Looking for a Pepper Alternative? An Honest Comparison

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

Pepper and AnyRecipe start from the same problem: recipes you find on Instagram, TikTok and food blogs that never make it anywhere useful. Then they go in opposite directions. Pepper turns your collection into something social. AnyRecipe keeps it private. Most of this page is about which of those you actually want.

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

The numbers, mine included

Pepper: 4.78 stars from around 9,500 ratings. Shipping since September 2021. iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS 15.

AnyRecipe: 4.5 stars from 2 ratings. Shipping since 2024. iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS 26.

The iOS line is the one to read first. Pepper installs on phones going back years. AnyRecipe needs the current iOS, which rules out plenty of working iPhones. That is a real limitation, not a design choice.

What Pepper does

Pepper calls itself a “social recipe organizer”, and both halves of that are true.

Saves from the usual places. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and recipe blogs, or text pasted from your Notes app.

A cookbook other people can see. Your saved recipes live in a cookbook you can share with friends, family or Pepper’s wider food network. Its site says 3 million home cooks use it and that more than 5 million recipes have been organized in it.

Shared folders. Build recipe folders together with a partner, family or friends, for date nights, dinner parties or a family cookbook.

Grocery delivery. Order the ingredients for delivery straight from a recipe or your grocery list.

A game. Pepper has a virtual charcuterie board you decorate with items from mystery packs, earned through community engagement, and you can compete with friends to build the rarest board. Nothing else in this comparison series has anything like it.

A printed cookbook. You can publish your cookbook as a physical book, which its listing suggests as a holiday gift.

What it costs

Pepper is free to download. Its App Store page lists subscriptions at $4.99 a month, with yearly plans at $39.99 and $49.99, some with a free trial week, plus one-off purchases called Spice, priced from $3.99 to $89.99. The listing does not spell out exactly what the free version includes, so check that in the app before you commit a collection to it.

Where we actually differ

Social against private. This is the whole comparison. Pepper’s value comes from other people: the community, shared cookbooks, trending cooks, the board game. That design needs an account and a service holding your recipes, because a social network cannot work any other way.

AnyRecipe has no account at all. Your cookbook syncs through your own private iCloud, so there is nothing to sign up for, nothing to lose access to, and nothing for me to read. It also means no community and no followers. If the social part is why Pepper appeals to you, that is a real loss, not a feature I am dressing up.

Shopping list arithmetic. AnyRecipe merges quantities across every recipe in a planned week and rounds them up to the packet sizes shops sell, so the list asks for the 500g bag rather than 340g of something. Several good apps merge quantities; the rounding is the narrow part I have not found elsewhere.

Getting the food. Pepper can order the groceries for delivery. AnyRecipe cannot, and syncs its list with Apple Reminders instead.

Where Pepper is straightforwardly ahead

The community, if you want one. Millions of home cooks sharing what they make is something a private app will never have.

Shared cookbooks and folders with friends and family, grocery delivery, the printed cookbook, and iOS 15 support.

And 9,500 ratings against my 2.

Who should pick which

Pick Pepper if cooking is social for you: you swap recipes with friends, want a shared family cookbook, like seeing what other home cooks are making, or would enjoy the game. Also if your phone cannot run iOS 26.

Pick AnyRecipe if you want your recipes to stay yours: no account, no network, synced through your own iCloud, and a shopping list that rounds to real packet sizes.

Try both if you are unsure. Both are free to download, and saving the same five recipes into each will tell you quickly whether the social layer feels like a feature or like noise.

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

Other comparisons: ReciMe is the largest by ratings, Pestle is the closest to AnyRecipe on social import, AnyList is the one for shopping together, and Osta is the newest, with shared folders built in.

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. Pepper is on the App Store and at peppertheapp.com, and is the most social recipe app in this series.