Paprika has been around since 2010 and has earned a loyal following as a straightforward recipe manager. It runs entirely on your device, uses simple file sync, and does the basics well. If you've been using Paprika for years, it probably feels like a comfortable old cookbook.
But the world of recipe apps has changed a lot since Paprika was first built. AI has made it possible to import recipes from sources that didn't even exist a decade ago — social media videos, cookbook photos, Instagram posts — and to organize and cook from those recipes in ways that older technology simply can't support.
Deglaze, released in 2023, was built from the ground up with these modern capabilities in mind. Both apps hold a 4.9 rating on the App Store, so clearly each is doing something right. The question is which approach fits the way you cook today.
We're obviously biased (you're reading this on the Deglaze blog), but we'll do our best to give you a fair picture. Where the apps are similar, we'll say so. Where they differ, we'll explain what each offers so you can decide what matters most.
This comparison is accurate as of February 2026. Both apps update regularly, so some details may change over time.
At a Glance: Why Cooks Choose Deglaze
Before we get into the details, here's a quick summary of the areas where Deglaze stands out:
- Modern AI-powered imports — Save recipes from your browser, social media, and even cookbook photos with two taps. Paprika requires navigating to recipes in an in-app browser.
- Significantly better import quality — AI-powered parsing handles complex recipes accurately, including multi-section recipes that trip up Paprika's older technology
- Automatic organization — AI-powered smart collections organize recipes by course, type, and dietary preference without any manual work
- Powerful filtering — Combine multiple filters to find exactly what you want to cook. Paprika only lets you browse one category at a time.
- Household sharing — Share a recipe library, grocery list, and meal plan with your household while keeping individual preferences
- Smarter grocery list — Deglaze learns the items you buy regularly and suggests them, so you're less likely to forget staples
- Dedicated cooking mode — One-tap timers, AI-powered inline ingredients, multi-recipe cooking sessions, and cooking history
- Accurate recipe scaling — Handles complex ingredient formats that trip up other apps, including Paprika
- Recipe discovery — Built-in recipe search and a social feed to see what friends are cooking
- Active development — Frequent updates with new features, compared to Paprika's minimal update cadence
Now let's look at each area in detail.
Importing Recipes
This is probably the single biggest difference between the two apps, and it affects your experience every time you want to save a new recipe.
How You Save Recipes
Paprika's primary method for saving recipes is an in-app browser. You open Paprika, navigate to the recipe's URL within the app, then tap save. There's also a Safari extension you can configure, but the core workflow requires you to leave whatever app you discovered the recipe in and use Paprika's built-in browser instead.
With Deglaze, you save recipes directly from wherever you find them. Browsing a food blog in Safari? Share to Deglaze with two taps and keep browsing. Watching a recipe video on Instagram or TikTok? Share it. See a recipe on NYT Cooking? Share it. You never have to leave the app you're in to save a recipe, and Deglaze processes everything in the background on our servers so you're never waiting around.
This might sound like a minor workflow difference, but it adds up significantly — especially if you save recipes from social media or tend to save multiple recipes in a single browsing session.
What You Can Import
Paprika is limited to websites and blogs. It has no support for photo imports, so cookbook recipes and screenshots need to be entered manually. Social media imports are technically possible through the in-app browser, but the experience is cumbersome and the parsing often fails.
Deglaze can import from virtually any source: websites and blogs, Instagram posts and reels, TikTok videos, YouTube videos (it extracts recipes from spoken audio), Pinterest pins, screenshots, and cookbook photos. For cookbook lovers, Deglaze offers first-class cookbook management — when you import a recipe from a cookbook photo, Deglaze often finds the matching book and displays the cover automatically. All it takes is a few photos of the recipe pages.
Import Quality
Paprika uses older, non-AI parsing technology to extract recipe data from web pages. It works reasonably well for simple recipes, but frequently struggles with complex formatting — especially recipes with multiple ingredient sections (like a recipe with separate lists for the cake and the frosting). When parsing goes wrong, it's up to you to fix it manually.
