Self-Hosted Recipe Managers

Mealie, Tandoor, Grocy, KookBook — your cookbook on your own server, with import-from-URL, mobile UI, and HA hooks.

The recipe-collecting subset of Self-Hosted Personal Apps — gone deep. If you also want pantry / chores / shopping unified see Pantry Inventory & Grocy; for hosted closed-source apps see Hosted Recipe Apps; for the import engine that powers most of these see Recipe Import & Scrapers; for digitizing paper recipes see Recipe Digitization & OCR.

The big three (FOSS, all dockerized)

★ ★ Mealie — modern Vue / FastAPI recipe manager; the default in 2026. Excellent mobile UI, recipe-scrapers-powered URL import, OpenAI-assisted import, meal plans, shopping lists, multi-user households, Home Assistant integration. v1.x finally hit "boring & stable" status in 2025. AGPLv3.
- https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie
★ Tandoor Recipes — Django / Vue; heavier, more "kitchen ERP." Stronger meal-planning + shopping list logic, recipe scaling with proper unit conversion, ingredient supermarket categorization, multi-tenant spaces. AGPLv3. Pick over Mealie if meal planning is the thing.
- https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes
★ ★ Grocy — "ERP for your home" — pantry + recipes + chores + battery tracking + shopping. PHP. Recipes are functional but barebones; the magic is "I scanned the barcode coming in, the recipe knows it's there, the shopping list updates when I cook." MIT.
- https://github.com/grocy/grocy

KookBook — KDE / Linux-native recipe manager; Markdown files; no DB. For the "my recipes are text files" crowd.
Cooklang + Cookcli / CookLang Web — recipe-as-text DSL. .cook files in git, render anywhere. Surprisingly addictive once you commit.
- https://github.com/cooklang/cookcli
Cookielist — small free hosted; minimal feature set.
OpenEats — older Django app; mostly historical now.
Plant Eaters Manual — sunset; do not start here.
Chowdown — Jekyll-based; "recipes as a static site." Charming for blog-shaped recipe books.
- https://github.com/clarklab/chowdown

Mobile-first UX: Mealie ★ ★ > Tandoor > Grocy.
Meal planning depth: Tandoor ★ > Mealie > Grocy.
Pantry awareness: Grocy ★ ★ — nothing else is close.
Recipe import quality: Mealie ★ ★ (uses recipe-scrapers + OpenAI fallback) ≈ Tandoor.
Multi-user / family share: Mealie households (post-v1.4) ★, Tandoor spaces.
Recipe scaling math: Tandoor ★ — proper unit conversion engine.
Backup story: All Postgres / SQLite — trivial. Grocy is single SQLite file.
Home Assistant integration: Mealie ★ (community integration; mealplan card). Tandoor has a less-loved one. Grocy has the best HA integration of any of these (chores, stock, shopping list — all surfaceable on a dashboard).

v1 schema is stable; migrations from v0 are painful — start fresh on v1 if you can.
Run behind your reverse proxy with BASE_URL set, or mobile bookmarks break.
OPENAI_API_KEY enables one-click import for sites that block scrapers — pays for itself if you collect recipes from food blogs heavily.
The Android / iOS apps are PWA-shaped; "Add to Home Screen" works fine.
Backups: built-in zip backups, but also dump Postgres separately.

Spaces = tenants. One server, multiple households / friend groups.
"Mealplanner" is genuinely good; can auto-generate shopping list deltas vs. pantry.
Recipe import will fall back to GPT-readable extraction if the page lacks schema.org markup.
Memory-hungry compared to Mealie; budget 1 GB for a small instance.

Don't try to use Grocy purely for recipes — it's a pantry-first app.
Stock-aware recipes ("I have everything except parsley") is unique.
Barcode-driven workflow assumes you'll scan things in. If you won't, skip Grocy.
Userscripts for Open Food Facts barcode lookup save hours of typing.
See Pantry Inventory & Grocy for Grocy as a pantry / inventory tool.

Mealie, Tandoor, Grocy, KookBook, Cooklang, Chowdown — all free, FOSS, self-host only.
Tandoor offers a hosted plan at the project's sponsor link if you don't want to deploy.
Mealie has no official hosted offering; community providers exist.