Looking for a CookBook Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe. This comparison cost me a claim I had been making elsewhere on this blog, so it is worth reading for that alone.

Figures were checked in August 2026 against Apple’s App Store listing.

The claim I have to give up

Across several of these comparisons I have said that AnyRecipe’s shopping list does arithmetic other apps do not: it merges quantities across every recipe you plan, and rounds up to the packet sizes shops sell.

CookBook’s listing says, in its own words, that it “merges ingredients, sorts groceries by aisle and syncs your shopping list across devices.”

So the merging half of that claim is not a difference against CookBook. Only the packet rounding is, and I am not going to quietly leave the broader version standing now that I know.

The numbers

CookBook: 4.77 stars from around 2,590 ratings, shipping since September 2016, which makes it one of the longest-running apps here. Last updated July 2026. Its listing says it runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and the web. Requires iOS 16.4. Free to start with a 14 day trial.

AnyRecipe: 4.5 stars from 2 ratings, iPhone and iPad only, requires iOS 26.

What CookBook does

Its opening line is “Stop screenshotting dinner ideas”, which is the same problem I built my app around, so let us be clear that this is a direct competitor rather than an adjacent one.

Imports from everywhere. Instagram, TikTok, websites, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and plain links. Plus an AI scanner that turns photos of handwritten cards, cookbook pages, screenshots and clippings into editable recipes.

Ask CookBook, an AI cooking assistant for dinner ideas, ingredient swaps, using up leftovers, adapting a recipe to a diet, and general cooking questions. Nothing else in this series has this.

Deep organisation. Tags, favourites, ratings, notes, filters, and search by name, ingredient, tag, source, cook time or nutrition.

Meal planning across days, weeks or months, with servings scaling.

Grocery lists that merge ingredients and sort by aisle.

Nutrition tracking, with estimated calories and macros so you can plan against a goal.

Cooking tools: servings scaling, unit conversion, timers, screen stays awake.

That is a lot of app, and it has had a decade to accumulate.

Where CookBook is the better choice

You want nutrition data. We do not calculate calories or macros at all. If planning around a target is part of why you want a recipe app, this decides it.

You want an AI assistant. Ask CookBook answers “what can I make with what I have” and “how do I adapt this”, which is a genuinely different thing from importing recipes well.

You want a Mac or web version. Its listing covers both. AnyRecipe is iPhone and iPad only.

You want a track record. Around 2,590 ratings since 2016 against our 2.

Your phone is not on the newest iOS. CookBook needs iOS 16.4, we need iOS 26.

You organise heavily. Tags, ratings, filters and search by cook time are more developed than ours.

Where AnyRecipe differs

Two things, and one of them is narrower than I used to claim.

The shopping list rounds to real packets. CookBook merges and sorts by aisle, as noted above. What I have not seen advertised anywhere else is rounding the merged quantity up to the size shops actually sell, so 40 grams of an ingredient becomes the jar you will really buy rather than a number you have to translate in the aisle. If that sounds like a small thing, it is, and I would rather describe it accurately than inflate it.

There is no account. AnyRecipe syncs through your own private iCloud, with no sign up, which means nobody at my end can read your cookbook. CookBook syncs a private library across devices and its web app, which necessarily involves a service. Both are legitimate designs and they trade different things. The six ways recipe collections get lost is the piece to read if that trade matters to you.

How to choose in one line

If you want the most feature-dense recipe manager, nutrition tracking, or an AI you can ask what to cook, get CookBook.

If you want a cookbook that lives only in your own iCloud and a shopping list that tells you to buy the jar, try AnyRecipe free and compare.

A note on switching

CookBook has been going for a decade and has a lot of people’s collections in it. I would not encourage anyone to move out of it on the strength of one shopping-list behaviour.

If you are undecided, do not migrate. Import new recipes into both for a month and see which you open on a Tuesday evening. That is the only test that means anything.

Other comparisons: Pestle is the app closest to mine, JustTheRecipe is the highest rated and runs on iOS 13, Crouton is the most complete on Apple platforms, Recipe Keeper covers Windows and Android, Paprika is the pay-once veteran, Mela is the most elegant, Copy Me That is the cheapest paid tier, and AnyList is for shopping together.

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 running iOS 26 or later. CookBook is on the App Store and at cookbookmanager.com, and it is a serious piece of work.