Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Mealime

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.

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.