Best Meal Planning Apps in the UK for 2026

The UK meal planning apps compared

Ollie appears on most lists like this one. It isn't on the UK App Store, so it isn't in the table.

The best meal planning apps, reviewed

Chop it

This one is mine, so weigh it accordingly. Chop it plans the household week: choose dinners from a library of over 1,300 recipes or your own, then shop it from one merged list and cook from a clear method. Your own recipes can come from a website link, a photographed cookbook page, a social video or a conversation in ChatGPT, and each becomes a structured recipe in the same library.

It runs on iPhone, on Android, in the browser and inside ChatGPT. In ChatGPT you can search recipes and draft a week without an account, then connect Chop it to save the week and its shopping list to the same account you use in the app. A walkthrough of every part of the app covers the rest: the Chef IQ catalogue, Make me a recipe, Pantry Check and the pantry.

The honest limitation: it's new. The Android app only arrived on 14 October 2026, so it has less road behind it than the iPhone app, and the built-in library is smaller than a publisher's decades of archive. If you want the biggest editorial recipe bank, buy something else.

Price: free to start. Plan my week and your first 10 imports a week are free, and you get 3 free credits a week for jobs like Pantry Check. Pro is £2.99 a month or £24.99 a year, currently discounted to £19.99 for the first year, and includes 50 credits a month. (Chop it's pricing checked 11 October 2026.)

Mealime

Mealime does one job properly: pick a few quick dinners, get a clean aisle-sorted list, cook in about half an hour. Its allergy and diet filtering beats most, and the free tier is usable on its own rather than a two-week tease. For a household that wants dinner solved with minimal thought, it's the least demanding app here.

The honest limitation: it's a filtered database that never learns your habits. There's no meaningful calendar, the web version is close to read-only, and it does nothing with the food already in your kitchen.

Price: free, with Meal Planner Pro at £2.99 a month, the joint cheapest monthly tier here with Chop it.

Samsung Food

Formerly Whisk, and you don't need a Samsung device to use it. It has the most generous free tier here: save recipes from anywhere on the web, plan them onto a week and get a shopping list built for you, on iOS, Android and a real web app. Most competitors charge for that combination.

The honest limitation: the product has grown broad, and finding the feature you want takes longer than it should. The best parts, including AI-personalised plans and the step-by-step cooking mode, sit behind the dearest annual subscription in this table, £59.99.

Price: free core. Premium is £6.99 a month or £59.99 a year with a seven-day trial.

Paprika 3

The recipe manager for people who want to own their collection. Clip from any site, scale the servings, make a shopping list, sync between devices and pay once, with no renewal and nothing held back for a higher tier. People have been moving their recipes into it for fifteen years, which says something about how well it holds up.

The honest limitation: it organises what you bring, so it's a filing system rather than a source of ideas. "Pay once" means once per platform: the iPhone app and the Mac app are separate purchases. There's no pantry awareness and no supermarket connection.

Price: £4.99 on the UK App Store, one time. Desktop versions are sold separately.

Cherrypick

The only app here that closes the loop between planning and paying. Choose your recipes and Cherrypick builds the basket at Sainsbury's, Tesco or Asda with real prices, so you see what the week costs before you commit to it. Scan your fridge and cupboard and it skips what you already own.

The honest limitation: the retailer integration is the product, so you're choosing among three supermarkets. Shop at Aldi, Lidl or Waitrose and the main reason to use it disappears. Some features are Sainsbury's only.

Price: free tier. Plus is £3.49 a month and Pro is £6.99 a month.

Plan to Eat

A planner for people who already have their recipes and want somewhere disciplined to put them. The drag-and-drop calendar is the best in this group, the list is grouped by aisle, and the web app is properly built rather than an afterthought. Households cooking from a fixed rotation of family recipes get on well with it.

The honest limitation: it's subscription-only after the trial, at £49.99 a year, with no free tier at all. It was built for a US audience, so ingredient names and quantities lean American and you'll do some translating. There's no pantry awareness.

Price: £49.99 a year after a 14-day free trial.

