Paprika vs Recipe Keeper vs FoodCore
These three come up together in search results and are not really competitors. Two are consumer recipe managers; one is business software. Comparing them on features misses the point — the question is whether you sell what you make.
The short version
If you cook for your family, Paprika or Recipe Keeper will serve you better than FoodCore will, and cost less. That is not a sales technique, it is the honest answer.
What the consumer apps do well
Paprika’s web capture is genuinely excellent: it pulls a recipe off a page, strips the story, and keeps ingredients and method structured. Recipe Keeper is stronger on meal planning and shopping lists across a week. Both sync across devices, both are cheap, and both are pleasant to use.
Neither models an ingredient as a thing you buy. “200g plain flour” is text. There is no pack size, no price, no supplier and no allergen record, because a home cook does not need one.
Where that breaks for a business
The moment you sell what you make, three requirements appear that text-based recipes cannot satisfy:
- Cost per portion, derived from what you actually paid for a 16 kg sack, not estimated
- Allergen data per ingredient, inherited by every recipe and sub-recipe that uses it
- A compliant label — for pre-packed for direct sale food, a full ingredient list in weight order with the 14 allergens emphasised
You can bolt the first onto a spreadsheet. The second and third are where manual systems fail, because they depend on remembering which recipes are affected when something changes. The allergen tracking guide covers why that chain breaks.
Which should you choose?
- Cooking at home: Paprika if you capture a lot from the web, Recipe Keeper if you plan weeks of meals. Do not pay for business software.
- Selling occasionally, a few orders a month: a consumer app plus our free recipe cost calculator is a reasonable stack.
- Selling regularly, especially pre-packed: you need ingredient records, allergen inheritance and labels. That is what FoodCore is for.
Frequently asked questions
Is Paprika the best recipe manager? For home cooking, it is among the best, particularly for web capture. For a food business it is the wrong category rather than a poor product.
Can I migrate from Paprika to FoodCore? There is no direct import. In practice most people re-enter their sellable products, which is fewer recipes than they expect — you sell a fraction of what you cook.