You didn't mention that Paprika also has the timer feature. You just touch the blue number in the directions and it starts the timer. Also, if you touch the ingredient listed and/or the direction, it will cross it out so you know where you left off, making it easy to see what you still need and what is next.
Not sure if this is mentioned below, but one thing I like about Paprika (which Melo doesn't have but looks like Pestle does) is the ability to cross off items from your ingredient list to show what you have left to prep before cooking. This (for me) is a big deal as I like to 'mise en place' when I am cooking. I have been using Paprika since it came out but am looking into switching to Pestle - I like the walkthrough option and the display. The price of about $2 a month seems great as long as they are offering support in terms of fixing bugs / updates.
I’ve been a paprika user on android for years. I just got an iPad so I’m playing around with mela and pestle exploring my options. I noticed pestle is very liberal with rounding up/down when using the convert function which I’m not a fan of. It seems they do this for purely cosmetic reasons. Rounding up to 1 cup looks a lot better in the app than 0.85 cup but could totally throw off a recipe. I also had an issue where pestle converted 4kg to 81lbs. Pestle also highlights random words (for, or, in, reduce, sauce in ‘sauce pan’ etc) in the instructions and associates them with ingredients. It will also falter if the recipe calls for the same ingredient twice in the same recipe, especially if it’s a different amount each time. I really wanted to like Pestle but I hate subscriptions, the lifetime cost is almost 10x the other two contenders, and the features are just not reliable enough to trust.
Excellent review of recipe apps! In the Paprika app, you can check off ingredients instead of directions. I find this type of ingredient checklist better than swiping through directions. I love that Paprika runs on everything; even the Apple Watch has an app. I have thousands of recipes, and I use Categories and Menus - this makes repeating Thanksgiving meal planning easy. I keep meal notes in the app to improve year to year. Accessing recipes, regardless of an internet connection, is a huge plus from the beginning.
For some reason you mentioned the timer function in Pestle but not in Paprika. Paprika can create multiple timers from the words in the text. Anywhere that mentions time for anything you just click on the words and it pops up with a timer creation dialogue. Plus in Paprika in the Pantry lists you can add in expiry dates for items in your Pantry so you know when they need to be used up by etc...
Another very important function (For me at least) is that with Paprika you can create an account and as long as it is the same account on each device it will sync automatically. I am even going to have my girlfriend purchase it on her iPad / iPhone and then use my account so we are in sync for meals and shopping for ingredients etc...
I've been a casual Paprika user for years and have a few hundred recipes. I agree the UI is lacking. I hadn't heard of Pestle or Mela and I do love their cleaner, more streamlined UI, especially the focus settings. I think it really comes down to how you approach cooking. I think Paprika is excellent for family cooking and busy folks having to schedule and prepare food every day. The meal planning and menu functions for Paprika really cater well to daily cooking. I can see, however, where Pestle or Mela would appeal to more casual cooks with less volume or need for extra planning. They would be great digital cookbooks for my post college kids that are newer to cooking and need the focus of the step by step approach. I do hope Paprika upgrades their UI in the future. It's very dated and would feel nice to have some more aesthetic styling. Other than that, it's a godsend for managing family meal planning.
I will continue to use the paid version of Paprika (5$) and the free version of Pestle until Pestle can add the monthly calendar view for meal planning, the grocery list organized by section (dairy, etc), etc. As of now I just use the Paprika app (primary) and just add the recipe(s) I want to cook for that day into Pestle and use simultaneously while cooking (Paprika on my Ipad and Pestle on Iphone or vice versa). This way I get the best of both and still only pay for one (5$).
very good review, I was interested in Mela, but now I may go for Pestle. The was one thing missing from the review though, which was why I cam here, I was looking to see how Mela (or the others) work when importing recipes from a cook book, magazine or hand written old family recipes. I know Mela has a scan function, but i was hoping to see it in action. Now that Pestle is on my radar, I'll need to check there also. While i don't have an iPad myself my parents do, and I'd love to set them up with something like these... but as you can guess recipes come from everywhere. so seeing how they can all be integrated in to one location would be great.
You had me w/Pestle until the end with the "sharing info" which isn't just sharing but also about exporting. What if you use these for a few years and end up with a ton of recipes, and then the app is abandoned or you just find something better. At least Mela has an export to PDF function, which can then probably be scraped to put into other apps down the line, or just viewed on an Android device or elsewhere. Even better would be some mass export option to get everything out at once. I can see why the devs would want to keep you locked in, but people really should think about this when investing time in any data management apps, like recipe managers or any notes app or similar.