AnyList

If your real problem is that someone in your household is in Tesco while you're at home looking in the fridge, AnyList solves it and nothing else here comes close. The shared list updates in real time, it's sensibly organised, and the household plan covers everyone for £14.99 a year. Recipe storage and meal planning are there and competent.

The honest limitation: the list comes first and everything else is thinner. For discovering recipes or planning an interesting week, most apps here beat it.

Price: free core. Complete is £9.99 a year for one person or £14.99 a year for a household, the cheapest annual price here.

Eat This Much

The pick if you're cooking to a number. Set a calorie target and macro split, and it builds a week that hits them, then makes the shopping list. Nothing else here plans against a numeric goal like this, and if you track intake for training or medical reasons, that's the whole point.

The honest limitation: planning to a target makes for clinical dinners. The recipes serve the numbers rather than the evening. It's also the most expensive option here by a distance: the monthly price is roughly five times Mealime's.

Price: free basics. Premium is £14.99 a month or £58.99 a year after a 14-day trial.

Good Food

The default for British home cooking, because of the archive: a large catalogue of triple-tested recipes from a brand most UK kitchens already trust, free to browse with no account needed. If you want to type "chicken thighs" and get twenty things that will work, it's still the strongest answer.

The honest limitation: the meal planner sits behind Premium, so for free it's a recipe bank rather than a planning tool. It does nothing with recipes from outside its own catalogue, which is most of them if you cook from social video or AI.

Price: free to browse. Premium is £4.49 a month or £24.99 a year, with a £0.99 annual trial offer running at the time of writing.

Mob

The most distinctive recipe brand here: strong originals with a clear point of view, written for British kitchens and British ingredients. If cooking is a pleasure for you rather than a logistics problem, Mob is the one most likely to get the pan out on a Friday.

The honest limitation: the full library and the meal plans are behind Premium at £39.99 a year, and it stays a curated publisher rather than a tool for managing your own collection. You can't bring in recipes from elsewhere and organise them.

Price: free taster. Premium is £6.99 a month or £39.99 a year with a seven-day trial.

ChatGPT on its own

Worth taking seriously as a rival to every app above, because for a lot of people it already replaced one.

It improvises better than anything on this list. Tell it you have half a cabbage, some feta and forty minutes, and it'll give you something plausible to cook. Ask for the same dinner cheaper, without dairy, or for a child who refuses anything green, and it adapts without a filter menu. The free tier is enough for this.

ChatGPT can remember useful preferences when memory is on, but it isn't a structured record of your week. A meal plan stays prose in a conversation, with no dependable week view, tickable list or pantry ledger. That gap between generating a recipe and keeping one is worth understanding properly before you decide whether you need an app at all.

Price: the free tier is enough for meal planning. Go is £6.99 and Plus is £19.99 on the UK App Store.

How to choose a meal planning app

Most comparisons rank these apps by catalogue size. That mattered when a publisher decided what you cooked. Now recipes reach you from a cookbook, a friend's text, a saved video and a chat window in the same week.

So ask whether an app can turn all of those into something you can find again in March, add to a weekly plan, merge into one shopping list and open cleanly at the hob, without you copying it between three tools. Paprika does that for anything on the web. Samsung Food does a good deal of it, free. Chop it is built for genuinely mixed sources, including ones that didn't exist five years ago.

None of that helps if you stop opening the app. The best meal planning app is the one still on your home screen in week three, so match it to the job in front of you, not the longest feature list. Browse a few quick weeknight recipes or a batch-cooking set and see which app you'd want holding them.

Prices verified on 5 August 2026 from the UK App Store listings for Mealime, Samsung Food, Paprika 3, Plan to Eat, Good Food, Mob and ChatGPT, and from in-app subscription screens for Cherrypick, AnyList, Eat This Much and Mob. Gousto pricing from gousto.co.uk; HelloFresh pricing from its own checkout at hellofresh.co.uk, at the standard rate rather than the introductory offer. Chop it's prices and features checked on 11 October 2026 against our own records; its App Store listing shows the current terms. Subscription prices change often, so check the current listing before you buy.