Plan to Eat vs Paprika: Planner or Recipe Box
Plan to Eat is a planner that stores recipes. Paprika is a recipe box that also plans. Pick on which half you actually use. Plan to Eat costs $49 a year forever and has the best weekly planner and shopping list in the category. Paprika costs about $35 once, works offline with no account, and never bills you again.
Over three years that is $147 against roughly $35. The question is whether the planner is worth the difference, and for a household that genuinely plans a week at a time, it often is.
A disclosure: we make Gratly, mentioned at the end. It sits between these two and is honest about losing to both at their strongest feature.
Plan to Eat pricing from plantoeat.com, Paprika from live store listings. Checked October 2026.
The short answer
| If this is you | Choose |
|---|---|
| You plan several days at once and shop one big list | Plan to Eat |
| You collect recipes and cook ad hoc | Paprika |
| You refuse subscriptions | Paprika |
| You want the best aisle-sorted combined shopping list | Plan to Eat |
| You want it to work with no account and no connection | Paprika |
| Android is in the household | Plan to Eat. Paprika has no Android app |
| You want to try before paying | Both, briefly. 14 days against a 50-recipe desktop trial |
Cost over time
| Plan to Eat | Paprika | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Subscription | One-time, per platform |
| Monthly | $5.95 | Not applicable |
| Yearly | $49 on the web, $54.99 via Apple | Not applicable |
| iOS | included | $4.99 |
| macOS | included | $29.99 |
| Windows | included | $29.99 |
| Android | included | Not available |
| Phone + desktop, year 1 | $49 | ~$35 |
| Phone + desktop, 3 years | ~$147 | ~$35 |
| Free tier | None, 14-day trial | None on iOS; desktop trial 50 recipes, no sync |
Note the Apple markup: Plan to Eat is $49 on their website and $54.99 through the App Store, because Apple's commission is passed on. Buy on the web.
Paprika's price covers every platform you buy, once. Plan to Eat's covers all your devices, every year.
Where Plan to Eat wins
The planner, decisively. Drag recipes onto a calendar and the shopping list assembles itself across the whole week, combining quantities and sorting by aisle. Paprika has a planner; Plan to Eat has spent a decade making its planner the product.
The shopping list. It handles the genuinely hard parts: merging the same ingredient across three recipes, keeping units coherent, remembering staples. This is the reason people pay yearly and keep paying.
It covers Android. Paprika does not exist there at all.
Terms you would accept from a friend. A 14-day trial with no card, a 60-day refund policy, and the yearly plan does not auto-renew unless you turn it on. That is a markedly more honest subscription than the category norm.
Customer-funded. No ads, no data selling, no appliance strategy.
Where Paprika wins
You pay once. About $35 for a phone and a laptop, then nothing, ever. Against $49 a year the gap compounds quickly.
No account, fully offline. Recipes live on your device and work with no connection. Nothing sits on a company server, and nothing stops working if you stop paying. With Plan to Eat, a lapsed subscription means losing access to the tool.
The recipe box is better. Import quality, organisation, search and scaling are all stronger. Paprika has seen more recipe sites than almost anything else in this category.
A usable trial. Fifty recipes with no time limit on desktop, against Plan to Eat's 14 days.
It will still work in ten years. A local-first app you own is a different kind of promise from a hosted subscription.
The honest framing nobody selling either will give you
These two are not really competitors. They are halves.
If your recipes are scattered and uncollected, a planner will not fix that. You will pay $49, face an empty calendar, and discover the work is getting recipes in. Solve collecting first.
If you have 300 recipes in good order and still eat chaotically, a better recipe box will not fix that either. The planner is the missing piece and Plan to Eat is worth the money.
Diagnose which problem you actually have before paying for either.
How to choose
- You plan weekly and shop once: Plan to Eat. Nothing here matches its combined list.
- You cook from a collection, when the mood takes you: Paprika.
- You never want a recurring bill: Paprika, or a one-time Lifetime plan elsewhere.
- Android in the house: Plan to Eat, since Paprika has no Android app.
- You want offline and no account: Paprika.
- You want both halves and will pay once: Paprika covers both adequately. Plan to Eat does not try to be a recipe box.
- Your recipes are not collected yet: fix that first, with a free clipper, then revisit.
The third option, if this week is all you plan
Ours, and scoped honestly. Many people do not need multi-week planning at all. Gratly plans this week free, adds a recipe's ingredients to a shopping list free, and is built around one-click clipping from recipe sites on Chrome, Edge and Brave, plus a web app that works on Android.
Free includes 10 active recipes, cook mode with step timers, serving scaling, unit switching, printing and export to JSON or CSV. Planning weeks ahead and one merged list for the whole week are paid, at $5.99 a month or $99 once for Lifetime.
Where it loses to both: the planner is shallower than Plan to Eat's and the recipe box is less mature than Paprika's. There is no mobile app yet. If multi-week planning with a smart aggregated list is the job, Plan to Eat is better and we would rather say so than sell around it.
FAQ
Plan to Eat or Paprika, which should I choose? Plan to Eat if you plan several days at once and want one aisle-sorted combined shopping list. Paprika if you mainly collect and cook recipes, want to pay once, and value offline use with no account.
Which is cheaper? Paprika, substantially over time. About $35 once for a phone and a desktop, against $49 a year for Plan to Eat. Three years is roughly $35 against $147.
Does Plan to Eat have a free version? No. There is a 14-day trial with no credit card required, then $5.95 a month or $49 a year. It does have a 60-day refund policy, and the yearly plan does not auto-renew unless you enable it.
Does Paprika work on Android? No. Paprika covers iOS, macOS and Windows. Plan to Eat covers Android, which is one of its practical advantages.
What happens to my recipes if I stop paying Plan to Eat? You lose access to the tool, so export before cancelling. With Paprika, recipes are stored locally on your device and keep working, since there is nothing to cancel.
Which has the better recipe import? Paprika. It has the longer track record and handles awkward recipe pages more reliably. Plan to Eat's clipper works but the planner is where its effort has gone.
Can I use both? Yes, and some people do: Paprika as the recipe box and Plan to Eat for the weekly plan. It is roughly $84 in year one, so only worth it if you genuinely use both halves heavily.
Start with the half you are missing
If your recipes are still spread across bookmarks and screenshots, that is the problem to solve first. Add Gratly to Chrome for free, clip the ten you actually cook, then decide whether you need a dedicated planner on top.
Related: Plan to Eat alternatives, Paprika alternatives, a grocery list from your meal plan, and weekly meal planning for families.