Looking for a Free ReciMe Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe, so treat this accordingly. It is also the comparison where the honest answer is most likely to be “stay where you are”, and I would rather say that at the top than bury it under nine paragraphs.

ReciMe describes itself as “the number 1 recipe organizer.” Having looked at the numbers, that is not marketing bravado.

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

The free question

If you searched for a free ReciMe alternative, the honest answer is that ReciMe is already free to use, with a limit. Its own site says the free version is limited to 5 recipe imports a week, and that the grocery list, meal plan and cookbooks stay free without a subscription.

So price is not the reason to switch. The differences below are about how the two apps work.

The numbers, mine included

ReciMe: 4.79 stars from around 284,000 ratings. Shipping since November 2021. iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS 17.

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

That rating count deserves a moment. It is more than three times AnyList’s, which is the next largest app I have compared, and roughly a hundred and forty thousand times mine. Whatever else is true, an enormous number of people have used ReciMe and been pleased enough to say so.

The iOS requirement is the other line worth reading. ReciMe runs on phones going back several years. AnyRecipe needs the current iOS, which rules out a lot of working iPhones outright. That is a limitation, not a philosophy.

What ReciMe does

The listing is dense, and most of it is the same job my app does.

Saves from social. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest, with ingredients and steps pulled into a readable format. That is a wider net than mine, Facebook in particular.

Imports from other apps. Paprika, Notes, Google Docs, Notion, Evernote. A migration path in, which is a thoughtful thing to build and something I have not.

Grocery lists sorted by aisle or by recipe. Both orderings, which is more flexible than picking one.

Orders the groceries. You can turn the list into a delivery from inside the app. Nothing I make does anything like this.

Meal planning, nutrition and cookbooks. Calories, protein, carbs and fat for any recipe. Meals categorised by breakfast, lunch and dinner. Recipes grouped into cookbooks.

The cooking basics. Scaling servings, metric and imperial conversion, screen stays awake, step by step mode.

Where we actually differ

Two things, and I want to be precise because the list above covers most of the ground.

Where your recipes live. ReciMe’s listing says it plainly: “All recipes are saved on the cloud.” That is their cloud, and it is what makes syncing across devices work. AnyRecipe syncs through your own private iCloud, under your Apple account, with no sign up and no password. The practical consequences are that there is no account to lose access to, and that I cannot read your cookbook even if I wanted to, because it was never on a machine I control.

Whether that matters to you is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one. For a lot of people it does not, and a company holding your recipes is an entirely normal arrangement they have with a dozen other services.

Shopping list arithmetic. Both apps merge ingredients across recipes and sort by aisle. That is table stakes now and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I have not found elsewhere, including here, is the rounding: when the week needs 340g of something, the list asks for the 500g bag the shop actually sells, rather than a number you then have to translate in the aisle.

It is a narrow thing. It is also the only shopping list difference I can defend, so it is the one I will claim.

Where ReciMe is straightforwardly ahead

Nutrition, for one. Calories and macros for every recipe is a whole category I do not touch.

Grocery delivery, for another. Turning a list into an order is a real convenience and building it means integrating with retailers, which is work I have not done.

The import path from Paprika, Notion and Evernote. If you have years of collecting in another app, ReciMe has thought about getting you out of it and I have not.

And the obvious one: 284,000 people have tested it in ways two ratings cannot.

Who should pick which

Stay with ReciMe if you are already using it, if you want nutrition tracking, if grocery delivery is useful where you live, or if your phone cannot run iOS 26. That last one is not a preference, it is a hard stop.

Look at AnyRecipe if you specifically do not want an account, or want your recipes syncing through your own iCloud rather than a company’s servers, or the packet rounding solves something that annoys you weekly.

Try both if you are starting from nothing. They are both free to try, and an afternoon of importing the same five recipes into each will tell you more than this page can.

If you searched for a ReciMe alternative because something specific irritated you, I would genuinely like to know what it was. That is more useful to me than anything I could argue here, and if the answer is that ReciMe already does the thing better, that is a legitimate result for a comparison to reach.

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, AnyList is the one to read if shopping together is the real problem, Pestle is the closest competitor on social import, and CookBook is the most feature-dense.

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. ReciMe is on the App Store and at recime.app, and on the evidence of a quarter of a million ratings, it is very good at this.