AnyList earned its reputation the honest way: it is one of the best shared grocery lists on the iPhone, and households swear by it. The recipe features came later, and it shows. If your starting point is “I have recipes I love and I want to cook from them,” rather than “I need a list my partner can edit,” a recipe-first app fits better. Here is how to think about the switch.
Where AnyList shines, and where it strains
The list is the product. Sharing is instant, checkboxes sync across the household, and the aisle grouping works. Nobody switches away from AnyList because the list failed them.
The strain shows up around recipes. As of this writing, importing recipes from the web requires the paid AnyList Complete upgrade, and the recipe browsing, scaling, and cooking experience feels like what it is: a capable list app with recipes attached. If most of your time is spent in the recipes rather than the list, you feel that inversion every day.
What a recipe-first alternative should get right
Import that works, free. Saving a recipe from a link is the front door. It should not sit behind the paywall, and it should produce clean ingredients and steps, not a pasted blob. You can try Trivet’s importer right in your browser, no install needed.
Scaling and cooking built in. Change the servings and every amount should recalculate. When you cook, the screen should stay awake and walk you through the steps. Try the scaling math here.
A grocery list that comes from the recipes. The list should be generated: add a recipe or a week’s plan, duplicates merge, items sort by aisle. That is the part AnyList users rightly refuse to give up, so the alternative has to do it well.
Privacy without an account. AnyList uses accounts to power sharing. If you do not need household sync, an app with no account, no ads, and on-device storage is simply less to worry about. If you do want sharing, the cleaner route leans on tools your household already has, rather than a new account.
How Trivet compares
- Web import is free, never capped, and built to work the first time.
- Scaling, cooking mode, saving from social posts, iCloud sync, and full export are free forever.
- The meal planner turns a week into a grocery list in one tap, and the list combines duplicates for everyone. A week of seven planned meals is free; Premium removes the limit and sorts the list by store aisle.
- The grocery list can be shared with your household through Apple Reminders. Add or check off an item in either place and the other one updates.
- There is no Trivet account. Recipes live on your devices and sync through your own iCloud, which you can turn off in Settings, so they follow you to an iPad too. Trivet has no sync server and cannot read them, and the App Privacy label reads Data Not Collected.
- Premium adds unlimited planning, the aisle-sorted list, unlimited scans, and unlimited cookbooks for $19.99 a year or a one-time $39.99 lifetime purchase. See pricing.
The honest caveat
If the shared household list is the center of your kitchen life, AnyList is genuinely good at it. Trivet does not run its own multi-person list. It connects your grocery list to a list in Apple Reminders, which you share the way you share any Reminders list, and keeps the two in step in both directions. That suits a household that already lives in Reminders, and it is a lighter fit than AnyList’s dedicated shared-list features. Some households run both: AnyList for the shared staples, Trivet for the recipes, the plan, and the list it generates.
Moving over
There is no lock-in either direction. Start by importing a handful of your most-cooked recipes from their original sites into Trivet, cook from them for a week, and see which app you reach for. Your recipes stay exportable from Trivet at any time, as plain JSON you keep.