Meal Planning Apps

Meal planning is the layer above recipe collection — picking what to cook this week, generating a shopping list, scaling for household size. For the recipe library underneath see Self-Hosted Recipe Managers and Hosted Recipe Apps; for shopping list as its own thing see Shopping List Apps; for nutrition-driven planning see Nutrition Tracking with Cronometer & MyFitnessPal; for the pantry layer see Pantry Inventory & Grocy.

Self-host (free, FOSS)

• ★ Tandoor Recipes — best meal-planning logic of any FOSS recipe app: drag recipes onto a week grid, auto-aggregate ingredients into a shopping list, deduct against pantry, scale per-meal independently. AGPLv3.
  • https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes
• ★ Mealie — meal planner is simpler than Tandoor's but plenty for a 1–2 person household. Drag recipe to a date, click "to shopping list."
• Grocy — meal-plan + stock-aware. Tells you "you have everything for tonight's meal except parsley" — nothing hosted matches this. PHP.

Hosted, recipe-driven (paid + free tiers)

• ★ Mealime — paid + free tier; very polished mobile UX; choose meals, get a shopping list grouped by aisle. Defaults to "weeknight 30-min meals." US-centric.
• Plan to Eat — paid (~$5/mo, ~$40/yr); subscription-only but generous trial; web + mobile; imports from any URL; strong "drag-recipe-to-day" UX. Indie company; sustainable.
• Real Plans — paid; opinionated about diet (paleo / Whole30 / GF baked in).
• PlateJoy (Hims-owned) — paid; questionnaire-driven; portion-tuned.
• Cook Smarts — paid (~$8/mo); curated weekly menus by Jess Dang; not really an app, more a recipe service.

Hosted, calorie-driven (where meal planning meets nutrition)

• ★ Eat This Much — paid + free; you input macros / calories, it builds a meal plan to hit them. Auto-generates grocery list. Different muscle than Mealime — calculator-flavored, not curation-flavored.
  • https://www.eatthismuch.com
• MealPrepPro — paid; macro-targeted weekly plans; iOS-first.
• Strongr Fastr — paid; bodybuilder-flavored; macros + grocery list.

Family / household-flavored

• ★ Mealime + AnyList combo — meal plan in Mealime, shared shopping list in AnyList; what a lot of US households actually run.
• Cozi Family — free + paid; chore-board + meal plan + shared calendar; strong with families with kids. See Shopping List Apps.
• Mealie households (post-v1.4) — Mealie now supports multi-user shopping lists per household.
• Tandoor "spaces" — shared meal plan + shopping among multiple users on one server.

Diet-driven plans

• Forks Plant-Based — whole-food plant-based weekly plans; paid + small free.
• Plant-Based on a Budget — free; Toni Okamoto's curated plant-based plans.
• Diet Doctor (keto / low-carb) — paid + free.
• Carb Manager (keto) — paid + free; meal-plan + tracker.
• See Diet-Specific Apps.

Pricing landscape (mid-2026)

What "good meal planning" means

• ★ Aisle-grouped shopping list. A flat list is useless in store; aisle / category grouping is the bare minimum. Mealime, Plan to Eat, Tandoor, Mealie all do this; Grocy does it best (you map your store's actual aisles).
• ★ Pantry-aware deduction. Real value unlock — only Grocy + Tandoor (with manual pantry) hit this.
• Scaling per-recipe in a plan. A 4-serving recipe split across 2 people is half a recipe. Tandoor handles it; Mealie hand-waves it.
• Recurring weekly templates. "Taco Tuesday every week." Plan to Eat and Tandoor support; Mealie via duplication.
• Leftovers logic. Best handled by stretching one cook across two slots; few apps model this directly.

Pick this if…

• You'll self-host: Tandoor (planning-first) or Mealie (recipe-first; planning is fine).
• Pantry-aware, OSS, you're committed: Grocy + Mealie / Tandoor.
• Hosted, mobile-first, US household: Mealime.
• Macro / calorie-driven plan: Eat This Much.
• Indie subscription you're OK paying: Plan to Eat.
• Diet-specific (keto / plant-based): see Diet-Specific Apps.