From a casual user perspective, I can see how you came to your conclusions. But I've been a huge fan of this genre of software since it first came about. Many of the newer players, like Pestle, do look nice and refreshing, but because they're new, the devs generally haven't had time to incorporate all the features of a really good recipe organizer. Rather than make accusations, I'll give you a good example. I have thousands of recipes in my recipe organizer apps and for the most part I want each recipe formatted the same way. With Pestle (which got my attention recently) you just can't have this uniformity...or at least not until the dev thinks it is important enough to include. Let's take servings - if I download a dozen recipes from various cooking sites, the captured serving may be 4, 4.0, Servings 4, 4 Servings, Yield: 4, Yield: 4 Servings...and the mess goes on. Pestle has absolutely no way to make the serving size what the "USER" wants...it just imports what the site has and that's it. What's worse...it won't let me change this to something uniform, which ALL the other top recipe organizers do. Multiply this problem times several, as it does the same thing for many other fields in the UI. I'm sure that Pestle will eventually be revamped to solve these issues, but for now, this...and several other glaring issues, keep me from making it my daily driver. As much as I've grown tired of the antiquated UI of Paprika, it's still the most functional of them all. Second (for me) is AnyList.
My wife has been using Paprika for about a decade and has close to 10,000 recipes stored. When I showed her the step-by-step that Pestle shows when you start cooking she was not pleased. She is a heavy multitasker in the kitchen and loosing her view of the entire process at once was seen as a hinderance.
You can view the normal recipe without pressing start cooking and you can activate the hands free mode to go to the next step by saying "Next" or "back"
@@klasfdj yes, but on the iPhone version you can't have the ingredients and the instructions on the screen at the same time (as you can with Paprika). Although you can with the iPad version.
I’m curious how much testing you did of the three apps for recipe importing. Some sites use great markup that’s easily parsed. Some sites, less so. It’s easy enough to parse out the recipe from clean markup, especially if the recipe schema is used. So where the rubber meets the road, for me, is getting a good capture from those sites where the markup is outdated, crufty, or just badly formed. I’ve had pretty good results from Paprika, but often enough need to clean up, or even manually copy/paste and format myself. I’m very curious if the other two apps handle bad markup better.
Yeah there's this one site that Paprika can't deal with, and they haven't improved it even when I told them about it. If you've got a recipe parser, how hard could it be to tweak for a specific site, especially compared to actually developing other aspects of the app functionality or UI which would seem way harder.
Paprika has pantry…a very nice feature because when u hit the grocery list button it only has checked off the items you dont have based on what you have already listed in the pantry.
Really good job in the review. The only thing I would want to know is what the paprika iPhone app looks like for grocery shopping since I would be using an iPhone at the grocery store.
Sorry, but you have forgotten the most important thing… Organisation!! Which apps work with folders? Subfolders? Tags? Subtags? Not everyone has one recipe like you, I’ve got thousands!
Well didn't know pestle only allows a few recipes to be saved damnit. At least they have a pay once option, but it's $40. I only need the recipe saver so that feels a bit steep. Wish they split up the features and priced them separately. Might try other options first, but I will never pay a subscription for an app that only needs minor bug fixes here and there.
I'm currently looking for a new recipe app. I have a grocery app that I love, but it's absolutely terrible for managing recipes - you have to type them all in by hand. The main thing I *LOVE* about the grocery app is that you can use geo-fencing to set up different stores that you do your grocery shopping in and it will "remember" the order you got items in the store based upon prior trips and sort the list in that order. I saw on the screen that Paprika had a "sort by" option (it was set to "aisle" in the screen), but I'm curious: what other sorting options are available on the grocery list? What I'm looking for is an app that will sort the grocery list based upon the order I pick things up in the store, as well as an app that will allow me to take pictures of recipes to import them into the app (looking to retire stacks of recipe cards and copies of recipes from cookbooks and magazines). Will any of these apps do all of these things?
which do you prefer for someone who wants to use recipes from my own extensive library of hardcover cookbooks? ideally i would like to be able to enter these and grow my own personal cataloge over time with the best recipes from these great sources as well as the occassional stuff from websites and youtube etc.The alternative is to write them into a moleskin notebook as i go through them ,not ideal. So put another way i want to have digital access to my The French Laundry's chicken stock recipe ( not some cooking websites recipe) or Hestan Blumenthals scrambled eggs not just the sites scrambled eggs. Thanks
Crouton is designed very similarly to Mela, so there's not much difference there. The 3 big things I see missing from Crouton and Mela when compared to Paprika are the following: 1. The organized Grocery list. Having this information sorted by "aisle" is extremely helpful. 2. An in-app browser. This makes it WAY easier to add multiple recipes at a time from a single site 3. Pantry - None of these apps except for Paprika have a way to track everything that's at home today. Spices, herbs, dry goods (rice, pasta, etc). It's an oft-overlooked feature that should really just be part of any recipe management app and it's one that keeps me currently from switching over to these newer apps. I am a sucker for cleaner UIs so that's why I started looking but these things are dealbreakers at the moment.
