What is Mealie used for?

Mealie is a self-hosted application for managing recipes, planning meals and building shopping lists, with a REST API and a Vue front end suited to families. It is a good fit for keeping a family recipe collection, planning weekly meals and shopping, and importing recipes from cooking websites.

Is Mealie open source?

Yes. Mealie is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at mealie-recipes/mealie and is written mainly in Python.

Yes. Mealie is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Mealie?

Yes. Mealie can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What are some alternatives to Mealie?

Similar open-source tools in the Productivity category include Tandoor Recipes, Dashy and Homer. SaaS products in the same category include Cakora, Cobble and Drizzlelemons.

Is Mealie actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Mealie was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.28.0, published on 24 September 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.

Mealie: open-source productivity

About Mealie

Mealie is a self-hosted application for keeping recipes, planning meals and building shopping lists. It has a REST API backend and a reactive front end written in Vue, and it is designed so that everyone in a household can use it comfortably from a browser.

Recipes can be created by pasting a URL, in which case Mealie imports the relevant data automatically, or by typing a family recipe into the built-in editor. A meal planner helps decide what to cook over the coming week, ingredients can be pushed to a shopping list organized by supermarket sections, and recipes can be grouped into cookbooks using your own criteria. The interface is translated into more than 35 languages.

Mealie is written in Python and licensed under AGPL-3.0. Docker is the easy path for deployment, with images published on Docker Hub and the GitHub Container Registry, and a demo and documentation are available. A documented API also lets third-party applications interact with the recipe database.

Key features

Recipe import from any URL
Built-in editor for family recipes
Weekly meal planner
Shopping lists grouped by supermarket section
Cookbooks for grouping recipes
REST API for third-party integrations
Translations for over 35 languages

Good fit for

→Keeping a family recipe collection
→Planning weekly meals and shopping
→Importing recipes from cooking websites

Built with: Python
Tags: recipes; meal-planner; shopping-list; self-hosted; docker; vue; python; cooking

Mealie: questions and answers

What is Mealie used for?: Mealie is a self-hosted application for managing recipes, planning meals and building shopping lists, with a REST API and a Vue front end suited to families. It is a good fit for keeping a family recipe collection, planning weekly meals and shopping, and importing recipes from cooking websites.
Is Mealie open source?: Yes. Mealie is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at mealie-recipes/mealie and is written mainly in Python.
Is Mealie free?: Yes. Mealie is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Mealie?: Yes. Mealie can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What are some alternatives to Mealie?: Similar open-source tools in the Productivity category include Tandoor Recipes, Dashy and Homer. SaaS products in the same category include Cakora, Cobble and Drizzlelemons.
Is Mealie actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Mealie was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.28.0, published on 24 September 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.