I like to cook food, and I like to try out new recipes. I started with using Mealie to import recipes and help me prepare what I needed to make them, but I recently gave Nextcloud Cookbook a go as it would integrate with my already-existing Nextcloud instance. After all, it's built into Nextcloud's ecosystem and integrates seamlessly with your files — seems convenient enough, right? However, after spending some time with it, I switched back to Mealie and haven't looked back.

While Nextcloud Cookbook works, Mealie is just so much better. I can't recommend it enough for anyone who wants to self-host their own recipe tracker, and there's no reason that you can't host both at the same time.

Nextcloud Cookbook offers a perfectly functional yet admittedly basic user interface. It follows the Nextcloud design language, which works great for files but doesn't quite translate well to a recipe tracker. For example, tasks such as adding or editing recipes can feel unintuitive, and the overall user experience suffers. Navigating through categories, managing tags, and even simple tasks like image uploads feel unnecessarily complicated.

On the contrary, Mealie provides a polished and well-designed user interface that feels modern, intuitive, and user-friendly. Even something as simple as adding recipes, categorizing them, and browsing through your collection is a significantly better experience due to thoughtful design choices. Everything makes sense, which goes a long way when dealing with software that you want to interact with quickly while you're busy in the kitchen. You can focus more on what actually matters rather than getting confused by a UI.