Looking for a Copy Me That Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe, so weigh this accordingly. Copy Me That is the competitor whose thinking I agree with most, which makes this an awkward article to write and probably a useful one to read.

Figures were checked in August 2026 against Apple’s App Store listing, and the price again in September 2026 against Copy Me That’s own site.

The difference in one paragraph

Copy Me That exists because saving a link is not saving a recipe. Its name is its thesis. You add a recipe from a website and you get your own complete copy: ingredients, method, your edits, your photos. When the original page moves, gets paywalled or disappears, you still have it.

That is not a small idea. It is the single most common way recipe collections quietly die, and Copy Me That was built around fixing it years before most people noticed the problem.

AnyRecipe agrees with that premise entirely and differs on where recipes come from. Copy Me That assumes a browser and a website. AnyRecipe assumes a share sheet and a camera, for recipes that arrive as reels, screenshots and cookbook pages.

Copy Me That is quietly excellent

It holds a 4.6 star average from around 1,180 ratings and has been going since January 2015, which is longer than most of the apps in this category.

The pricing is the most honest in the comparison, and unusually, it is stated plainly up front rather than hidden behind a paywall screen: free up to 40 recipes, then $1.00 a month for unlimited, with annual and lifetime memberships available, and one membership covering all your devices. Ninety nine cents a month is the cheapest unlimited tier of anything here by a distance.

The rest is solid and unshowy. Add recipes from any website and most apps. Edit any part of a recipe so your tweaks survive. Collections, or just search. A meal planner. A shopping list you can sort by recipe or by aisle, which is a genuinely useful toggle that most apps do not offer. The screen stays awake while you cook, which sounds trivial until you have wiped your hands on a tea towel for the fourth time.

There is also a community, where members share what they are cooking and you choose how much you take part. Nothing else in this comparison has that, and if you like browsing what real people actually make, it is a real reason to pick it.

The sentence I wish more apps would write

Straight from its App Store listing:

Your recipes belong to you and you can export them at any time.

That is the answer to the question I tell people to ask about any recipe app, and most cannot answer it as cleanly. I would rather compete with an app that says that than with one that does not.

Where Copy Me That is the better choice

You save recipes at a desktop, from a browser. This is what it was designed for and it does it better than mine.

You want the cheapest unlimited plan. A dollar a month, or a lifetime option. On price alone it is hard to beat.

You want one membership across every device. Simple and fair.

You want a community. Seeing what other people are actually cooking is a genuine source of ideas, and no other app here offers it.

You want to sort the shopping list by recipe. Sometimes you want to know which meal an item belongs to. Being able to flip between that and aisle order is smarter than picking one.

Where AnyRecipe is the better choice

Your recipes come from Instagram and TikTok. Copy Me That is built around websites and works from most apps, but a video post has no page to parse. AnyRecipe pulls the recipe out of the caption, and handles the case where a creator gates it behind “comment RECIPE and I’ll DM it” by telling you the keyword to comment. This is not mine alone, though: Pestle advertises the same thing on its front page.

Your recipes are on paper. Photograph a cookbook page or a handwritten card and it is read into a proper recipe.

You want the shopping list to do arithmetic. Copy Me That groups and sorts. AnyRecipe also merges quantities across everything you plan and rounds up to the packet sizes shops actually sell, so you get a jar rather than 40 grams. Several good apps merge quantities, CookBook and Paprika among them, so the packet rounding is the narrow part rather than the merging itself.

You do not want an account. Copy Me That syncs through its own service, which is what makes the web version and the community work. AnyRecipe syncs through your own private iCloud with no sign up, which means nobody at my end can read your cookbook. Both are defensible designs; they trade different things.

Recipe detection in other languages. Copy Me That’s listing notes that its recipe detection is currently optimised for English. If you save recipes in another language, that is worth testing before you commit.

How to choose in one line

If you collect recipes from websites at a desk and want the cheapest honest pricing in the category, use Copy Me That.

If your saved recipes are sitting in an Instagram folder you never cook from, try AnyRecipe free and see whether the import saves you the typing.

A note on switching

Copy Me That lets you export whenever you like, so trying something else costs you nothing but time. That is exactly how it should work, and it is worth checking your current app offers the same before you commit years of collecting to it.

If you are undecided, do not migrate. Leave the collection where it is, import new recipes into the other app for a month, and see which one you reach for.

Other comparisons: Recipe Keeper if your household spans Windows and Android, Paprika if you want to pay once, Crouton for the most complete Apple app, Mela if you follow food blogs, and AnyList if shopping together is the harder problem. And Pestle is the app closest to what AnyRecipe does, since it also imports from Instagram and TikTok. 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.

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. Copy Me That is on the App Store and at copymethat.com, and I recommend it without hesitation to anyone who collects from a browser.