Comparison
Prep Slate vs Paprika: an honest comparison.
Paprika is the recipe app most people land on, and for good reason, it is a dependable vault you buy once. Prep Slate is a different tool: a guided cook mode, a planner that knows when to start, and scaling that does the math a cook would actually trust, all in an interface we have fussed over down to the smallest detail. Here is where each one is the better pick, laid out plainly.
Where Paprika wins
- One-time purchase, no subscription. Pay once, sync is free, and it is yours for years.
- A long track record of reliable URL import and a deep, mature feature set.
- Native desktop apps for Mac and Windows, not just the web and a phone.
Where Prep Slate wins
- A real guided cook mode: step and ingredients on one screen, progress saved to your account, so it survives a reload or a switch of devices. On iPhone, “Hey Prep, next” moves it along without touching the screen.
- Scale by entering a serving count, not doing multiplier math, with kitchen-friendly rounding.
- A planner that schedules prep backward from dinner, and a shopping list that remembers which recipe every item came from.
- It connects to the AI assistant you already use — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or anything else that takes a connector — so you can ask it to plan the week around your calendar and it can reach your library directly. Here is how that works.
- A modern, beautiful interface where every screen has been thought through, the difference you feel in the first five minutes.
Feature by feature
The differences that show up while you cook.
| Paprika | Prep Slate | |
|---|---|---|
| Guided cook mode | Screen stays on; tap to highlight steps and cross off ingredientsTimers detected in the text. No guided view, though: ingredients and directions are separate tabs you tap between, and your place is only kept while the recipe stays pinned. | Built around itScreen-wake-lock, step + ingredients together, the step's own ingredients surfacing as you advance, background per-step timers, server-saved progress, and hands-free voice on iPhone. |
| Ingredient scaling | Any multiplier (2x, 1/3, 1.5)You enter a multiplier, not a serving count, so going from 4 servings to 6 is math you do first. | Any serving countEnter exact servings; quantities round the way a cook writes them (3 eggs, not 2.5). |
| Meal planning | Calendar with reusable menusA date-grid calendar: you pick the day, but nothing works backward from when you want dinner on the table. | Timeline plannerSchedules prep backward from when you want to eat, so you know when to start each dish. |
| Shopping list | Combines duplicates, sorts by aisle1 egg plus 2 eggs rolls up to 3 eggs, and the list is grouped by store aisle. | Dedupes, groups by aisleSame ingredient across recipes rolls into one line with a real total, the list is grouped by store aisle, and each line shows which recipes it came from. |
| Works with your AI assistant | Community-built onlySeveral people have written connectors against Paprika's cloud API and shared them, which is a real credit to the community. They are not from Paprika, though, so you host and maintain one yourself. | Built inAdd Prep Slate to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or anything else that takes a connector and it can search your library, plan the week around your calendar, and build the shopping list. Nothing to host, and you can revoke it any time. |
| Pricing | One-time, ~$4.99 mobileMac and Windows are $29.99 each, bought separately. Cloud sync is free. Cheaper over the long run. | Subscription$4.99/mo or $39.99/yr after a 14-day free trial. One subscription covers web and iOS. |
| Data portability | Export availableExports to its own format; your recipes are not trapped. | JSON + printable pagesExport the whole library any time, even after you cancel. No lock-in. |
Paprika pricing and feature details from paprikaapp.com, July 2026. Cook-mode and scaling notes come from our own hands-on time with the app, not a formal lab test. We keep this page current; if anything here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
So which should you pick?
Pick Paprika if you want a vault. Pick Prep Slate if you want a sous-chef.
If you mostly want to store recipes you have collected, Paprika's buy-once model is hard to beat. If the part that frustrates you is the cooking itself, the ingredients a tab away from the step, the multiplier math, the scaling that asks for half an egg, that is the exact gap Prep Slate was built to close, in an app designed to be a genuinely pleasant place to spend your evenings. Try it free for two weeks and cook one dinner from it before you decide.
Is Paprika or Prep Slate cheaper?
Paprika is a one-time purchase, about $4.99 on iOS or Android and $29.99 each on Mac and Windows, bought separately per platform, with free cloud sync, so over several years it costs less. Prep Slate is a subscription, $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr, with a 14-day free trial. You are paying for active development: a real cook mode, a planner, and per-serving scaling.
Does Paprika have a cook mode?
Paprika keeps the screen on while a recipe is open, lets you tap to highlight the current step and cross off ingredients, and detects timers written into the text. What it lacks is a guided view: ingredients and directions are separate tabs you tap between, and your place is only kept while the recipe stays pinned. Prep Slate is built around a cook mode that shows the step and its ingredients together and saves progress to your account, so it survives a reload or a switch of devices.
Can I move my recipes from Paprika to Prep Slate?
Yes, in bulk: export your Paprika library to a .paprikarecipes file and Prep Slate imports the whole thing at once. For anything outside Paprika, URL import works for almost any recipe site and photo import covers the rest — snap a cookbook page or a screenshot and the ingredients and steps are pulled in. Either way your Prep Slate library exports as JSON any time, even after you cancel, so you are never locked in.
Can I use either one from Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity?
Prep Slate connects to all three, and to anything else that takes a connector: you add it in your assistant's connector settings, paste one address, and approve it on Prep Slate's own sign-in screen. Once it is on, you can ask your assistant to plan dinners around the nights you are actually home, find the recipes you saved with a particular ingredient, or push the week onto your shopping list, and it reaches the real app rather than a copy. Paprika has no official connector, though several people have built and shared their own against its cloud API, which you would host and maintain yourself.
A note from
the maker
I am a home cook, not a chef. I cook most nights, I save recipes from all over, and for years I used the same apps everyone else does. They were good apps. I just had opinions.
I wanted the screen to stay lit at step three, with chicken on my hands. I wanted to check the ingredients without losing my place. I wanted to double a recipe without being handed two-thirds of an egg. None of that is a knock on anyone else's cook mode. I just knew exactly how I wanted mine to work, and I wanted it to be beautiful.
So I built the tool I wanted on the counter: one that stays out of the way while you cook. The screen stays lit. Your place is saved. The math is the math a cook would actually do. And your recipes are yours to take with you, always, even if you leave.
That is the whole idea. If it earns a place next to your stove, it has done its job.
Mark
Home cook, maker of Prep Slate
Cook one dinner from it. Then decide.
Fourteen days free. Cancel before then and you are never charged. Your library is always yours.