Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Copy Me That

Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager designed for households to collect, organize, and share recipes. It combines recipe importing and editing with meal planning and shopping lists, backed by an API-driven server and a modern web UI.

Key Features

• Import recipes from a URL using a built-in scraper, or create them manually with an editor
• Meal planning for week, month, or year, designed for multi-user households
• Shopping lists generated from planned meals and recipes, with section organization
• Cookbooks and organization tools for grouping and managing collections
• Multi-user support with groups for sharing recipes and meal plans
• REST API with interactive OpenAPI documentation for third-party integrations
• Scheduled webhooks for sending meal plan and related data to external services
• Automatic backups with customizable export formats via templates

Use Cases

• Centralize family recipes and import favorites from the web into a private database
• Plan meals for a household and generate a shared shopping list from upcoming meals
• Integrate recipe and meal plan data with home automation or notification workflows

Mealie is a strong fit for users who want an API-first, family-friendly recipe and meal planning system with a polished interface. Its import tools, multi-user sharing, and automation hooks make it practical for both casual home use and advanced integrations.

Tandoor Recipes is a web-based application for managing a personal collection of recipes. It helps you organize and search recipes, plan meals, and generate shopping lists, with options for sharing and collaboration.

Key Features

• Recipe editor for building and maintaining a structured recipe collection
• Meal planning with multiple meals per day
• Shopping lists generated from meal plans or directly from recipes
• Cookbooks to group recipes into collections
• Import recipes from many websites that provide structured recipe data
• Tagging and bulk management for ingredients, units, and tags
• Powerful search with full-text capabilities (PostgreSQL-focused)
• UI customization with themes and a mobile-friendly interface
• Optional integrations for file syncing with services like Nextcloud and Dropbox
• AI-assisted helpers for tasks like recognizing images and extracting nutrition (feature set may vary by setup)

Use Cases

• Replace scattered bookmarks and notes with a searchable, structured household recipe library
• Plan weekly meals and automatically produce shopping lists for groceries
• Share recipes and cooking plans with family or small groups in a private setup

Limitations and Considerations

• Includes only a basic permission system and is not designed to be exposed as a public, open website

Tandoor Recipes is well-suited for individuals and households who want a feature-rich, power-user-friendly recipe manager with meal planning and shopping list workflows. It emphasizes organization, importability, and flexible search for growing recipe collections.

KitchenOwl is a self-hosted grocery list and recipe manager designed for individuals and households. It combines real-time shopping lists, recipe management, meal planning, and shared expense tracking in one app, with clients for mobile, web, and desktop.

Key Features

• Shared households for collaborating on shopping lists, recipes, meal plans, and balances
• Real-time synced shopping lists with categories, amounts, and item icons
• Recipe management, including saving recipes and adding ingredients to shopping lists
• Import/store recipes from the web as well as create your own recipes
• Meal planning to schedule recipes for the week
• Expense tracking and balance splitting between household members
• Partial offline support so lists remain usable without signal
• “Smart” suggestions that learn item check-off order and recommend recipes

Use Cases

• Coordinate grocery shopping for a family or shared apartment with live list updates
• Plan weekly meals and generate shopping items directly from scheduled recipes
• Track and split grocery expenses among household members

Limitations and Considerations

• The project is still in active development and may have breaking changes

KitchenOwl is a strong fit if you want a privacy-respecting, self-hosted alternative to commercial grocery list apps while keeping recipes, meal plans, and shared household expenses in one place.

CookCLI is a command-line program and lightweight web server for working with Cooklang recipe files. It provides parsing, rendering, shopping-list generation, pantry tracking and a browsable web UI so recipes can be managed locally and automated with standard Unix tooling. (cooklang.org)

Key Features

• CLI commands to parse and display recipes in multiple formats (text, JSON, Markdown) and to scale servings. (github.com)
• Shopping-list generation that merges ingredients across recipes and organizes items by store/section. (github.com)
• Embedded web server to browse and search a local recipe collection with a web UI; includes a development workflow for building the frontend. (github.com)
• Importer to convert recipes from many websites into Cooklang format and tools for pantry/inventory tracking. (cooklang.org)
• Report and template support for exporting cookbooks, printable cards, and custom reports. (github.com)
• Cross-platform distribution: prebuilt binaries and Homebrew packages; source build requires Rust and Node tooling. (github.com)

Use Cases

• Manage a personal recipe collection as plain-text Cooklang files and generate consolidated shopping lists for a week of menus. (cooklang.org)
• Run a local recipe web UI (embedded server) to browse, search, and share recipes on a home LAN or single-board computer. (github.com)
• Integrate recipe parsing and report generation into automation scripts or CI pipelines for cookbook generation. (github.com)

Limitations and Considerations

• Building from source requires Rust and Node; some install paths (cargo install) have known issues noted in the project documentation, so prebuilt binaries or Homebrew are often recommended. (github.com)

CookCLI is a pragmatic, Unix-friendly toolset for anyone who stores recipes as Cooklang files and wants programmatic control over shopping lists, scaling, and a local web UI. Its Rust core and small frontend build steps make it suitable for local and Raspberry Pi deployments while integrating into existing text-based workflows. (cooklang.org)

Bar Assistant is a cocktail-focused platform for managing home (or small venue) bar recipes and ingredient inventory. It combines recipe management, bar organization, and pricing tools, and exposes an API for integrations.

