BigOven

Best Self Hosted Alternatives to BigOven

A curated collection of the 2 best self hosted alternatives to BigOven.

BigOven provides web and mobile apps for discovering, organizing, and sharing recipes, creating meal plans and grocery lists, and managing cooking tasks to simplify meal preparation for home cooks and food creators.

Alternatives List

#1
Mealie

Mealie

A self-hosted recipe manager for organizing, importing, sharing, and planning meals with shopping lists, user accounts, and a modern web UI.

Mealie screenshot

Mealie is a self-hosted web application for managing a personal or family recipe collection. It focuses on fast recipe capture (including importing from URLs), organizing and sharing recipes, and turning them into practical meal plans and shopping lists.

Key Features

  • Recipe creation and organization with categories/tags and rich recipe pages
  • Recipe import from supported websites/URLs (recipe scraping) to quickly save online recipes
  • Meal planning and a calendar-style workflow for planning upcoming meals
  • Shopping/grocery lists generated from recipes and meal plans
  • Multi-user support with authentication and household-style sharing/collaboration
  • REST API for integrating Mealie with other tools and automations
  • Docker-first deployment options with persistent storage support

Use Cases

  • Replace a proprietary recipe app by hosting your own searchable recipe library
  • Plan weekly meals and automatically generate a consolidated grocery list
  • Share and manage recipes collaboratively within a household or small group

Mealie is well-suited for people who want a private, organized recipe workflow—from importing recipes to planning meals and shopping—through a clean web interface and API-driven integrations.

11.1kstars
1.1kforks
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#2
Bar Assistant

Bar Assistant

Manage a personal cocktail library with ingredients, inventory, and mixology tools to plan and make drinks from what you have.

Bar Assistant screenshot

Bar Assistant is a self-hosted web app for organizing cocktail recipes and running a home bar inventory. It helps you store and discover drinks, track bottles and ingredients you own, and find what you can make with your current stock.

Key Features

  • Cocktail recipe library with structured ingredients, measures, and preparation steps
  • Ingredient and bar inventory management to track what you have on hand
  • “What can I make?”-style discovery based on available ingredients
  • Support for tags/categories (e.g., spirit base, style) to organize recipes
  • Import/export and data management tools for maintaining a personal collection
  • Docker-based deployment for repeatable setup and updates

Use Cases

  • Maintain a personal cocktail cookbook with consistent measurements and notes
  • Track your liquor cabinet and quickly find drinks you can make tonight
  • Plan shopping by identifying missing ingredients for specific cocktails

Bar Assistant is a practical choice for home bartenders who want a structured, searchable recipe database paired with inventory tracking. It focuses on personal collection management and “make-with-what-you-have” workflows rather than restaurant POS operations.

946stars
41forks
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Why choose an open source alternative?

  • •Data ownership: Keep your data on your own servers
  • •No vendor lock-in: Freedom to switch or modify at any time
  • •Cost savings: Reduce or eliminate subscription fees
  • •Transparency: Audit the code and know exactly what's running