What it does
Mealie is an open-source recipe manager with meal calendars and shopping lists. It imports web recipes or accepts manual entry, organizes collections into cookbooks and supports groups with separate household planning.
Mealie is a fit when someone can run and maintain the installation. Once available, a household can import a recipe, organize it into a cookbook, place it on a meal calendar and add ingredients to a shopping list. The editor also allows family recipes to be entered directly.
Groups share recipes, while households can keep meal plans and shopping lists separate. That distinction is useful when several related households use one installation without wanting identical weekly plans. The documentation also covers backups and importing collections from other recipe managers. Mealie is distributed under the AGPL license; hosting and upkeep remain separate responsibilities from the cooking features.
Strengths
- Groups and households separate shared recipes from individual planning.
- Imports from other managers support moving an existing collection.
Watch out for
- Self-hosting requires installation, maintenance and backups.
Best for
- Households with someone able to maintain a shared recipe server.
Sources
- Home - Mealie (Oct 26, 2026)
- GitHub - mealie-recipes/mealie: Mealie is a self hosted recipe manager and meal planner with a RestAPI backend and a reactive frontend application built in Vue for a pleasant user experience for the whole family. Easily add recipes into your database by providing the url and mealie will automatically import the relevant data or add a family recipe with the UI editor · GitHub (Oct 26, 2026)