Looking for a Recipe Keeper Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe, so treat this the way you would treat any comparison written by someone with a stake in it. Recipe Keeper is more established than my app by a wide margin and a good part of this argues for it.

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

The difference in one paragraph

Recipe Keeper is built for reach. Every platform, every import path, every output format. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows and Android, it scans handwritten cards and PDFs, it prints cookbooks, it answers Alexa, and it will swallow a collection exported from almost any competitor.

AnyRecipe is built for one broken thing. Recipes arrive as reels, screenshots and cookbook photographs, and typing them out is why they never get cooked. You share a post, and it comes back as a recipe with ingredients and steps separated.

If your recipes come from websites and you have a Windows PC, you can probably stop reading here and go get Recipe Keeper.

Recipe Keeper is genuinely established

It holds a 4.8 star average from close to 30,000 ratings, which is more accumulated evidence than almost anything else in this category, and it has been shipping since 2015.

The feature list is unfashionably complete. Import from hundreds of recipe websites. OCR scanning from cookbooks, magazines, handwritten recipes and PDF files. Search by name, ingredient or directions. Serving size recalculation. A weekly and monthly meal planner that can generate a plan for you from hints. A shopping list grouped by aisle automatically. Twenty five colour schemes.

Two things stand out as genuinely unusual. It builds printable cookbooks as PDFs with a cover page, table of contents and custom layouts, which nothing else here does properly. And it has an Alexa skill, so you can ask for a recipe and step through it hands free without touching anything.

Its minimum requirement is iOS 12.2, which means it still runs on phones most apps abandoned years ago. That is a deliberate kindness and worth noticing.

The migration story is its real advantage

This is the part I would most want if I were choosing.

Recipe Keeper’s listing names transfers from Living Cookbook, MasterCook, MacGourmet, BigOven, Cook’n, My Cookbook, My Recipe Book, Paprika, Pepperplate, OrganizEat and Recipe Box, among others.

If you have three hundred recipes trapped in an app that is dying or already dead, Recipe Keeper is the one most likely to take them. That solves a real and painful problem, and it is the exact failure mode that ends most recipe collections. Being the app everyone can move to is a genuine public service and I am not going to be sniffy about it.

Where Recipe Keeper is the better choice

Anyone in the house is on Windows or Android. AnyRecipe is iPhone and iPad only. This decides it outright.

You already have a big collection somewhere else. Nothing else imports from as many apps.

You want a proven track record. Thirty thousand ratings is evidence. AnyRecipe has a handful, and I would rather write that than dress the number up.

You want a printed cookbook. The PDF cookbook builder is a real feature that people genuinely want for family recipes, and we have nothing like it.

You have an old phone. iOS 12.2 support is unusually generous.

You want to pay once per platform rather than subscribe. Recipe Keeper is free to download with a purchase per platform.

Where AnyRecipe is the better choice

Your recipes come from Instagram and TikTok. This is why the app exists. Tap Share on a post and the recipe is pulled out of the caption with ingredients and steps separated. It also handles the case where a creator gates it behind “comment RECIPE and I’ll DM it”, by recognising that and telling you the keyword to comment. Recipe Keeper’s import is built for recipe websites, which is a different shape of problem. There is a longer piece on saving recipes out of social video. Note that Pestle does this too and is more established at it, so if this is your only requirement, compare those two rather than stopping here.

You want the shopping list to do arithmetic. Both group by aisle. AnyRecipe also merges quantities across everything you plan 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. Several good apps merge quantities, CookBook and Paprika among them, so the packet rounding is the narrow part rather than the merging itself.

You want no account at all. AnyRecipe syncs through your own private iCloud with no sign up and no password, which also means I cannot read your cookbook.

That is the honest extent of it. On breadth, Recipe Keeper wins comfortably.

How to choose in one line

If your household spans platforms, or you have a collection to rescue from another app, get Recipe Keeper.

If the specific thing that keeps failing is saving recipes out of reels and captions, try AnyRecipe free and see whether the import saves you the typing.

A note on switching

If you already have a library in Recipe Keeper, I would not encourage you to move it. It is a mature app and you would be trading breadth for a narrow advantage.

If you are undecided, do not migrate at all. Leave the old collection where it is, import new recipes into the other app for a month, and see which one you reach for. If it is the old one, you have lost nothing.

Other comparisons worth reading: Paprika is the other genuinely cross-platform option, Crouton is the most feature-complete on Apple platforms, Mela is the most elegant, Copy Me That is the cheapest paid tier in the category, and AnyList is the one to read 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. Recipe Keeper is on the App Store and at recipekeeperonline.com, and is a thoroughly sensible place to keep your recipes.