Pluck vs Mela: The Best Recipe App for iPhone (and Android)

Mela is one of the best-looking recipe apps ever made. The typography is thoughtful, the reading experience while cooking is excellent, and it feels perfectly at home on iOS and Mac. If you’re deep in the Apple ecosystem and save recipes from food blogs, Mela is genuinely great.

But beauty isn’t everything — and in 2026, a recipe app needs to handle more than just web pages.

What Mela does well

Credit where it’s due:

Beautiful design: Mela’s interface is clean, modern, and pleasant to use. It’s one of the few recipe apps that feels like it was designed by someone who cares about typography.
iCloud sync: Seamless sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Reading experience: The cooking view is thoughtfully designed with large text and clear layout.
One-time purchase: No subscription — pay once and it’s yours.

If your recipe sources are exclusively food blogs, and you only use Apple devices, Mela is a strong choice.

The two big gaps

1. No Android, no cross-platform

Mela is Apple-only. This is a dealbreaker for a lot of people:

Your partner uses Android? They can’t access your shared recipes.
You switch from iPhone to Android? Your recipe collection stays behind.
You want to check a recipe on a work computer? No web access.

Pluck works on both iOS and Android with full sync. Your recipes aren’t locked into any ecosystem.

Mela’s recipe import works the same way as every other traditional clipper — HTML parsing. Paste a food blog URL with recipe markup and it works. Paste an Instagram post, a TikTok video, or a Facebook recipe, and you get nothing.

Pluck handles all of these with AI extraction. It reads captions, watches videos, listens to audio, and scans images to produce structured recipes from any source.

Feature-by-feature comparison

Feature	Pluck	Mela
Social media extraction	Yes (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube)	No
Video recipe extraction	AI watches & listens	No
Photo/image extraction	AI vision	No
AI cooking assistant	Yes (Plus/Pro)	No
Web recipe clipping	AI-powered	HTML scraping
Offline access	Yes	Yes
Platforms	iOS, Android	iOS, Mac only
Design quality	Modern, clean	Beautiful
Price	Free tier + premium subscriptions	~$6 one-time

The AI advantage

Beyond extraction, Pluck offers something Mela doesn’t have at all: an AI cooking assistant. While you’re cooking, you can ask questions about the recipe you’re making — substitutions, scaling, technique tips. It’s contextual, meaning the AI knows exactly what you’re cooking and can give relevant advice.

Mela gives you the recipe. Pluck gives you the recipe and helps you cook it.

Switching from Mela to Pluck

Recipe import from Mela is on our roadmap. For now, the fastest way to rebuild your collection is to re-extract recipes from their original URLs. Pluck’s AI extraction typically takes a few seconds per recipe, so migrating your 20-30 most-used recipes is quick work.

The verdict

Mela is a beautiful recipe manager for people who save recipes from food blogs on Apple devices. If that describes you perfectly, it’s a fine choice.

But if any of these apply to you, Pluck is the better fit:

You find recipes on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook
You or someone in your household uses Android
You want AI help while cooking
You want one app that handles food blogs, social media, videos, and photos

Recipe discovery has moved to social media and video. Your recipe app should follow.

For more comparisons, see how Pluck stacks up against Pestle and Deglaze — two other Apple-focused recipe apps — or browse the full recipe app comparison hub. Mela is one of our top picks for iOS — see the full best recipe app for iPhone ranking. You can also check out the Mela alternative page for a quick summary.

Pluck is available now on Android — get it on Google Play. iOS coming soon; join the waitlist to be notified. Visit our roadmap to see what’s next — and suggest what you’d like us to build.