Awesome video, my friend. I have been using Paprika for such a long time but I will give the other apps a try as well. Could you tell me what software are you using to showcase the screen of your device? Is that an iOS emulator? Thank you.
missed opportunity for a “where’s the beef?” reference 😂🤷♀️also, mela is fully featured for up to 10 recipes…not sure if this is new since this video was posted but worth mentioning
Dear Anybody -- I need a simple recipe manager (very simple) (just the text file is fine) that will allow me to click a button (or whatever) to get a random recipe. ?
Seems to be more about "pretty" it sounds like. Pestle you have to "touch" too much...I am cooking, I don't want to keep touching the app. Plus it is only apple...so it sucks BAD.
This review was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for taking the time to put this together!
You didn't mention that Paprika also has the timer feature. You just touch the blue number in the directions and it starts the timer. Also, if you touch the ingredient listed and/or the direction, it will cross it out so you know where you left off, making it easy to see what you still need and what is next.
Not sure if this is mentioned below, but one thing I like about Paprika (which Melo doesn't have but looks like Pestle does) is the ability to cross off items from your ingredient list to show what you have left to prep before cooking. This (for me) is a big deal as I like to 'mise en place' when I am cooking.
I have been using Paprika since it came out but am looking into switching to Pestle - I like the walkthrough option and the display. The price of about $2 a month seems great as long as they are offering support in terms of fixing bugs / updates.
Mela has the option to check off the ingredients as you go. I noticed quite a few things he missed. Mela is free to use for up to 10 recipes.
I’ve been a paprika user on android for years. I just got an iPad so I’m playing around with mela and pestle exploring my options. I noticed pestle is very liberal with rounding up/down when using the convert function which I’m not a fan of. It seems they do this for purely cosmetic reasons. Rounding up to 1 cup looks a lot better in the app than 0.85 cup but could totally throw off a recipe. I also had an issue where pestle converted 4kg to 81lbs. Pestle also highlights random words (for, or, in, reduce, sauce in ‘sauce pan’ etc) in the instructions and associates them with ingredients. It will also falter if the recipe calls for the same ingredient twice in the same recipe, especially if it’s a different amount each time.
I really wanted to like Pestle but I hate subscriptions, the lifetime cost is almost 10x the other two contenders, and the features are just not reliable enough to trust.
Excellent review of recipe apps! In the Paprika app, you can check off ingredients instead of directions. I find this type of ingredient checklist better than swiping through directions. I love that Paprika runs on everything; even the Apple Watch has an app. I have thousands of recipes, and I use Categories and Menus - this makes repeating Thanksgiving meal planning easy. I keep meal notes in the app to improve year to year. Accessing recipes, regardless of an internet connection, is a huge plus from the beginning.
CookList is another app I’ve been using and it’s amazing that shows you recipes based on what you already have in your pantry.
For some reason you mentioned the timer function in Pestle but not in Paprika. Paprika can create multiple timers from the words in the text. Anywhere that mentions time for anything you just click on the words and it pops up with a timer creation dialogue. Plus in Paprika in the Pantry lists you can add in expiry dates for items in your Pantry so you know when they need to be used up by etc...
Another very important function (For me at least) is that with Paprika you can create an account and as long as it is the same account on each device it will sync automatically. I am even going to have my girlfriend purchase it on her iPad / iPhone and then use my account so we are in sync for meals and shopping for ingredients etc...
I've been a casual Paprika user for years and have a few hundred recipes. I agree the UI is lacking. I hadn't heard of Pestle or Mela and I do love their cleaner, more streamlined UI, especially the focus settings. I think it really comes down to how you approach cooking. I think Paprika is excellent for family cooking and busy folks having to schedule and prepare food every day. The meal planning and menu functions for Paprika really cater well to daily cooking. I can see, however, where Pestle or Mela would appeal to more casual cooks with less volume or need for extra planning. They would be great digital cookbooks for my post college kids that are newer to cooking and need the focus of the step by step approach.
I do hope Paprika upgrades their UI in the future. It's very dated and would feel nice to have some more aesthetic styling. Other than that, it's a godsend for managing family meal planning.
Umami is similar to Paprika, except with a more modern UI and better family sharing.
