Tandoor

What is Tandoor?

Tandoor is an open source, self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner. You import recipes from cooking sites, organize them with tags and cookbooks, plan the week’s meals, and generate shopping lists — all kept on your own server. Its ingredient model understands amount, unit, and food, so scaling servings recalculates the recipe for you.

What is Tandoor best for?

Households and cooking enthusiasts who want the most feature-rich recipe manager and don’t mind configuring it. It fits people building a large, searchable recipe library, planning meals for a family, and sharing collections with granular permissions — especially anyone leaving a paid app like Paprika who wants to own their data.

What can Tandoor do?

• Import recipes by URL from thousands of sites that use schema.org markup, plus Paprika and Nextcloud Cookbook imports
• Scale servings automatically using a smart amount/unit/food ingredient model
• Plan meals on a calendar and auto-generate shopping lists sorted by supermarket aisle
• Search recipes with fulltext and trigram similarity, and group them into cookbooks
• Share collections with family via permissions and public share links
• Optional AI features for image recognition, step sorting, and nutrition extraction
• Sync recipe files with Dropbox or Nextcloud, in multiple languages

Where does Tandoor fall short?

• It’s the heaviest option in its class: a Django + Vue app that requires PostgreSQL from the start, so setup is more involved than SQLite-based tools like Mealie.
• There’s no polished official mobile app — you use the mobile-optimized web UI or third-party apps, where a paid app like Paprika offers native, offline-first clients.
• The license carries a Commons Clause selling exception, so while it’s free to self-host, it isn’t strictly OSI-approved open source.

Is Tandoor free?

Yes — Tandoor is free to self-host, and you only pay for your own server. There’s also a managed cloud at app.tandoor.dev with a free tier (10 recipes) and paid plans from about €1.99/month, so you’re paying for hosting convenience, not the software.

What does Tandoor replace?

Tandoor is a self-hosted alternative to paid recipe and meal-planning apps like Paprika, AnyList, and Plan to Eat. It does the same import-organize-plan-shop job, but you run it yourself and keep your recipes without a per-platform purchase or yearly subscription.

FAQ

Is Tandoor open source? Mostly — the code is public and licensed under AGPL-3.0 with a Commons Clause selling exception. It’s free to self-host and use, but the clause restricts selling it as a hosted service, so it isn’t strictly OSI-approved.

Can I self-host Tandoor for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free; you only pay for the server it runs on. The managed app.tandoor.dev cloud is the paid, hosted alternative.

Is Tandoor a good Paprika alternative? For data ownership and features, yes — it imports Paprika recipes and adds meal planning and sharing. But Paprika has native, offline mobile apps, so if you want a polished phone-first experience with no server, Paprika may suit you better.

What do I need to run Tandoor? A server with Docker and a PostgreSQL database. Deployment examples cover Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Unraid, and Synology.