Product & apps
The best apps for deciding what to eat, honestly compared (2026)
WFD, Mealime, Paprika, Samsung Food and a shared note, compared for the real problem: deciding. Which app is best for couples, families and recipe collectors.
First, a disclosure you should have: we make What's For Dinner?! (WFD), one of the apps below. So we've done this comparison the only way it's worth doing — factually, feature by feature, matching each app to the problem it's actually built for. Which one fits depends entirely on which problem you have.
Because "meal planning app" covers at least three different problems:
- Deciding — the nightly "what do you want?" / "I don't mind" loop, multiplied by everyone at your table.
- Organising — collecting recipes, filing them, scaling them, shopping from them.
- Discovering — finding new recipes you wouldn't have thought of.
Most apps are built for problems 2 and 3 and quietly assume problem 1 is already solved — that one person knows what everyone will eat and just needs help executing. If that's your household, brilliant, you have great options below. If the deciding itself is the fight, that's the gap WFD was built for.
The comparison
| What's For Dinner?! (WFD) | Mealime | Paprika | Plan to Eat | Samsung Food | A shared note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Households deciding together | One cook planning quickly | Recipe collectors | "The planner", in its own words | Recipe savers & discoverers | Whatever you make it |
| How dinner gets chosen | Everyone swipes; a mutual match decides | You pick from generated plans | You pick from your collection | The planner picks from the recipe book | You pick from saved recipes | Someone types it |
| Multiple people get a real say | Yes — every household member swipes on their own phone | Not really — one plan, one account drives it | No — single-cook tool | No — one shared login; tags to note who wants what | Partially — you can share recipes and lists | Only if everyone edits |
| Works if someone forgets to take part | Yes — the plan builds from whoever swiped | Yes, one person was always planning | Yes, same | Yes, same | Yes, same | Yes, until nobody updates it |
| Weekly plan | Generated from matches, then editable: swap, move, lock, skip a night | Yes, generated from preferences | Yes, manual calendar | Yes, drag-and-drop calendar | Yes, manual planner | Manual |
| Shopping list | Auto-built from the plan; UK aisles, pack sizes, per-meal check-off, servings scaling | Yes, from the plan | Yes, from recipes | Yes, from the plan; store-specific lists | Yes, from recipes | Manual |
| Cook mode | Step by step, with step titles and timers | Yes, step by step | Recipe view | "Start Cooking" step by step | Recipe view | No |
| Recipe import/management | No — a human-checked catalogue, not a recipe manager | Limited | Yes — clip, file, scale | Yes — web clipper and manual entry | Yes, saves from the web | No |
| Nutrition | Calories and macros per serving, from published data | Some (Pro) | Basic | Nutrition and macro tracking listed | Yes | No |
| Price | Free: swiping, matching, the weekly plan; Full Access £2.99/month or £24.99/year for up to six people, 3-day free trial | Free, optional Pro | Paid app (per platform) | $5.95/month or $49/year; £49.99/year on the UK App Store | Free, ad supported | Free |
| Platforms | iPhone, Android | iPhone, Android | iPhone, Android, desktop | iPhone, Android, web | iPhone, Android, web | Anywhere |
Which problem each app fits
Deciding together — couples, families, house-shares: What's For Dinner?! (WFD). This is the one problem where we think WFD is genuinely the strongest option, because it's the only app here where two or more people each swipe on meals and a mutual match makes the decision. Nobody proposes, nobody vetoes at the table, and "I don't mind" stops being an answer because the app already knows what you both said yes to. Matches build the weekly plan, the plan builds the shopping list, and the planning is the full job: swap, move and lock meals, scale servings, shop by aisle, cook step by step (a week inside it). It does not need everyone to take part, either: the plan builds from whoever has swiped, so a partner who forgets blocks nothing (how that works). If you cook for yourself and never argue about dinner, it still works as a solo planner, but the apps below are also worth a look.
One busy cook who wants speed: Mealime. Mealime generates a week of meals from one person's preferences, with a shopping list and step-by-step cooking instructions. What it doesn't do is share the deciding — the household eats what the planner picked.
The household's planner, with a recipe hoard: Plan to Eat. Plan to Eat's own listing says it is "designed with the planner in mind", and its advice to families is to share one login. It clips recipes from the web, drags them onto a calendar and builds a grocery list, and it does all that well. What it does not do, on any page we read, is ask the rest of the house what they want. The full comparison, with its sources.
Recipe collectors: Paprika. If your problem is two hundred bookmarked recipes across nine websites, Paprika is built as a recipe filing cabinet: clip, scale, organise, shop. It assumes you already know what you want to cook — it organises decisions, it doesn't make them. Deciding vs organising is the whole difference, and we've written up the full head-to-head.
Discovering and saving recipes: Samsung Food. Web-clipping, a recipe community, and sharing of recipes and lists. Closest of the big apps to "household" features, but the model is still save-then-pick, not swipe-and-match.
The free-and-instant option: a shared note. If your household just needs a list of "meals we both like" pinned somewhere, a shared note costs nothing and syncs everywhere. Its limits are the reasons apps exist: nothing updates the shopping list when the plan changes, nothing surfaces new ideas, and someone still has to do the deciding — which is usually how the note stops being used.
The short version
- The deciding is the fight → WFD (that's the couples, families and house-share problem)
- One cook, wants speed → Mealime
- One planner with a recipe hoard → Plan to Eat
- Recipe hoard needs a home → Paprika
- Wants to find and save recipes → Samsung Food
- Just needs a pinboard → shared note
What's For Dinner?! (WFD) is the swipe-to-match dinner-decision and meal-planning app for couples, families and households, free to download on iPhone and Android and made in the UK. If the nightly question is the thing you're trying to kill, that's exactly what it's for.