Deglaze uses modern AI models combined with finely tuned queries to extract recipes accurately, even from tricky sources like handwritten cookbook pages, fast-paced social media videos, or recipes with complex multi-section formatting. The difference in import accuracy is substantial and saves you time every time you add a recipe.
Organizing Your Recipes
Both apps let you put recipes into collections (called Categories in Paprika), and a recipe can live in multiple collections in both apps. But the approaches to organization are fundamentally different.
In Paprika, all organization is manual. Every recipe you save sits in an unsorted library unless you manually assign it to a category. If you want to browse your pasta recipes, your vegetarian options, or your quick weeknight meals, you need to have created those categories yourself and sorted every recipe into them. Over time, this becomes a real maintenance burden.
Deglaze gives you the best of both worlds. AI-powered smart collections automatically tag your recipes by course (mains, sides, desserts), type (pasta, soup, salad, seafood), and dietary preference (vegetarian, vegan, etc.) — so you get useful organization from the moment you start adding recipes. You can also create custom collections on top of this automatic foundation, giving you full flexibility to organize recipes your way.
Filtering is another area where the gap is significant. Deglaze lets you combine multiple filters simultaneously — find vegetarian main dishes you haven't cooked yet that take less than an hour. In Paprika, you can only browse within a single category at a time, with no way to narrow things down further.
In a 2025 survey of Deglaze users, 68% said that having their recipes easily accessible and organized resulted in them cooking more, and 72% said it resulted in them enjoying cooking more. A good recipe organizer really does make a difference.
Grocery List
Both apps offer a grocery list that organizes items by store section to make shopping faster, and both let you add non-recipe items manually.
Deglaze's grocery list app goes further by learning from your habits. The items you add manually — staples like milk, eggs, bread, or whatever you buy regularly — get remembered and suggested the next time you open the add screen. Restocking your essentials becomes as simple as tapping the items you need. It's a small feature, but it saves time every week and means you're less likely to forget something at the store.
Meal Planning
Both apps offer a calendar-based meal planner where you can assign recipes to specific days with labels like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Deglaze adds several touches that make the meal planning experience more complete. Deglaze shows grocery status for each planned meal — both on the calendar and within the recipe itself — so you can see at a glance which meals are ready to go and which still need shopping. Planned recipes are automatically surfaced at the top of your recipe library for the week, keeping everything connected.
From a 2025 survey of 358 Deglaze users, 84% who adopted a meal planning workflow reported cooking more often, and 81% said they were spending less money on food overall. When a meal planning app actually reduces friction, the benefits compound quickly.
For a deeper look at how Deglaze approaches meal planning (including a more flexible option for people who don't want to plan every meal), check out our guide to meal planning in Deglaze.
Household Sharing
Paprika has no support for multiple users in the same household. If you want to share your recipe library with a partner or family member, you need to share a login — which means you can't have individual preferences or see who added what.
Deglaze's household feature lets multiple people share a recipe library, grocery list, and meal planning calendar while each having their own account. You can filter your recipe library to see just the recipes you added versus ones your partner saved. On the grocery list, you can see who added each item. Everyone stays on the same page without having to compromise on how they use the app.
For families or couples who cook together, this is a meaningful difference — especially when it comes to meal planning and grocery shopping coordination.
Recipe Discovery
Paprika is purely a recipe storage and organization tool — it doesn't include any features for discovering new recipes.
Deglaze includes a social feed where you can follow friends to see what they're cooking (a post is optionally created each time someone cooks a recipe) and follow your favorite recipe creators for new inspiration. There's also a personalized recipe search that pulls from trusted food sites, so you can discover and save new recipes without ever leaving the app.
Cooking Mode
Paprika doesn't have a dedicated cooking mode, though it does let you start timers by tapping a time mentioned in an instruction.