Key Features

• Manage cocktail recipes with notes, ratings, favorites, images, and variations
• Ingredient inventory with categories, units, pricing, and ingredient substitutes
• ABV calculations, unit switching, and recipe scaling by volume or servings
• Powerful search and filtering by tags, base ingredients, available inventory, and more
• Shopping list generation based on missing ingredients
• Create and publish bar menus with pricing, pour cost calculations, and exports
• Import and export recipes and ingredients in multiple formats (including JSON, YAML, CSV, and Markdown)
• Multi-bar and multi-user support with roles and fine-grained access control
• Personal access tokens with custom permissions and single sign-on (SSO) support
• Optional search indexing and metrics support for improved discovery and monitoring

Use Cases

• Track a personal home bar inventory and quickly find cocktails you can make
• Plan an event by calculating quantities and generating shopping lists
• Maintain and publish a cocktail menu with cost-based pricing

Limitations and Considerations

• This repository contains the API server; the main web UI is provided by a separate client application
• Some search features depend on an external search service being configured

Bar Assistant is a strong fit for cocktail enthusiasts who want structure around ingredients and inventory, as well as for groups sharing a bar with role-based access. Its data portability, menu tools, and API make it practical to extend and integrate into a broader homelab setup.

RecipeSage is a collaborative recipe keeper that helps you collect, organize, and search your recipes, then turn them into meal plans and shopping lists you can share with others. It is built as a Progressive Web App, designed to feel native on mobile and desktop.

Key Features

• Import recipes from URLs, images, PDFs, or pasted text
• Full-text search across recipe fields with typo tolerance
• Recipe tagging and filtering for organization
• Drag-and-drop meal planning calendar
• Shopping lists with automatic categorization, grouping, and combining similar items
• Sharing features for collaborating on recipes, meal plans, and lists
• Import from other recipe apps/formats (including JSON-LD and several popular recipe managers)
• Export/backup in multiple formats for portability
• Dark mode and multi-language support

Use Cases

• Keep a household recipe collection with shared access for family members
• Plan weekly meals and generate a combined shopping list from selected recipes
• Import and archive recipes from the web into a searchable personal database

Limitations and Considerations

• Dual-licensed: non-commercial use is available under AGPL-3.0; commercial usage requires a separate license

RecipeSage is a strong fit for individuals and households that want an organized, searchable recipe library with collaborative planning and shopping workflows. Its import capabilities and PWA interface make it especially convenient across devices.

Recipya is a web-based recipe manager designed for families to collect, organize and share cooking recipes. It focuses on simplicity, cross-platform availability, and features to import, digitize and migrate existing recipe collections.

Key Features

• Save and organize recipes into cookbooks with a clean web interface
• Import recipes from websites and migrate from Mealie, Tandoor and Nextcloud Cookbook formats
• Digitize paper recipes (OCR-assisted) to convert physical recipes into searchable entries
• Automatic unit conversion between imperial and metric systems
• Automatic nutritional information calculation for recipes
• Print-friendly recipe output and UI options to prevent device sleep while viewing
• Theme support (follows system theme or choose from multiple custom themes)
• Cross-compiled builds for Windows, Linux and macOS and provided Docker packaging
• Built-in updater mechanism to detect and apply new releases

Use Cases

• Centralize family recipes into searchable cookbooks and share across household devices
• Migrate an existing recipe collection from other recipe managers into a modern, themed app
• Convert legacy paper recipes into digital, searchable entries with OCR and calculated nutrition

Limitations and Considerations

• The project is being rewritten in Rust; the Rust-based rewrite is not production-ready and may lack feature parity with the current Go implementation
• Some integrations or importers may require manual adjustments depending on source formatting

Recipya is a practical choice for users who want a focused recipe management app with import, OCR and nutrition features, packaged for desktop and container deployments. It emphasizes a simple, family-friendly UI and straightforward migration paths from other recipe managers.

Tamari is a web-based recipe manager built with Python and the Flask framework. It provides tools to store, organize, search, import, and share recipes along with meal planning and shopping list functionality.

Key Features

• User accounts with email/password login and optional password reset via mail
• Save detailed recipes (title, category, time, servings, ingredients, instructions, nutrition, photo) and mark favorites
• Real-time search-as-you-type and browse by category
• Explore and import recipes from a large indexed collection of external sites with one-click import
• Meal Planner to schedule recipes up to 30 days in advance
• Per-store shopping lists; add all recipe ingredients to a list and check items off; barcode scanning supported
• REST API to manage recipes, shopping lists, and meal plans programmatically
• Customization options: themes (light/dark), accent colors, photo size, items per page, and profile settings
• Docker image and manual installation instructions; includes database migrations and Gunicorn-based deployment
• Data export/import via ZIP for backups and migration

Use Cases

• Maintain a personal, searchable collection of family recipes with photos and nutrition info
• Plan weekly meals and generate shopping lists populated directly from chosen recipes
• Import recipes found online into a private collection for later use or sharing with friends

Limitations and Considerations

• Recipe import/parsing may fail on some websites due to varied HTML structures; imported content quality varies by source
• The default deployment uses a simple SQL database configuration; production setups may require custom DB tuning and reverse proxy configuration

Tamari is a practical, feature-rich option for individuals or households who want a private, self-hosted recipe management solution with programmatic access and mobile-friendly UI. It is suitable for local deployments via Docker or a standard Python/Flask stack.

