Mela – Recipe Manager

LOVE IT! Love it so much! This app has REALLY impressed me! We have been long-time users of Paprika - but switched because MELA DOESN’T HARVEST DATA. Win for Privacy. PLUS ITS A MUCH BETTER RECIPE MANAGER. I love being able to scan a recipe. It’s SO EASY to use. We were able to import our 1950 recipes in a snap (I know who needs nearly 2000 recipes?!) Our recipes are Organized, easy to find, easy to edit. The grocery list is awesome! Today I just found out about the RSS feeds which I absolutely love! And the price is reasonable. We have bought this for our family, and gifted it to a few friends. It’s truly awesome. I keep categories for home made cleaning products and beauty supplies. The Mela app makes it super easy to find them when I need them. I sure hope they don’t ever start collecting data so I have to stop using it! Please don’t! Thank you Mela!

I really want to love this app and it has so much going for it. It is easy to add recipes, they look beautiful, it is super easy to half recipes, and the grocery list function is actually really helpful. But once you add a decent number of recipes, Mela’s weaknesses in organization really come out and get annoying. The category labeling feature is clumsy and frustrating to use. You can add new category labels, but only from within a recipe. And if you want to change your labels later to better organize your growing recipe library, be prepared to spend a lot of time on this. You can only click one category at a time when designating categories from within a recipe. And once a category label is created, you can never delete that label from your list! It would be nice to be able to open up a category and either add or remove recipes from there. It would also be nice to have a way to easily switch between multiple open recipes because when you are in the middle of cooking one recipe and have to check a second recipe, there are just too many steps to find the first one again! I really hope that the developers of this app aren’t going to take their relative success and leave good enough alone. I will keep crossing my fingers for useful updates to Mela’s ability to organize and access my recipe library.

I really like this app, the UI is beautiful to look at, which is the primary reason I chose Mela over other apps that have much stronger features. I appreciate the simplicity, however there are some features I feel could be added to enhance the user experience without compromising the simplicity. • ability to import a url INSIDE of the app instead of just through safari • ability to rearrange the grocery list • option to show a small photo/icon of the chosen recipe in the meal planning section • Additionally, I sometimes add YouTube links in the notes and would appreciate notes to recognize this and create a hyperlink. I see this app has not been updated in over a year, I really hope it hasn’t been abandoned. I would hate to have to use an ugly app lol, but many of them are advancing far beyond what Mela is currently capable of and I’m starting to think I would be better off with an intuitive UI then a pretty one.

I use Mela every sine day, both to collect new recipes and for meal planning and cooking. And the RSS feature is genius! My one request is for a more robust scraping capability on sites like Instagram. I follow numerous cooking profiles and collect recipes from them. Mela has gotten a lot better at capturing such recipes but there is still probably about a third of what I want to save that I end up saving with a competitor app that is much more capable at this. Mela is far superior and much more enjoyable to use, and I would love to discard the other app and keep all my digital recipes in Mela.

Update: 05/16/2026 I’ve gotten pretty decent in managing my files; however, Editing the categories to remove accidental category made or edit an existing one I haven’t been able to do. If I correct the category in error, it just makes a new category entry. I like things neat and fairly easy; I don’t want my mistakes still available to choose from the list. I just got the app today and immediately began importing my recipes. The scan option works pretty decent, love the import option from websites, and love being able to assign categories. The only complaint I have so far is I haven’t been able to import any of my pdf file recipes. The message I get when trying says “no recipe found”. But for the cost, it’s still worth having especially since when I travel to help care for my Mom I can take my favorite recipes along that I may cook without all the hassle. Wish I understood why the pdf import function doesn’t work with either my Google drive or Dropbox, which is where I have almost all my electronic recipes currently stored.

I’m a stay at home mom and do majority of the cooking for my family of 6. I had sooo many recipes saved in my folders and different websites. I hated meal planning because it was all so disorganized. Now all my family favorite recipes are all in one place. It makes it so easy to make a grocery list. I love not scrolling though a bunch of blogs and ads. Everything is very clean and easy to use when I’m making the recipe. 100% recommend. The best app purchase that I’ve done in the last 5 years!