I have tried out Living Cookbook, Plan to Eat, and eMeals (and am an affiliate for all three, just fyi), and I’d like to talk a little bit about the three and how they compare to one another.

If you choose to use a digital method of menu planning — or a digital tool to assist in your meal planning — I believe that all of these are excellent options.  The biggest difference between them is the differing balance of control to effort.  That is, some will afford you greater control over your end result, but require more effort on your part, while others will do more for you, but give you less control in the end.

Living Cookbook

2021 UPDATE: Living Cookbook has, unfortunately, been defunct for a few years now.  I’m now using Paprika.

Living Cookbook is the recipe software I use.  It’s my favorite all-around solution.  I store my recipe collection this way.  The “capture” feature enables me to copy-and-paste recipes fairly easily from any digital source.  I can organize them into folders and with tags and flags.  And the recipe portion of the interface is pretty intuitive.

This is extremely powerful software, and will do a wide variety of things related to recipe management.  Unfortunately, because it’s so powerful, I’ve found it less than intuitive when working with the more complex elements and how they interact with one another.  You can scale recipes, manage inventory, create menus and grocery lists, etc.  But I have a hard time sorting out how the program interacts with itself when, for instance, you’re creating a grocery list from a menu.  The terminology could be clarified better so that it’s obvious to the user which measurements are transferring where.  The other unfortunate disadvantage to Living Cookbook is that it’s Windows-only. 🙁

The tremendous advantage to Living Cookbook, though, is that you have full control.  You choose what goes on your menu, you enter all of the recipes, everything resides on your computer under your control, etc.  You only have to pay for it once, and then it’s yours, period.  (If you want to upgrade when upgrades come out, you can choose to pay for those.  But it’s software that you own, not an ongoing service.)  And if you can figure out the details, it will do a lot.

If you use Living Cookbook, I recommend a little Firefox plugin called Recipefox, which will make grabbing recipes from websites (especially major ones like Allrecipes) even faster than the built-in capture tool.

Plan to Eat

Plan to Eat is similar in its basic functionality.  This is a service you sign up for monthly or annually, and it allows you to save/store recipes and to create menus and grocery lists.  To be honest, I find the interface a lot more intuitive and obvious than Living Cookbook, because it’s much simpler.  In part, that’s because it doesn’t do as much, so there’s a bit of a trade-off.

The service is completely online, which will be a perk for some people and a liability for others.  (Your recipes do not reside on your machine.  You can download a backup of them in .csv format, but you won’t want to read them like that.)  Now, if you suspend your service, they don’t delete them; they save them in case you come back.  But while you aren’t paying for the service, you don’t have access to them.

The added advantage is ease of use and the fact that they store everything for you.  Disadvantages are the recurring cost, the fact that it’s not as powerful, and the fact that if you want your recipes on your own machine you’ll have to double up on work to get them there. [As of 2025, this is what we’re primarily using, because it’s easy to share amongst family members.]

eMeals

eMeals is the ultimate in done-for-you planning.  You can’t get any easier, short of having someone else actually cook for you.  When you sign up for eMeals, they send you a finished meal plan, complete with recipes and grocery list, every week.  If you want lunches and breakfasts planned for you, you can sign up for those, too.

There are plans for a variety of dietary needs/preferences, including gluten-free, paleo, vegetarian, and “clean eating.” (Lunches and breakfasts aren’t tailored to any of these things, though; just dinners.)

The obvious advantage here is that you don’t have to plan anything; it’s all done for you.

The disadvantage is that you have no control over the finished plan, short of choosing which general one you’re on.  If your family doesn’t like fish and there’s a fish recipe — well, you can either go with the “yucky” fish recipe or you can tailor the plan and lose much of the benefit of having it done for you in the first place.

(You won’t get anything better-tailored, though, unless you hire a personal chef, which would, of course, be a lot more expensive.)

(The Fresh 20 is a similar service I have also tried and liked.  They don’t have as many meal plans available, but they do have gluten-free and vegetarian options. A distinct advantage I’ve found with eMeals is that they actually email the plan itself to you each week, as an attachment; you don’t have to go to the site to download it.  I often forgot to go retrieve my meal plans with other services.)

Which One for You?

Which one is right for you?  How much control do you need?  How much do you want done for you?  Have you used another tool/service you like better?

Shared at Keep it Real Thursday.