Looking for a BigOven Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe, so read this with that in mind.

BigOven is the oldest app in this comparison series by a distance. It arrived on the App Store in October 2008, which is four months after the App Store itself opened. It has been maintained continuously since, and was updated a couple of weeks before I wrote this.

That matters more than it sounds. In a category where apps quietly stop shipping, eighteen years of updates is a form of evidence.

Figures were checked in September 2026 against Apple’s App Store listings, including my own.

The numbers, mine included

BigOven: 4.7 stars from around 14,000 ratings. Shipping since October 2008. iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Requires iOS 15.

AnyRecipe: 4.5 stars from 2 ratings. Shipping since 2024. iPhone and iPad, no Watch. Requires iOS 26.

iOS 15 against iOS 26 is the line to read first. BigOven installs on phones many years old. Mine does not install on anything that cannot run the current iOS, which is a real limitation and not a considered choice.

What BigOven does

It is built around discovery as much as organisation, which is the main way it differs in character from what I make.

A library of over a million recipes. Searchable, with trending dishes and seasonal collections. AnyRecipe has no library at all: it holds the recipes you bring to it and nothing else.

A community of five million registered cooks. You can follow bloggers and see what other people are making. There is a social layer here that I have deliberately not built.

RecipeScan. Photograph a handwritten card and it transcribes it. Mine does this too, so it is not a difference, but it is worth knowing both do it if you have a box of your grandmother’s index cards.

A web clipper. Save from your favourite sites from a browser.

Meal planning and grocery lists. Plan weekly, daily or monthly, push recipe ingredients to the list, and share the plan with family.

A leftovers tool. Enter what you need to use up and it suggests recipes built around those ingredients. This is aimed squarely at food waste and I have nothing like it.

An Apple Watch app. I do not have one.

Where we actually differ

Folders against a shopping list that does arithmetic. BigOven organises recipes into folders and pushes ingredients to a list. What I do that its listing does not describe is merge the same ingredient across every recipe in a planned week and then round the total up to the packet size a shop actually sells. If you plan four dinners that each want a bit of cream, the difference is one line asking for the pot you can buy, rather than four lines you add up in the aisle.

Several good apps merge quantities. The rounding is the narrow part, and it is the part I will defend.

No account, and your own iCloud. BigOven works around a registered account, which is what its community features require. AnyRecipe has no sign up at all and syncs through your own private iCloud. That means nothing to lose access to, and it means I cannot read your cookbook because it was never on my servers.

This is a trade rather than a win. An account is exactly what lets BigOven have a community, and community is a real feature that I have given up by not having one.

Where BigOven is straightforwardly ahead

The recipe library, if you want somewhere to find dinner rather than somewhere to keep it. A million recipes is a different product from an empty cookbook waiting for you to fill it.

The leftovers tool, which addresses a real and expensive problem.

The Apple Watch app, the older iOS support, and eighteen years of being maintained.

And 14,000 ratings against my 2.

Who should pick which

Stay with BigOven if you use the recipe library or the community, if the leftovers feature earns its place in your week, if you want it on your Watch, or if your phone cannot run iOS 26.

Look at AnyRecipe if you already know what you want to cook and the problem is keeping your own recipes together, if you would rather not have an account, or if the packet rounding on the shopping list solves something that irritates you every week.

Neither, if what you actually want is inspiration rather than organisation. BigOven is closer to that than I am, but a browse through the ways to organize recipes digitally may be a better use of ten minutes than either app.

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

Other comparisons: Paprika is the pay-once veteran, Recipe Keeper covers Windows and Android, ReciMe is the largest by ratings, and AnyList is the one to read if shopping together is the real problem.

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 running iOS 26 or later. BigOven is on the App Store and at bigoven.com, and has earned its place by outlasting almost everything else in the category.