What’s the Best Recipe Sharing App?

Recipe-sharing apps are those designed to help you discover new and exciting recipes while providing the means to share your own with others. Many people want easy methods to share their favorite recipes with friends and loved ones, and these mobile options make it easy to do just that. 

However, not all recipe-sharing apps are intuitive or work efficiently, making it difficult to use them, especially if there are errors or limited functionality that reduce the quality of the experience.

When considering which app is the cream of the crop, people have different favorites depending on their preferences. To better appeal to different “tastes” on this subjective matter, here are three that many people consider the best. 

Cookpad

A phenomenon in Japan, its country of origin, Cookpad has achieved global success as a cooking recipe-sharing app, featuring approximately 100 million users in a given month. With a focus on practical recipes and the ability to share mouth-watering photos of these artistic culinary creations, Cookpad is excellent for the home cook. 

In fact, that is their intended audience as they shy away from celebrity cooks or social influencers in place of real-life kitchen mavens, designing recipes in the comfort of their own homes. This has a broad global appeal for those who love cooking at home and has largely contributed to the app’s success.

Other factors include an intuitive, easy-to-use design and a wide variety of unique or unusual recipes, with some users strong proponents of the ability for users to leave comments on the recipes. Sometimes, these users have made creative alterations to ingredients that appealingly add to the flavor. 

Of course, one of the major ingredients for Cookpad’s success is that it is easy to create a recipe and share it with others, on the app itself or through your chosen social media platforms.

If nothing else, Cookpad’s longevity speaks volumes about its global appeal. It was first introduced in 1997 (although it didn’t make its way to America until 2013) and is still strong today! 

Bublup

Rather than focusing on sharing your incredible recipes with the world, Bublup’s design is to provide an excellent catalog for recipes, making it simple to share and acquire recipes from friends, family, and others within your social circle. 

The app is attractive and allows you to create folders to organize your recipes the way you want, serving as a digital cookbook with everything you need available at the touch of a button. With these folders, you can keep a special set of recipes for different occasions, such as when you want to splurge on some of your favorites or feed a sweet tooth. Moving recipes is easy, using popular drag-and-drop technology. 

Of course, you can assign a photo to your recipe, adding the image of the delicious culinary wonder to come when you next use your recipe. This is also helpful when sharing with friends, as they can see the end product before trying something new. 

Even though Bublup is mainly for sharing with friends and family, it still provides ways to discover new and exciting recipes that you may want to add to your collection. With a “discover new content” feature, you can explore new ideas and learn innovative recipes. 

Plus, other features can improve the quality of life. For instance, many people love using the ingredient panel to design their easy-to-use shopping list. You can also develop weekly meal plans to make it easier to follow diets or remember which ingredients to add to that shopping list. 

Paprika

Another stellar cooking companion, Paprika, offers some of the same features available through the other two options, with some new surprises. It provides a surprisingly expansive selection of recipes with text-based cooking instructions, which you can save and organize the way you like. Of course, you can also add your own and share them with others. 

In addition to adding new recipes, you can also edit existing ones, so if there are ingredients you do not like included, or you try something new that works for you, update the recipe to suit your tastes. It also has a nifty feature that prevents your phone from going into sleep mode. You can continue to refer to recipes without swiping your phone continually, potentially with dirty fingers. 

When seeking new recipes, the app integrates google search, allowing you to find recipes that suit your needs. Once you find them, you can download them with a click, which brings along all the ingredients and instructions. In addition, the app collects a snapshot for an image thumbnail, making the new listing more attractive.

To make the best use of the sharing options within a household, Paprika suggests creating an account for the entire family and having users log in at will to access the information. Otherwise, you can sync devices or share via email, airdrop, or export the file. 

Paprika also includes the ability to design meal plans and a shopping list. In addition, it provides a pantry option, making it easier to automate the shopping list as it can keep a record of what you already have and compare that to the items you need. As you choose ingredients for a recipe, it will remove them from your pantry; when the pantry is empty, it adds the item to your shopping list. 

The Bottom Line

As is the case with many apps on a given topic, there are many recipe-sharing apps, many of them much the same, while others exhibit unique and unusual traits that make them stand out from the competition. Determining which is best is largely a matter of your personal preferences and how well the app measures up in those quadrants.

Cookpad, Bublup, and Paprika are each popular choices, providing the ability to share and build a custom recipe catalog while focusing on different aspects of the experience. These differences are why many users believe one of the three apps earns the crown for best recipe-sharing app.