Pluck vs Recipe Keeper - Time to Upgrade?

Recipe Keeper has been around for a long time, and it’s still actively maintained. If you use it, you probably have a well-organized collection built up over years. It works, it syncs, and it doesn’t try to be flashy. It also does more than many people assume: it imports from hundreds of recipe websites, scans recipes from photos and PDFs, and has imported from Instagram and TikTok since late 2024.

An earlier version of this post described Recipe Keeper as a manual-entry app with no social or photo import and a $9.99 upgrade. That was wrong, and we’ve rewritten the Pluck vs Recipe Keeper comparison below. The real question is narrower: how much of your cooking now comes from videos, and how much help do you want once a recipe is saved?

What Recipe Keeper does well

Stability and reliability. A 4.8 rating from about 31,000 App Store ratings, and steady updates over many years. For an app that holds years of recipes, that matters.
Cross-platform breadth. iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. Very few recipe apps cover phones and desktops.
Plenty of ways in. Web import from hundreds of popular recipe sites, OCR scanning of camera images, photos and PDFs, Instagram and TikTok import (since version 3.41.1 in October 2024), and import from Paprika, Pepperplate and BigOven.
Planning and shopping. A meal planner and shopping lists grouped by aisle.
Nutrition, scaling and family sharing.
Offline use and 15 languages.
Pay once. The Pro upgrade is a one-time $19.99 on iOS. The free version has a recipe limit (around 20 recipes; we couldn’t confirm the exact number).

If you’re happy with how you save recipes now, Recipe Keeper is a solid, no-frills tool, and a better one than its reputation in “AI app” roundups suggests.

Where Pluck is the upgrade

Reading the video, not just the post

Recipe Keeper’s Instagram and TikTok import appears to work from the post’s text. We couldn’t confirm the method, and Recipe Keeper doesn’t use AI. YouTube and Facebook import aren’t supported.

Pluck’s AI reads the video itself. It:

Watches the frames, catching ingredient lists and amounts shown on screen
Transcribes the audio, capturing what the creator says
Reads the caption and description
Combines them into one recipe with a confidence score, which you review and edit before saving

A TikTok creator who talks through the recipe without writing it down? Pluck gets it from the narration. A YouTube chef who flashes the ingredients on screen for a few seconds? Pluck reads them from the frames. It works for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook videos and Reels, and for photo carousels, which it reads as one recipe.

AI instead of OCR for photos

Recipe Keeper’s OCR turns a clear printed page into text. Pluck’s AI reads photos as recipes: handwritten cards, cookbook pages, screenshots from a group chat, even a photo of a finished dish (which gives a best-guess recipe). It separates ingredients from steps for you rather than giving you a block of text to tidy up.

An AI cooking assistant inside cook mode

Recipe Keeper has no AI. Pluck’s AI cooking assistant (on the Light, Plus and Pro plans) knows the recipe you’re making and, in cook mode, the step you’re on. Ask “Can I substitute almond milk for the buttermilk?”, “I’m halving this, does the bake time change?” or “What temperature should the oil be?” It can also convert units and translate a recipe, and you can apply the changes to the saved recipe.

Pluck’s cook mode shows one step at a time in large text with the ingredients for that step, starts timers from the step, keeps the screen awake, and lets you resume where you left off. A recipe you finish there is counted in your cooking log, so each recipe shows how many times you’ve cooked it and when you last made it. See our guide to recipe apps with a cook mode.

”What can I cook?”

Type what’s in your fridge and Pluck ranks your saved recipes: what you can make now, and what you’re missing one or two ingredients for. It ignores staples like salt and oil if you want. It’s free and unlimited on every plan. Recipe Keeper searches your own recipes by ingredient too; what its listing doesn’t mention is a photo. Pluck’s pantry scan reads the ingredients from a photo of your fridge (1 scan a month on the free plan, more on paid plans). More in what can I cook with what I have.

Meal plan and grocery list

Both apps have a meal planner and an aisle-grouped shopping list. Pluck’s plan has breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack slots, takes free-text notes like “Eating out”, and lets you change servings per meal; the grocery list merges duplicate ingredients across the week, adds up the amounts and shows which recipe each item is for. Recipe Keeper’s planner has the longer track record.