Vanilla Cookbook is a lightweight self-hosted recipe manager focused on simplicity and minimal user work. It provides recipe scraping and parsing, unit conversion, recipe scaling, shopping lists and cooking logs, with optional LLM-powered assistants for recipe analysis and generation.

Key Features

• Smart ingredient parsing with multi-language support and unit conversion between US, imperial and metric (including fractions and temperature conversion)
• Recipe scraping from hundreds of sites via bookmarklet or URL paste, with HTML fallback parsing
• LLM Assist integration supporting multiple providers for scrape assist, text/image analysis, recipe tweaks, summarization and generation (requires API key)
• Recipe scaling, shopping list creation, and cooking logs with calendar view
• User authentication with configurable registration and public recipe sharing
• Automated database backups for Docker installs with scheduled and pre-migration backups and configurable retention
• Progressive Web App support for mobile install and share-to-parse workflows

Use Cases

• Personal cookbook: collect, clean and organize recipes scraped from the web or added manually
• Meal planning and shopping: scale recipes and generate shopping lists for planned meals
• Recipe experimentation: use LLM features to refactor directions, tidy messy ingredients, or generate new recipes from prompts

Limitations and Considerations

• LLM features require supplying API keys and may incur usage costs; functionality depends on the chosen provider
• Local development requires native build toolchain for dependencies like better-sqlite3
• Scraping/parsing may fail on some websites or non-standard recipe markup and may require manual cleanup

Vanilla Cookbook offers a focused, uncluttered interface for managing recipes with practical features for everyday cooking and optional AI enhancements. It is designed for easy Docker deployment and local hosting.

Fork Recipes is a simple, elegant frontend web application built with Django to manage personal food recipe collections. It is designed to work alongside the ForkApi backend and provides media-rich recipe management, meal planning, printing and backup tools.

Key Features

• Django 5.x Python frontend with HTML/CSS/JS UI and Docker/docker-compose deployment
• Postgres database support and preconfigured SSL/NoSSL options
• Create and organize recipes with images or video, categories and favorite flag
• Meal planning scheduler and shopping list integration for ingredients
• Print-ready recipe layouts (compact and extended) and exportable backup snapshots
• Smart utilities that integrate with external AI services: recipe scraper, generate-by-ingredients, translation, and audio narration (these features require an OpenAI API token)
• Import/export and apply database snapshots for backup/restore workflows

Use Cases

• Home cooks who want a searchable, media-rich personal recipe collection with meal planning
• Small kitchens or producers that need printable recipes and centralized media for menus or training
• Users who want to scrape or generate recipe variations, translate recipes, or add narrated steps via external AI services

Limitations and Considerations

• Many smart features (scraper, recipe generation, translation, audio narration) require an external OpenAI API token and are not available offline
• The frontend is intended to work with the ForkApi backend; deploying without a compatible API may limit functionality
• Audio narration is English-only as provided by the integrated service and scraper compatibility varies by target website

Fork Recipes is focused on a clean, media-first recipe management experience with practical features for planning, printing and backups. It is optimized for containerized deployment and integrates optional AI-powered utilities when API credentials are provided.

ManageMeals is an open-source web application for collecting, organizing and using recipes. It provides URL-based recipe import, a fast searchable interface, meal planning and shopping list generation. The frontend is built with SvelteKit and pairs with a separate backend service.

Key Features

• Import recipes by URL with support for hundreds of sites and AI-assisted parsing for non-standard pages
• Create meal plans (single day or weekly) with multiple course types and optional auto-generation
• Generate shopping lists from individual recipes or entire meal plans
• Fast, fuzzy search that handles spelling mistakes and returns results quickly
• Printer-friendly recipe view and a cooking mode to keep the screen awake while cooking
• Shareable public recipe links for easy viewing without registration
• Responsive SvelteKit frontend, bookmarklet for quick imports, and a planned browser extension

Use Cases

• Build a personal recipe collection by importing recipes from websites and blogs
• Plan weekly meals and automatically produce consolidated shopping lists
• Share curated recipe lists or single recipes with friends and family via public links

Limitations and Considerations

• The frontend requires the ManageMeals backend service to be running; the backend is a separate repository and must be configured
• AI-assisted imports rely on heuristics and may fail or require manual cleanup for some sites
• The public demo is read-only and has creation actions disabled; some integrations (browser extension) are still in progress

ManageMeals is suited for individuals who want a fast, privacy-friendly recipe manager and meal planner they can host themselves. It focuses on straightforward recipe workflows, searchability and interoperability with a backend service.