AnyList alternatives: when the shopping list is solved but dinner is not

Lists are downstream of decisions

A grocery list is only as good as the plan behind it. If your AnyList weeks start with twenty minutes of scrolling for dinner ideas, the bottleneck is upstream — and the fix is a planner that feeds a list, not a better list.

You want the week suggested, then the list

MealPot (iPhone and iPad, free to download; full planning requires Pro) suggests dinners around your preferences and household size, then writes an aisle-sorted list from the plan. Its 1,676 recipe pages are browsable on the website. AnyList also builds a list from a plan, but you select the meals.

Plan to Eat has a calendar for your saved recipes and builds the list from what you schedule. It gives you more manual control over the plan.

You want a local recipe archive

Paprika 3 clips recipes, provides a meal calendar and creates grocery lists. It stores recipes locally with optional sync and export. Check the price for your device; the iOS and desktop versions differ.

You want free

Samsung Food covers saving recipes, planning and lists at no cost, with personalised planning behind the Food+ tier. It is the closest free all-in-one; the list-sharing polish is not quite AnyList’s.

Moving off AnyList

1. Keep AnyList installed — the list is still the best at being a list, and it is cheap to keep for shared household use.
2. Export or re-save the recipes you actually cook; AnyList’s recipe feature stores the source link for each one.
3. Add the planner: one week of dinners decided, then push those ingredients into whichever list your household lives in.