Both can also draft the plan for you. Recipe Keeper creates a random meal plan from your hints. Pluck’s Fill my week, on Plus and Pro, picks from your own saved recipes by rules: favorites mixed with ones you haven’t tried, and nothing repeated from last week.

Sharing works differently. A Recipe Keeper family signs in to one account, and each person buys Pro for their own platform. A Pluck grocery list is shared between separate accounts: you invite up to 5 other people, free on every plan.

Feature comparison

Feature	Pluck	Recipe Keeper
Web import	AI extraction	Yes (hundreds of recipe sites)
Instagram, TikTok	Yes (frames, audio, on-screen text, caption)	Yes (likely caption-based)
YouTube, Facebook	Yes	No
Photo carousels	Yes, as one recipe	Not verified
Photo / scan	AI, including handwriting	OCR from camera, photos and PDFs
AI cooking assistant	Yes (paid plans)	No
Cook mode	Yes, with step timers	Not verified
Meal planning	Yes (weekly)	Yes
Plans the week for you	Fill my week, from your own recipes (Plus and Pro)	Random meal plan from your hints
Grocery list	Yes, merged, sorted by aisle, shared with up to 5 people	Yes, grouped by aisle
Ingredient search	”What can I cook?” (free), also from a fridge photo	Yes (your own recipes)
Import from other apps	Paprika, Mela, Crouton, CopyMeThat, JSON-LD	Paprika, Pepperplate, BigOven
Nutrition	No	Yes
Family sharing	Grocery list (up to 5 others); recipes as links	Yes (one shared account)
Offline access	Yes	Yes
App languages	6	15
Platforms	iOS, Android (phone)	iOS, Android, Windows, Mac
Free plan	3 extractions/mo, 10 recipes	About 20 recipes (unverified)
Paid price	From $2.99/mo; Plus $6.99/mo; Pro $11.99/mo	$19.99 one-time (iOS)

Where Recipe Keeper is ahead

Pluck’s honest gaps here:

No desktop or web app. Pluck runs on iPhone and Android phones only.
No nutrition data.
Limited family sharing. A family signed in to one Recipe Keeper account shares everything in it. In Pluck, up to 5 other people can share a grocery list and you can send a recipe as a link, but the recipe box and meal plan are personal.
Subscription vs one-time. Recipe Keeper’s $19.99 is cheaper than a year of any Pluck paid plan.
More languages: 15 versus Pluck’s 6.

Moving from Recipe Keeper

You don’t have to switch overnight. A practical approach:

Start with new recipes. Install Pluck alongside Recipe Keeper and use it for anything from video, carousels or photos.

Bring your favorites across. Pluck imports Paprika, Mela, Crouton and CopyMeThat files and any schema.org JSON-LD file. Recipe Keeper’s own export format isn’t on that list, so for your 20 or 30 most-cooked recipes, share the original links to Pluck and it re-extracts them in seconds each. For recipes you typed in yourself, a photo of the screen or the printed page works too. Our guide on how to switch recipe apps covers what to check along the way.

Keep Recipe Keeper for the long tail. There’s no need to delete it while you find out whether Pluck fits.

Who should choose what

Stay with Recipe Keeper if:

You need Windows or Mac apps
You want nutrition data, or the whole family on one shared account
You prefer a one-time purchase
Your social recipes have the full recipe written in the caption
You want the app in one of its 15 languages

Switch to Pluck if:

You save from YouTube or Facebook, or from videos where the recipe is spoken or shown on screen
You want AI to read handwriting and messy photos, not just OCR
You’d use an AI cooking assistant while cooking
You want to search your own recipes with “What can I cook?”, from a list you type or a photo of your fridge
You want the week planned from your own recipes, or a grocery list shared between separate accounts

Recipe Keeper has kept up better than its age suggests. If your recipes increasingly come from video, though, Pluck is built for that.

For a similar comparison with another long-standing recipe app, see Pluck vs Paprika. For families, see our best recipe app for families guide, or browse the best free recipe apps for 2026. There’s also a quick summary on the Recipe Keeper alternative page.

Pluck is available on iOS and Android - get it on Google Play. Also on iOS. Visit our roadmap to see what we’re planning next.