Would love to know what your thoughts on preppie are?
I will continue to use the paid version of Paprika (5$) and the free version of Pestle until Pestle can add the monthly calendar view for meal planning, the grocery list organized by section (dairy, etc), etc. As of now I just use the Paprika app (primary) and just add the recipe(s) I want to cook for that day into Pestle and use simultaneously while cooking (Paprika on my Ipad and Pestle on Iphone or vice versa). This way I get the best of both and still only pay for one (5$).
very good review, I was interested in Mela, but now I may go for Pestle.
The was one thing missing from the review though, which was why I cam here, I was looking to see how Mela (or the others) work when importing recipes from a cook book, magazine or hand written old family recipes.
I know Mela has a scan function, but i was hoping to see it in action. Now that Pestle is on my radar, I'll need to check there also.
While i don't have an iPad myself my parents do, and I'd love to set them up with something like these... but as you can guess recipes come from everywhere. so seeing how they can all be integrated in to one location would be great.
Crouton is another option which I have started using. Also has the recipe to ingredient link and good design.
You had me w/Pestle until the end with the "sharing info" which isn't just sharing but also about exporting. What if you use these for a few years and end up with a ton of recipes, and then the app is abandoned or you just find something better. At least Mela has an export to PDF function, which can then probably be scraped to put into other apps down the line, or just viewed on an Android device or elsewhere. Even better would be some mass export option to get everything out at once. I can see why the devs would want to keep you locked in, but people really should think about this when investing time in any data management apps, like recipe managers or any notes app or similar.
Then just don’t find a better app
From a casual user perspective, I can see how you came to your conclusions. But I've been a huge fan of this genre of software since it first came about. Many of the newer players, like Pestle, do look nice and refreshing, but because they're new, the devs generally haven't had time to incorporate all the features of a really good recipe organizer. Rather than make accusations, I'll give you a good example.
I have thousands of recipes in my recipe organizer apps and for the most part I want each recipe formatted the same way. With Pestle (which got my attention recently) you just can't have this uniformity...or at least not until the dev thinks it is important enough to include. Let's take servings - if I download a dozen recipes from various cooking sites, the captured serving may be 4, 4.0, Servings 4, 4 Servings, Yield: 4, Yield: 4 Servings...and the mess goes on. Pestle has absolutely no way to make the serving size what the "USER" wants...it just imports what the site has and that's it. What's worse...it won't let me change this to something uniform, which ALL the other top recipe organizers do. Multiply this problem times several, as it does the same thing for many other fields in the UI.
I'm sure that Pestle will eventually be revamped to solve these issues, but for now, this...and several other glaring issues, keep me from making it my daily driver. As much as I've grown tired of the antiquated UI of Paprika, it's still the most functional of them all. Second (for me) is AnyList.
So Paprika works, that's all I need to know. thanks!
Mela was the only one that's really stuck with me.
My wife has been using Paprika for about a decade and has close to 10,000 recipes stored. When I showed her the step-by-step that Pestle shows when you start cooking she was not pleased. She is a heavy multitasker in the kitchen and loosing her view of the entire process at once was seen as a hinderance.
You can view the normal recipe without pressing start cooking and you can activate the hands free mode to go to the next step by saying "Next" or "back"
@@klasfdj yes, but on the iPhone version you can't have the ingredients and the instructions on the screen at the same time (as you can with Paprika). Although you can with the iPad version.
I’m curious how much testing you did of the three apps for recipe importing. Some sites use great markup that’s easily parsed. Some sites, less so. It’s easy enough to parse out the recipe from clean markup, especially if the recipe schema is used. So where the rubber meets the road, for me, is getting a good capture from those sites where the markup is outdated, crufty, or just badly formed. I’ve had pretty good results from Paprika, but often enough need to clean up, or even manually copy/paste and format myself. I’m very curious if the other two apps handle bad markup better.
have you tested this with the either 2 apps?
Yeah there's this one site that Paprika can't deal with, and they haven't improved it even when I told them about it. If you've got a recipe parser, how hard could it be to tweak for a specific site, especially compared to actually developing other aspects of the app functionality or UI which would seem way harder.
Paprika has pantry…a very nice feature because when u hit the grocery list button it only has checked off the items you dont have based on what you have already listed in the pantry.
Pestle also offers a lifetime option for payment as well
Thank you for introducing me to Mela! Using it now and loving it !!
Really good job in the review. The only thing I would want to know is what the paprika iPhone app looks like for grocery shopping since I would be using an iPhone at the grocery store.
Sorry, but you have forgotten the most important thing… Organisation!! Which apps work with folders? Subfolders? Tags? Subtags? Not everyone has one recipe like you, I’ve got thousands!
