Tired of Paprika telling you nothing about what to cook next?

What Paprika does well

Its built-in web browser clips a recipe from almost any cooking site — ingredients, steps, photo — into a clean, ad-free format you can read offline. It is widely regarded as the app's best feature.

It's a one-time purchase, not a subscription: roughly $4.99 for the iOS/Android version, with Mac and Windows sold separately. Pay once per platform and keep it.

Automatic ingredient scaling to any serving size, and tappable in-recipe timers that start when you touch a time mentioned in the instructions — small conveniences that add up while you're actually cooking.

Full freedom to add, edit and organize your own recipes rather than being limited to a fixed catalog — it is built for people who already have recipes worth keeping.

Who Paprika is for

Someone who already has a growing folder of recipes — screenshots, printouts, browser bookmarks — and wants one clean place to keep them, searchable and ad-free, without paying a subscription for it.

Someone who cooks from their own taste and experience and mainly wants better organization: a shopping list generated from a recipe they picked, timers, scaling — tools around a recipe, not a plan replacing the choice of what to cook.

Where it stops

The planner and the grocery list are only loosely connected: adding a recipe to the calendar does not automatically push its ingredients to the shopping list, so you're often adding items by hand after the fact.

The meal-planning side of the interface is described as less intuitive than the recipe library itself — most of the praise for Paprika is about saving and reading recipes, not about planning a week.

Users have reported losing edits when navigating between sections of the app.

Each platform is sold separately — buying it on iPhone does not unlock the Mac or Windows version, so a household with more than one type of device pays more than once.

None of this is about nutrition, because Paprika was never built for it: no calorie or protein target, no goal, nothing that adapts a recipe's portions to what you're trying to reach.

What Macro Recipe does the same

You still get real recipes, step by step, not a list of nutrients to assemble yourself. Each dish opens with clear steps and quantities when it's time to cook.

Ingredients across the week are combined into one grocery list — the connection Paprika's calendar and shopping list don't quite make automatically. Swap a dish, and the list updates with it.

Recipes are grouped by meal and by day, the way a planner should read, not just a searchable pile of individually saved recipes.

What it does differently

Macro Recipe builds the week for you, starting from a goal — lose weight, maintain, or build muscle — instead of starting from a recipe you already found. You tell it your diet, allergies, and the ingredients you don't want to see, and it proposes real dishes that fit.

The grocery list comes with an estimated cost in your own currency, adjusted to your country's price level, against a weekly budget you set. Paprika has no concept of a shopping budget at all.

Portions are adjusted so a day lands near your estimated calorie and protein target, and when a day falls short the app says so rather than pretending — the same honesty Paprika simply never has to apply, since it never claims to hit a number in the first place.

What it does not do

It is not a universal recipe clipper. You cannot save an arbitrary recipe from any website the way Paprika's built-in browser lets you — Macro Recipe works from its own dish library, adapted to your goal, not from whatever you find while browsing.

It is not a one-time purchase. Your first menu is free and there's a 3-day trial, after which it's a monthly or yearly subscription — a real difference from Paprika's pay-once model, and one worth weighing if cost is the main factor.

It is on iPhone today, with no Mac or Windows app and no offline recipe archive of your own — if what you want is a permanent personal library independent of any subscription, that's what Paprika is for.

Switching in practice: what to keep, what changes

You don't have to choose one forever. Some people keep Paprika as their personal archive — the recipes from family, from a magazine, from a site they trust — and use Macro Recipe for the week they haven't already planned themselves, when they want the goal-and-budget layer Paprika doesn't have.

A first week with Macro Recipe looks like this: set your goal, diet and allergies once, get a full week of dishes with a single combined grocery list and its estimated cost, then cook from the app step by step. There's no import from Paprika — you're starting a new list, not migrating an old one.

If your Paprika library holds dishes you genuinely can't do without, keep using it for those and let Macro Recipe fill the rest of the week where you'd otherwise be deciding from scratch.

Price, side by side

Paprika: roughly $4.99 as a one-time purchase for iOS or Android, Mac and Windows versions sold separately at their own one-time price. No subscription, no recurring charge, no built-in goal or budget tracking.

Macro Recipe: free first menu, then a 3-day trial, then a monthly or yearly subscription. In exchange, the menu, the combined grocery list and its estimated cost are generated for you each week rather than assembled by hand from recipes you saved yourself.

Which is cheaper depends on how much a week of not deciding what to cook, and not adding up the shopping list, is worth to you — these are estimated figures, not a guarantee of what either app will cost you over a year.

What three days of a weekly menu look like

An indicative example for someone aiming at roughly 1,800 kcal and 120 g of protein a day. Estimated figures; your own menu is built from your profile, your tastes and your budget.

Frequently asked questions