Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Paprika Recipe Manager

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.

Grocy is a web-based household management system focused on groceries and consumables. It helps you track pantry inventory, shopping, and consumption, while also covering related home organization needs like recipes and chores. Grocy is designed around stock movements, best-before dates, and product metadata to reduce waste and keep supplies accurate.

Key Features

• Pantry inventory with stock transactions (purchase/consume/transfer), quantity units, and location support
• Best-before date tracking with expiry handling and notifications
• Shopping list management, including “missing items” based on desired stock levels
• Barcode scanning support for fast product identification and stock actions
• Recipe management with ingredient linking and automatic stock deduction based on servings
• Chores and tasks with schedules and assignment (useful for shared households)
• Built-in REST API for integrations and automation (e.g., scanners, dashboards, scripts)
• Multi-language UI and configurable settings for products, units, and workflows

Use Cases

• Track pantry/freezer inventory and get alerted before items expire
• Generate shopping lists from minimum stock targets and planned recipes
• Run a shared household system for chores, recurring tasks, and shopping

Limitations and Considerations

• Primarily designed for household-scale inventory (not a full retail/warehouse system)
• Barcode workflows often benefit from compatible mobile clients or external scanner setups

Grocy fits users who want more structure than a simple shopping list: it models real stock movements and links them to recipes and household routines. With its API and flexible configuration, it can serve as a central “home ERP” for groceries and daily consumables.

KitchenOwl is a household-focused kitchen organizer that helps groups plan meals, manage recipes, and maintain shared grocery/shopping lists. It is designed for families/flatmates and emphasizes quick list entry, recipe-driven shopping, and multi-user collaboration across web and mobile clients.

Key Features

• Shared shopping lists with multi-user collaboration for households
• Recipe management with ingredient lists and instructions
• Meal planning to schedule recipes and plan upcoming meals
• Generate shopping items from recipes/meal plans
• Multiple kitchens/households support (separate spaces for different groups)
• Web interface plus companion mobile apps

Use Cases

• Families coordinating weekly meal plans and grocery runs
• Flatmates sharing a single always-up-to-date shopping list
• Home cooks organizing recipes and turning them into shopping items

Limitations and Considerations

• Feature depth is focused on household kitchen workflows (not a general-purpose task manager)

KitchenOwl fits users who want a lightweight, private alternative to hosted grocery list and recipe apps, while still supporting collaboration for multiple people. It is particularly useful when meal planning and recipe-to-shopping workflows are central to the household’s routine.

CookCLI is the official command-line toolchain for Cooklang, a plain-text recipe markup format designed to be easy to write, diff, and store in Git. It parses Cooklang files and helps turn them into practical outputs such as rendered recipes and shopping lists.

Key Features

• Parses Cooklang recipe files (a lightweight, plain-text recipe markup)
• Exports/prints recipes into user-friendly outputs (for reading/sharing)
• Generates shopping lists from one or more recipes
• Ingredient scaling/multipliers for adjusting servings
• Designed to fit into developer-friendly workflows (files on disk, easy to version)
• Extensible CLI-style usage suited for scripting and automation

Use Cases

• Keep a personal recipe collection as text files and render them on demand
• Generate a consolidated shopping list for weekly meal prep from multiple recipes
• Store and review recipe changes over time using Git diffs and pull requests

CookCLI is a good fit if you want a minimal, text-first recipe workflow with reproducible outputs via the terminal. It pairs naturally with any editor and file-based sync/backup approach, while producing practical artifacts for cooking and grocery planning.

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.