Product & apps
WFD vs Paprika: deciding vs organising
Paprika organises recipes you've already chosen; What's For Dinner?! (WFD) gets the household to agree on dinner in the first place. If the nightly 'what do you want?' is the problem, here's why organising doesn't solve it.
Disclosure first: we make What's For Dinner?! (WFD). WFD and Paprika get compared a lot, but they start from opposite ends of the same evening: Paprika starts after dinner has been decided; WFD exists to make that decision happen. And in most households, the deciding, not the filing, is the hard part. Paprika's facts below come from its own site, store listing and support pages, fetched on 7 August 2026; the conclusions are our opinion.
Where Paprika stops
Paprika is a recipe filing cabinet. It clips recipes from websites, files them, scales them, and puts them on a calendar with a grocery list. Everything it does assumes the decision is already made: you know what you're cooking, and it helps you store and execute it.
That's where it stops short of the core problem. Nothing in it answers "what does everyone actually want to eat tonight?" It's a single-cook tool: its own support pages describe sharing as everyone logging into the same account, with no shared say, no way for a partner or kids to weigh in, and no mechanism for agreeing. Two hundred perfectly filed recipes still leave you at the fridge door, asking the same nightly question out loud.
Where WFD starts
What's For Dinner?! (WFD) starts at the decision. Everyone in the household, partner, kids, housemates, swipes on meals on their own phone. When two people love the same meal, it's a match, and that's dinner chosen without anyone proposing or vetoing out loud. Matches build the weekly plan automatically, and the plan builds a shopping list that adapts when the week changes.
So the planning and shopping a filing tool helps with still happen. WFD builds them for you, from decisions the whole household actually made, and then hands you a planner that does the rest of the job: swap any meal with search, move meals between nights, lock the ones you're sure of, skip a night you won't cook, scale servings, shop by UK supermarket aisle with pack-size maths, cook step by step with timers. A week inside it is here. And it doesn't wait for anyone: if only one of you has swiped, the plan builds from that person's likes, and the other's matches take priority once they get round to it (how that works).
Every meal in WFD is a real dish a person has checked before it ships, so the shopping list it builds is one you can trust. Here's more on what WFD is for.
Side by side
| What's For Dinner?! (WFD) | Paprika | |
|---|---|---|
| Decides dinner with you | Yes: everyone swipes, a mutual match makes the decision | No: you decide first, it files the result |
| Everyone gets a real say | Yes: each household member swipes on their own phone | No: single-cook tool, shared by logging into one account |
| Works if someone forgets to swipe | Yes: the plan builds from whoever swiped | Not applicable: one person was always doing it |
| Weekly plan | Generated from matches, then editable: swap, move, lock, skip a night | Manual: a calendar you fill yourself |
| Shopping list | Auto-built from the plan; UK aisles, pack sizes, per-meal check-off, servings scaling | From recipes you've already picked |
| Recipe import | No: human-checked catalogue | Yes: clip, file, scale |
| Ends the nightly "what do you want?" | Yes: that's the whole point | No: that still happens before you open it |
The bottom line
Paprika organises decisions you've already made; What's For Dinner?! (WFD) makes the decision with you. If dinner in your house is genuinely already decided every night, a filing tool will keep the recipes tidy. If the deciding is the hard part, the asking, the "I don't mind", the nightly stand-off, no amount of organising solves it. That's the problem WFD was built to end, and here's how it works. If Paprika changes anything described above, tell us and this post gets corrected.