AnyList Complete Pricing: Is It Worth It, and What Are the Alternatives?

I make AnyRecipe, so read this the way you would read any comparison written by someone with a stake in it. Most of what follows argues for the other app.

Prices were rechecked against AnyList’s own site in September 2026, and the other figures in August 2026.

The difference in one paragraph

AnyList is a shopping list that learned to hold recipes. AnyRecipe is a recipe collection that produces a shopping list. Both do both now, and each is still better at the half it started with.

That sounds like marketing, so here is the concrete version. AnyList’s centre of gravity is a list two people share, updating on both phones as one of them walks the aisles. AnyRecipe’s centre of gravity is getting a recipe out of wherever you found it, a reel, a screenshot, a cookbook page, and into a form you can cook from.

So if the hard part of your week is shopping together, keep reading but expect me to point you at AnyList. If the hard part is that your recipes are scattered across saved folders and screenshots, that is the problem I built for.

AnyList is a good app

It is free to download, and AnyList Complete costs $9.99 a year for an individual or $14.99 a year for a household. That household price covers everyone, which is unusually fair pricing for a family tool.

It holds a 4.9 star average from around 80,000 ratings. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, Apple Watch and the web, so it works no matter what anyone in the house carries.

Complete adds recipe importing, the meal planning calendar, recipe scaling, item photos, price tracking, store filters, location based reminders and cloud backup. The free tier still gives you lists, sharing and sync, which is the part most people use daily.

Where AnyList is the better choice

Someone in your house is not on Apple. AnyRecipe is iPhone and iPad only. AnyList runs on Android and in a browser. If you and your partner are on different platforms, this decides it and nothing below changes that.

The shopping list is the point. A list that two people edit at once, in the shop, without either of them thinking about it, is what AnyList was built to do and it has had over a decade to get it right.

You want it on your wrist or in a browser. Apple Watch and a web app are genuinely useful in a supermarket and neither exists for AnyRecipe.

You want household pricing. $14.99 a year for everyone in the house is cheap for what it does.

You want features I do not have. Price tracking, store filters and location based reminders are real things AnyList does and AnyRecipe does not.

Where AnyRecipe is the better choice

Recipe import is the core. In AnyList, importing recipes from websites is part of Complete. AnyRecipe is built around it: websites, Instagram and TikTok posts and cookbook photos all come in as recipes. If you are mainly trying to collect recipes rather than shop with someone, that difference matters.

Your recipes come from video and paper. AnyList imports from websites, blogs and emails, which is the right list for where recipes used to live. AnyRecipe is built for the share sheet and the camera: an Instagram or TikTok post, a screenshot, a cookbook page, a handwritten card. There is a longer piece on how that works, and Pestle is worth comparing too, since it covers the same ground with a longer track record.

The list does more thinking. Ingredients merge across recipes, so three recipes calling for onions produce one line rather than three. Several good apps merge quantities, CookBook and Paprika among them, so the packet rounding is the narrow part rather than the merging itself. Quantities combine and round to the packet sizes shops actually sell, which is the difference between a list you can shop from and a list you have to interpret.

No account. There is no sign up and no password. Your cookbook syncs through your own private iCloud, which also means I cannot read it.

The part I have to be straight about

AnyRecipe does not have a live shared list. The Share button sends someone the list as text, which is fine for “here is what we need” and useless for two people shopping at once.

What it does instead is sync your shopping list two ways with Apple Reminders. A Reminders list can be shared with family, and edits flow both directions, so collaboration is possible through Apple’s app rather than mine. That works well if everyone is on Apple devices. It is not a substitute if they are not.

If shared shopping is the whole reason you are looking, AnyList is a better answer and I would rather say so than sell you something that will disappoint you in a supermarket.

How to choose

If you shop with someone, or anyone in the house is on Android, use AnyList.

If your problem is that recipes arrive as reels and screenshots and never make it anywhere useful, try AnyRecipe free and see whether the import saves you the typing.

Using both is not silly

A fair number of people will want AnyList’s shared list and a better way to collect recipes. Keeping both is a reasonable answer, and AnyRecipe’s Reminders sync means the two can meet in the middle if you shop from a shared Reminders list.

If you are weighing up other options too, the Paprika comparison covers the other end of this market, Crouton and Mela are the two strongest Apple-only apps, Recipe Keeper covers every platform there is, Pestle is the closest app to AnyRecipe of any here, and there is a wider comparison of ways to organise recipes if you are not sure an app is the answer at all. JustTheRecipe is the highest rated of the lot and runs on iOS 13, and CookBook is the most feature-dense, with nutrition tracking and an AI assistant.

Choosing between Paprika and AnyList specifically? Paprika vs AnyList compares the two head to head.

All twenty-two are side by side, with ratings and iOS requirements, in the best recipe apps for iPhone.

Also compared since: ReciMe, which has more ratings than everything else here combined, BigOven, which has been shipping since 2008, Samsung Food, which has the most generous free tier, and Plan to Eat, which is the best pure meal planner and the only one with no free tier at all.

Compared most recently: RecipeBox, which sends your list to Walmart or Instacart, Pepper, the most social, OrganizEat, shipping since 2015, and Osta, with free shared folders and lists.

Newest in the series: Recipe Gallery, a searchable photo archive that syncs through iCloud, Deglaze, with a full free version, MealBoard, which plans around your pantry for $12.99 once, and Flavorish, which runs on Android and the web too.

AnyRecipe is free on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad. AnyList is at anylist.com and on the App Store, and is a very good shopping list.