Looking for a Mela Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe, so read this the way you would read any comparison written by someone with a stake in it. Mela is the app I admire most in this category and a good part of what follows argues for it.

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

The difference in one paragraph

Mela assumes your recipes live on the web. Its centrepiece is an in-app browser with a live preview, plus feeds: you subscribe to your favourite food blogs and read their new recipes inside Mela’s own clean viewer, stripped of the life story and the pop-ups.

That is not a coincidence. Mela is made by Silvio Rizzi, who also makes Reeder, one of the best RSS readers ever written for Apple platforms. Mela is what happens when the person who understands feeds better than almost anyone turns their attention to cooking.

AnyRecipe assumes your recipes arrive in whatever form they arrive in. A reel in your saved folder. A screenshot of a caption. A photograph of your mother’s handwriting. You share it or photograph it and it comes back as a recipe with ingredients and steps separated.

If you read food blogs, keep reading, but you may already have your answer.

Mela is a genuinely lovely app

It holds a 4.7 star average from around 850 ratings, runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and is free to download with a one-time purchase to unlock everything. No subscription.

The design is the quietest and most confident in the category. Cook mode uses a larger font so you can read it from across the counter, timers are detected in the steps and support Live Activities, there is a scanner for recipes in books, and recipes sync through iCloud either privately or as a library shared with other iCloud users.

The part I find genuinely clever is the delegation. Mela does not build its own grocery list, it uses Reminders. It does not build its own meal planner, it uses Calendar. That means your shopping list and your week are available on every device you own even where Mela is not installed, and they outlive the app entirely. Given how easily recipe collections disappear when an app does, that is a more thoughtful design decision than it first appears.

The one thing to check before you buy

Apple lists Mela’s most recent update as version 2.6.2, released in June 2025. At the time of writing that is over a year without a release.

That is not evidence of abandonment. Small, finished apps from careful developers can go quiet for a long time and come back, and Mela does not obviously need anything. But it is a fact worth having before you commit years of collecting to it, and it is the kind of thing a comparison written by a competitor is tempted to leave out.

Check the listing yourself before deciding. If there has been a release since, ignore this section.

Where Mela is the better choice

Your recipes come from food blogs. This is the real one. If you follow a dozen food writers and want their new recipes to arrive somewhere clean and readable, Mela is the only app here built for that, and the feed reader is excellent.

You want to pay once. A single unlock with no subscription is a real argument, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

You want a Mac app. Mela runs on Mac. AnyRecipe is iPhone and iPad only.

You value restraint. Mela does less on purpose and does it beautifully. If a busy app puts you off, that preference is legitimate and Mela is the answer to it.

You want your list and plan outside the app. Reminders and Calendar are yours, permanently, whatever happens to any app.

Where AnyRecipe is the better choice

Your recipes come from Instagram and TikTok. This is why the app exists. Tap Share on a post, pick AnyRecipe, and the recipe is pulled out of the caption with ingredients and steps separated. A browser cannot do much with a video post, because there is no page to parse. It also handles the case where a creator gates the recipe behind “comment RECIPE and I’ll DM it”, by recognising it and telling you the keyword to comment. I should be straight that other apps do this too, Pestle chief among them, so it is a reason to look past Mela rather than a reason to land on me specifically.

You want the shopping list to do arithmetic. Because Mela hands groceries to Reminders, the list is a list. AnyRecipe merges quantities across everything you plan, sorts by aisle, and rounds up to the packet sizes shops actually sell, so two recipes wanting one egg and three eggs give you four rather than two lines to add up in the aisle.

You want the week planned from your own collection. AnyRecipe’s planner is built on the recipes you saved rather than on calendar events, which matters if the thing that defeats you is the six o’clock decision rather than remembering what you agreed to cook.

You want active development. AnyRecipe ships regularly. Given the update gap above, that is worth stating plainly.

How to choose in one line

If your recipes come from food blogs and you want to pay once, buy Mela. It is a better designed app than mine and the feed reader has no equal.

If your recipes come from reels, screenshots and cookbook pages, and you want the shopping list to think, try AnyRecipe free and see whether the import actually saves you the typing.

A note on switching

There is no one-tap migration between the two. What tends to work is not migrating at all: leave the old collection where it is, start importing new recipes into the new app, and after a month see which one you actually reach for. If it is the old one, you have lost nothing.

Whichever you land on, check you can get a single file of everything back out before you commit years of collecting, which is the question that decides whether a collection is really yours.

Mela is not the only comparison worth reading. Paprika is the safe, long-established choice and runs on Windows and Android too. Crouton is the most feature-complete of the lot and the best rated app in the category. Recipe Keeper covers Windows and Android and imports from almost any other app. Copy Me That has the cheapest paid tier of the lot. And if the harder problem in your house is shopping together rather than collecting recipes, the AnyList comparison is the more useful one. 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. Mela is on the App Store and at mela.recipes, and is a lovely place to keep your recipes.