WFD vs Paprika: deciding vs organising

Disclosure: 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.

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 — no shared say, no way for a partner or kids to weigh in, 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 just builds them for you, from decisions the whole household actually made. (WFD isn't a recipe archive and isn't trying to be one; here's what it is and isn't 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
Weekly plan	Yes — built automatically from matches	Manual — a calendar you fill yourself
Shopping list	Yes — auto-built from the plan, adapts when the week changes	From recipes you've already picked
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.