Mealie

What is Mealie?

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner that runs as a web app on your own server. You add recipes by pasting a link — it scrapes the title, ingredients, steps, and photo — or enter them by hand, then organize everything with tags, categories, and cookbooks. A Python (FastAPI) backend and a Vue frontend give it a REST API and a polished, mobile-friendly interface, so it works as a Paprika alternative you fully control.

What is Mealie best for?

Households and families who want one shared, private recipe manager for collecting recipes, planning the week’s meals, and generating shopping lists — and who are comfortable running a Docker container. It also suits anyone leaving a cloud recipe app who wants to own their data and script against a real API.

What can Mealie do?

• Import recipes from any site by URL using structured-data scraping, or migrate from Nextcloud Cookbook, Paprika, Tandoor Recipes, Copy Me That, and Chowdown
• Parse ingredients with a built-in NLP model, a brute-force parser, or an OpenAI-compatible AI provider
• Create recipes from a photo, screenshot, or pasted text with the “Import with AI” feature (requires your own OpenAI-compatible key)
• Plan meals on a calendar and auto-generate shopping lists grouped by store section
• Organize with tags, categories, and cookbooks, plus smart search (fuzzy search requires PostgreSQL)
• Share with the family through multi-user households and sign-up links
• Automate with a full REST API, webhooks, and interactive Swagger docs
• Install as a Progressive Web App on phones, with the interface translated into 35+ languages

Where does Mealie fall short?

• No native desktop or mobile apps. Mealie is a web app you can install as a PWA, but unlike Paprika it has no true offline mode — you need a network connection to reach your server to view or edit recipes.
• Your recipes live in a database, not plain-text files. That is fine day to day, but it makes reading, backing up, or version-controlling individual recipes outside the app harder than with plain-text tools like Cooklang.
• The URL scraper leans on structured (Schema.org) recipe data, so it is reliable on big cooking sites but hit-or-miss on small blogs. Major version upgrades have also occasionally needed hands-on fixes when database migrations fail.

Is Mealie free?

Yes — Mealie is fully free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tier and no cloud upsell; every feature is included. You only pay for the server you run it on, and a small VPS or a home machine is plenty. The optional AI import features are the one extra cost: they need your own OpenAI-compatible API key, billed by that provider.

What does Mealie replace?

Mealie is a self-hosted alternative to Paprika Recipe Manager and to cloud recipe apps in general. It covers the same import-organize-plan-shop workflow, but you host it yourself and reach it from any browser instead of buying a per-platform app with a per-device unlock. Other open source options such as Tandoor Recipes and KitchenOwl solve a similar problem; Mealie stands out for its polished UI and large, active community.

FAQ

Is Mealie open source? Yes. Mealie is licensed under AGPL-3.0, an OSI-approved open source license, and the full source is public on GitHub. The AGPL means that if you offer a modified Mealie as a network service, you must share your changes.

Can I self-host Mealie for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free — the only cost is the server. Mealie runs from a single Docker container using SQLite by default, or PostgreSQL for larger households and fuzzy search.

Is Mealie a good Paprika alternative? For households that want a shared, private, browser-based recipe box, yes — plus a REST API that Paprika does not offer. If you need polished native apps with full offline access on every device, Paprika still has the edge.

What do I need to run Mealie? A machine with Docker — a $5/month VPS or a home server works — and optionally a PostgreSQL database for fuzzy search and bigger libraries. The AI import features additionally need your own OpenAI-compatible API key.