I compared meal planning apps for 3 months and one came out way ahead

I tried out Mealboard and Paprika for a full 3 months each, thinking they'd be pretty similar. Paprika won hard for me. The ingredient scaling feature on Paprika is just way more solid - I meal prep for 4 people and it never messes up the amounts. Mealboard would sometimes double the garlic wrong or miss scaling a weird measurement like 1/3 cup. Also Paprika's grocery list tool lets me check off items by aisle which saves me like 15 minutes at the store. The only downside was Paprika costs like $5 but Mealboard was free. Has anyone else tried switching apps and found a clear winner for budgeting time at the grocery store?

2 comments

2 Comments

grantw321mo ago

Oh man, I gotta say you're onto something but I think you missed the biggest difference between those two. Nobody talks about how Paprika handles recipe imports from random blogs. Mealboard would grab the ingredients fine but then it left out half the instructions or scrambled the steps. I had one recipe that showed the oven temperature as part of the garnish list, it was a total mess. Paprika just cleaned everything up and put it in order, like it knew what was important and what was just blog filler. That alone made the 5 bucks worth it for me. Plus I agree with you on the scaling thing, my wife and I cook for a big family too and getting garlic amounts wrong ruins a whole batch of pasta sauce.

xenaf511mo ago

Wait hold on, @grantw32, the oven temp got listed as a garnish? That's absolutely wild! I thought I'd seen it all with recipe imports but that takes the cake. I honestly never ran into that specific problem with Mealboard, but now I'm wondering if I just got lucky or if I was somehow missing those disasters. The blog filler thing is so true though, some of those recipe sites have four paragraphs of someone's life story before you even get to the ingredients list. Paprika really does just cut through all that noise like a hot knife through butter, doesn't it?