I was new to it 🤷♂️
Well didn't know pestle only allows a few recipes to be saved damnit. At least they have a pay once option, but it's $40. I only need the recipe saver so that feels a bit steep. Wish they split up the features and priced them separately. Might try other options first, but I will never pay a subscription for an app that only needs minor bug fixes here and there.
I'm currently looking for a new recipe app. I have a grocery app that I love, but it's absolutely terrible for managing recipes - you have to type them all in by hand. The main thing I *LOVE* about the grocery app is that you can use geo-fencing to set up different stores that you do your grocery shopping in and it will "remember" the order you got items in the store based upon prior trips and sort the list in that order. I saw on the screen that Paprika had a "sort by" option (it was set to "aisle" in the screen), but I'm curious: what other sorting options are available on the grocery list? What I'm looking for is an app that will sort the grocery list based upon the order I pick things up in the store, as well as an app that will allow me to take pictures of recipes to import them into the app (looking to retire stacks of recipe cards and copies of recipes from cookbooks and magazines). Will any of these apps do all of these things?
which do you prefer for someone who wants to use recipes from my own extensive library of hardcover cookbooks? ideally i would like to be able to enter these and grow my own personal cataloge over time with the best recipes from these great sources as well as the occassional stuff from websites and youtube etc.The alternative is to write them into a moleskin notebook as i go through them ,not ideal. So put another way i want to have digital access to my The French Laundry's chicken stock recipe ( not some cooking websites recipe) or Hestan Blumenthals scrambled eggs not just the sites scrambled eggs. Thanks
1:42 Yes, Paprika is the most universal. It also runs on Windows, which you failed to mention.
Great video, can you pls do a video on best read later apps
I wish you could do an updated version with the rising star: Crouton!
Crouton is designed very similarly to Mela, so there's not much difference there. The 3 big things I see missing from Crouton and Mela when compared to Paprika are the following:
1. The organized Grocery list. Having this information sorted by "aisle" is extremely helpful.
2. An in-app browser. This makes it WAY easier to add multiple recipes at a time from a single site
3. Pantry - None of these apps except for Paprika have a way to track everything that's at home today. Spices, herbs, dry goods (rice, pasta, etc). It's an oft-overlooked feature that should really just be part of any recipe management app and it's one that keeps me currently from switching over to these newer apps. I am a sucker for cleaner UIs so that's why I started looking but these things are dealbreakers at the moment.
Amazing video ! Exactly what I was looking for ✨
Good review of the app. Thank you. Your latest subscriber 🙏🏽
Can I input my own recipes into any of the apps reviewed?
Awesome video, my friend. I have been using Paprika for such a long time but I will give the other apps a try as well.
Could you tell me what software are you using to showcase the screen of your device? Is that an iOS emulator? Thank you.
I have paprika on an iphone, paid, and on a Windows 10 computer, free to try with some features disabled.
missed opportunity for a “where’s the beef?” reference 😂🤷♀️also, mela is fully featured for up to 10 recipes…not sure if this is new since this video was posted but worth mentioning
Great quality, and very helpful video. Thank you.
Super helpful. Thanks for doing the review.
I’ve found Mealime to be very good. Some of the recipes are a little odd IMO and I wish there were more ‘traditional’ recipes, but would recommend!
Any recipe manager that provides its own recipes is a hard no from me. Pick a lane.
Omg thanks for this. Incredibly helpful.
Looking for an app where I can just store recipes easy from any source. Insta fb blogs etc ?
I love baking it’s fun
Am looking for app i can adjust my macros to the demand with my meal
Do any of these apps let you change or adapt the recipe or make notes?
damn, i love technology
Will Paprika allow export to Instacart?
Dear Anybody -- I need a simple recipe manager (very simple) (just the text file is fine) that will allow me to click a button (or whatever) to get a random recipe. ?
why not use free apps like Yummly?
I would never use Pestle because I have to pay a yearly fee. I rather buy Paprika and never pay another fee. Or Mela...
Pestle does have a pay once option, it’s $25.
@@danielegvi It's $40 now..... Don't see why they are charging 8x the price of its competitors just because the UI looks better.
If Pestle could stop being so Apple-centric, I would definetly choose that one. Paprika just seems a little dated.
Really too bad about the ios-only apps :-(
If you cooked more you’d rate aesthetics much less over function
Seems to be more about "pretty" it sounds like. Pestle you have to "touch" too much...I am cooking, I don't want to keep touching the app. Plus it is only apple...so it sucks BAD.
Pestle uses voice control for hands free cooking