The 6 best Mela alternatives in 2026.

RecipeSage is free, with no ads and nothing behind a paywall; its hosting is paid for by optional contributions. It runs in any browser, with an Android app and desktop apps for Windows, Mac and Linux, and on iPhone you add the web app to your home screen. It imports Mela's .melarecipes archive directly, along with exports from Paprika, Crouton and other apps.

Beyond the recipe box it has a drag-and-drop meal-plan calendar, a shopping list grouped by aisle that combines similar items, nutrition per serving, a full-screen cook mode, offline search, and sharing with family and friends. If you'd rather run it yourself, it can be self-hosted. We couldn't find it in the App Store: its download page has iPhone users add the web app to the home screen. It has no recipe-blog feeds like Mela's.

If you love Mela because it feels at home on your iPhone, iPad and Mac, Crouton is the closest match that's still moving fast: its latest update came out on October 26, 2026. It shares a lot with Mela, including iCloud sync and sharing with family, recipe-blog feeds, groceries sent to Reminders and cookbook scanning, and adds AI import from a photo or text, meal plans it can fill from your dinner recipes, and a step-by-step mode you can move through hands-free. It also runs on Apple Watch and Vision Pro.

We couldn't find Mela among its imports, so recipes come across one at a time, from their websites or by scanning. Discover is $1.99 a month or $14.99 a year and Crouton Plus is $24.99; what's free isn't spelled out on its pages.

Paprika is the long-standing recipe manager you buy once, with native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and Windows, so it's the one-time-purchase choice for a household that isn't all on Apple. It goes further than Mela on planning and shopping: a meal planner with reusable menus, a grocery list that combines ingredients and sorts them by aisle, and a pantry with expiry dates. Your data is stored on the device, so it works offline.

Paprika 3 is bought separately on each platform ($4.99 on iPhone and iPad, $29.99 on Mac and on Windows), there's no web app, and neither Paprika 3 nor the Paprika 4 beta lists Mela among its imports. The Paprika 4 beta has been open to every Paprika user since September 28, 2026, and its premium features will need a subscription once the beta ends.

Recipe Keeper scans recipes from the camera, photos and PDFs with OCR, much like Mela's book scanner, and runs offline on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and Windows. It adds a weekly and monthly meal planner, a shopping list grouped by aisle, a shared family recipe collection and an Alexa skill for cooking hands-free, step by step.

Like Mela+, the Pro upgrade is bought once, but separately on each platform ($19.99 on iPhone, iPad and Android, $29.99 on Mac). There's no web app, and Mela isn't among the apps it names for importing.

Pestle is a modern recipe app for iPhone and iPad, which also runs on Apple Watch and Apple-silicon Macs. A Pestle Household shares recipes and meal plans with the people you cook with, guided cooking can be controlled hands-free, and it saves recipes from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube posts as well as websites. The free version holds up to 15 recipes and includes the shopping list, the pantry and meal plans.

Pestle Pro, for unlimited recipes, the recipe scanner and PDF import, is $24.99 a year, with monthly and lifetime options in the App Store. Like Mela it's Apple-only, and its listing doesn't mention importing from Mela.