Looking for a Samsung Food Alternative? An Honest Comparison

I make AnyRecipe, so weigh this accordingly.

Samsung Food is the app formerly known as Whisk, acquired by Samsung and relaunched under its name. The App Store listing still traces back to a 2016 release, so despite the newer branding there is a decade of work underneath it.

It is also, on features per pound, the most generous free app in this whole comparison series. That is the honest headline.

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

The numbers, mine included

Samsung Food: 4.78 stars from around 6,300 ratings. Shipping since July 2016. iPhone, iPad and web. Requires iOS 15.

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

One thing I would want to know as a buyer, and which I would rather point out than have you discover later: the last App Store update was in May 2026, about four months before I wrote this. That is not alarming on its own and the app is plainly still operating, but it is a slower cadence than most of the others here, and worth knowing before you move years of collecting into anything.

The iOS line matters too. Samsung Food runs on iOS 15, so most working iPhones can install it. Mine needs iOS 26.

What Samsung Food does

The free tier is unusually deep.

Over 240,000 public recipes, including 124,000 with guided steps, searchable by ingredient across 42,000 recognised products in 26 languages, filterable by meal type, cook time, cuisine and fourteen diets.

Saves any recipe from any website and lets you edit it into your own version.

Meal planning and shared shopping lists, with lists you can share with family.

Grocery delivery through 23 integrated retailers across four regions.

Nutrition information and health scores on more than 218,000 recipes.

Communities. Over 5,400 public food communities with millions of members, Jamie Oliver among them.

The paid Samsung Food+ tier adds AI-personalised weekly meal plans, ingredient swapping, a step-by-step Smart Cooking mode, pantry management and nutrition tracking.

That is a lot of app for nothing, and if breadth is what you are after, this is the wrong page to be reading.

Where we actually differ

It is a service, and mine is not. Samsung Food is account-based and its value comes from the network: shared lists, communities, retailer integrations, a searchable public library. That design requires a company holding your data, and holding everyone else’s, because that is what makes the shared parts work.

AnyRecipe has no account and syncs through your own private iCloud. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to lose access to, and nothing for me to read. It also means no community, no public library, and no grocery delivery, because all of those need exactly the thing I gave up.

Which of those you want is a real question, and for a lot of people the answer is the service.

Shopping list arithmetic. Both apps build a list from a plan. What I have not found elsewhere is the rounding: the week needs 340g, the shop sells 500g bags, and the list asks for the bag. Merging quantities is common now, including here. The rounding is the narrow part.

Company size, cutting both ways. Samsung is not going to vanish, which is genuine reassurance. Samsung also acquired and rebranded a product once already, and large companies discontinue things. I am one person, which is a different risk of the same kind. Neither of us is a safe bet in the way a text file is, which is why I would ask any app how you get your recipes back out before you commit.

Where Samsung Food is straightforwardly ahead

The free tier, by a distance. Recipe library, meal planning, shared lists and nutrition data at no cost is more than most paid apps offer.

The recipe discovery. A quarter of a million recipes is a different product from an empty cookbook.

Grocery delivery, web access, iOS 15 support, and 6,300 ratings against my 2.

Who should pick which

Stay with Samsung Food if you use the library, the communities or the delivery integrations, if you want a serious free tier, if you want it on the web, or if your phone cannot run iOS 26.

Look at AnyRecipe if you already know what you want to cook, you would rather not have an account, you want your recipes in your own iCloud rather than a company’s, or the packet rounding solves something that annoys you weekly.

Check the update cadence either way. Four months is not abandonment, and I would still rather you looked at the App Store listing yourself than took my word for it.

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, BigOven is the longest running, AnyList is the one for shopping together, and Mela is the most elegant.

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. Samsung Food is on the App Store and at samsungfood.com, and remains the most generous free option in the category.