Deglaze has a full cooking experience designed to make your time in the kitchen easier. Your screen stays on so you don't have to keep tapping your phone with messy hands. One-tap timers let you start countdowns directly from recipe instructions, and you can have multiple timers running at once. If you're cooking multiple dishes — say, for a dinner party — you can have multiple recipes open and switch between them with a single tap.
Our AI-powered inline ingredients feature shows you the exact quantities you need directly within each instruction, so you never have to scroll back to the ingredients list mid-step. And Deglaze keeps a cooking history for each recipe, including any notes and photos you take along the way — a nice way to track what you've made and remember adjustments for next time.
Recipe Scaling
Both apps offer recipe scaling, but the accuracy differs significantly. Real-world recipes are full of complex formatting — alternate measurements in parentheses, additive quantities like "¼ cup + 2 tbsp," and multi-part ingredient descriptions — and Paprika's scaling frequently gets these wrong.
In a head-to-head test of 15 real-world ingredient phrases, Deglaze scaled all 15 correctly while Paprika got 7 right. You can see the full comparison, including exactly what went wrong for each phrase, in our recipe scaling deep dive.
Design and Usability
Paprika's design hasn't seen a significant update in nearly a decade, and it shows. The interface feels dated compared to modern apps, and some interactions feel clunky. This won't matter to everyone — if you're used to Paprika and it works for you, the familiarity might be a plus. But if you value a polished, modern experience, the difference is noticeable.
Deglaze is a modern cooking app with extensive resources dedicated to making tasks easy and intuitive. A few usability differences worth noting: in Paprika, the main navigation disappears when you're viewing a recipe, so checking your grocery list means closing the recipe first. In Deglaze, the bottom nav is always available so you can switch between your recipe library, grocery list, and calendar at any time.
Paprika also has a very slow update cadence — just two minor updates in all of 2025. What you see today is essentially what you get. Deglaze is actively developed with frequent new features and improvements.
Where Paprika Has the Edge
In the interest of fairness, Paprika does have advantages worth considering.
Desktop apps: Paprika offers native Mac and Windows apps (sold separately at $29.99 each). Deglaze is currently available on iPhone, iPad, and Android, but doesn't have a desktop app yet.
Pantry tracking: Paprika includes a pantry feature that lets you track what ingredients you have at home. Deglaze doesn't currently offer this.
One-time pricing: If you strongly prefer a one-time purchase over a subscription, Paprika's pricing model may appeal to you (more on this below).
Pricing
This is one of the starkest differences between the two apps, and it reflects fundamentally different approaches to building a recipe app.
Paprika is a one-time purchase: $4.99 for each mobile platform (iOS or Android) and $29.99 for each desktop platform (Mac or Windows). There is no free plan — you pay upfront. The trade-off is that you own it outright with no ongoing costs.
Deglaze has a free plan that includes a limited number of recipe imports per week, with unlimited imports and full feature access available through Deglaze Pro at $49.99/year in the US. The subscription model supports the ongoing server costs that make AI-powered imports, smart organization, and features like inline ingredients possible — these capabilities require cloud processing that a one-time purchase can't sustain.
If you don't need AI-powered imports, automatic organization, or any of the modern features that require server-side processing, Paprika's one-time price is hard to beat. But if you value accurate imports from any source, smart organization that works without manual effort, and an app that's actively improving, Deglaze Pro delivers a lot of value for the price.
Try Deglaze for Yourself
The best way to see the difference is to try both apps and decide which fits your cooking style. We're confident that once you experience Deglaze's import quality, organization, and cooking features, you'll see why we built things the way we did.
Download Deglaze for iPhone, iPad, or Android. New users get a free trial of Deglaze Pro to try everything — including AI-powered imports, meal planning, smart grocery lists, recipe scaling, and inline ingredients.
Have questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you at help@deglaze.app.
