the app.
AnyList: Best for Shared Grocery Lists
The apps on this list with thousands of recipes to scroll through are great, but if you just want someone or something else to pick for you, start here. It takes all of the work out of meal planning by allowing you to import meals from any website on the internet and add them to your plan. Plans can be made for a week at a time, or a month if you’d prefer. If you’re searching for a meal planning app to ease the difficulty of dieting, but are feeling a little overwhelmed, you need not worry. We vetted the apps so you don’t have to, and there’s no wrong choice from this list — just ones that offer different features that might suit your needs. Keep reading to decide which meal planning app to download.
Can I add custom items to the grocery list?
Another downside is its limited number of original recipes, but if you find the amount of recipes available on other sites overwhelming, this may be a good solution for you. Menu Planner allows you to have separate user profiles and easily edit your meal plan and shopping list. You can create templates for meals and sync your data between devices. It also syncs to your Apple Health app, so you can have your nutritional information tabulated to give you a more comprehensive look at your overall health. You can also create a favorites list to track the foods you like to keep on hand at home, and you can easily refer to your calendar and prep not just for the week, but for the month, as well. You can upload recipes from the internet into your app and assign them to the day of the week you want to eat them.
If you are always wondering what your friends are eating for dinner, then Prepear is the app for you. Each week, you’ll receive a menu of recipes for healthy meals and the grocery list. Its grocery list has a neat feature where it combines ingredients. This will save you the hassle of walking all around the grocery store and returning to the same aisle multiple times. EMeals lets you choose meal plans based on many different options. You can search for meals that are healthy and easy to make, or based on diet and taste.
MealBoard – Meal Planner
And if you want the nutritional info of each recipe or to substitute items, you’ll have to pay for the pro version, which is only $3/month (truly, a steal if ya ask me). On the paid version, you can upload your own recipes, plus other perks. • Save recipes for later by tapping the heart next to the title.
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