Alternative · Apple Notes
Recipes, beyond Apple Notes.
Samla is a recipe app in the browser: it saves the recipe, plans the week and writes the shopping list. This page is for anyone who already keeps recipes in Notes and is wondering whether it is worth moving. Short answer: not until the folder starts costing you time.
25 kr / month
Or 20 kr a month billed yearly. A free plan that keeps working, with no card.
Free
Free, and it will hold text. It will not plan a week or write a shopping list.
Row by row
What the two actually do.
Everything about other apps was checked on 2026-09-16 against their own pages:
| Feature | Samla | Apple Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A free plan that keeps working, not a trial | Yes | Yes |
| Save a recipe from a link | Yes | No |
| Samla reads a page that has no structured recipe | Yes | No |
| Import from a photo of a printed page | Yes | Partly |
| Plan the week | Yes | No |
| Shopping list from the plan | Yes | No |
| A household: everyone sees the same recipes and lists | Yes | Partly |
| Swedish interface | Yes | Yes |
| Works in a browser, nothing to install | Yes | Partly |
| iPhone and Android app | No | Yes |
Honestly
Which of them is yours?
When Apple Notes is the better buy
You have five recipes and no plans for more. Notes is already there, costs nothing, and needs no account.
You do not want another account. That is a fair reason on its own, and Notes already syncs across your Apple devices.
All you need is the text. A note holds text indefinitely and never asks you for anything.
When Samla is
You want to plan the week. Notes has no week in it, and therefore no shopping list that knows what you planned to cook.
You save from links. Samla pulls the recipe out of the page; pasted into a note, the ads, the comments and the life story come along with it.
There is more than one of you. A shared note is a shared note. A household is the whole collection, the week and the list, for everyone, at once.
Questions
Questions about Apple Notes and Samla
- Can I move my recipes in from Notes?
- One at a time. You can paste the text into a new recipe, or photograph the note and import the photo. There is no bulk import, and twenty recipes take about a quarter of an hour.
- Doesn't Notes already read text off a photo?
- It does lift the text out. What it does not do is work out that one line is an ingredient and another is a step, and that is the difference between text you can search and a recipe that can end up on a shopping list.
- What does it cost?
- Writing and editing your own recipes is free and unlimited, and the free plan does not expire. Premium is for households and imports from any link or photo; the price is on the pricing page.
- Who can see my recipes?
- You, and the people you share a household with. Nothing in Samla is public. There is no link that makes a recipe readable by anyone, and no sharing level that does it by accident.
Start today
Try it before you decide.
The free plan does not expire and asks for no card: unlimited recipes you write yourself, and 50 link imports a month.
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