AnyList alternative: do you want a list, or a week?
AnyList is, first and best, a shopping list two people can both edit — you add milk at your desk and it appears in the hand of whoever is already in the shop. Farro is a weekly plan from which the list is derived: two recipes wanting an onion become one line saying two, everything scales to the people at your table, and moving a meal moves its ingredients with it. If what you want is a shared list, use AnyList.
A list app and a planner, side by side
| AnyList | Farro | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is first | A shopping list, shared between people, with recipes and planning built around it. | A weekly plan, from which the shopping list is derived. |
| Two people editing one list | Yes — it is the central feature. | No. The list can be sent to someone as plain text. |
| Where the list comes from | What you add to it, plus recipes you send to it. | The meals on the week, added up and scaled to the people eating. |
| Meal planning | A calendar built alongside the list, in AnyList Complete. | The whole product. |
| Recipe import from a website | Yes, in AnyList Complete. | Yes, reading the structured recipe data a page publishes. |
| Account | Needed for the syncing and sharing the app is built around. | None of any kind. |
Feature descriptions read from anylist.com on 31 July 2026. Apps change. If anything here has gone out of date, tell us at farroapp@protonmail.com and we will correct it.
1AnyList is a list app, and that is a compliment
It started as the best shared shopping list on the iPhone and it is still that. Two people, one list, updating live in both hands.
Everything else grew outward from there — recipes, a planning calendar, scaling, folders, store filters. That is a sensible way to build an app, and it is why the list is the part that feels effortless while the planning feels like a good addition rather than the reason the app exists.
2The one thing it does that Farro cannot
Two people editing one list at the same time. Farro has no server, so it has no way to do this, and no amount of good design substitutes for one. The most it offers is sending the list to someone as plain text, which is a message, not a shared list.
If your household runs on a shared list, stop reading and use AnyList. That recommendation costs us nothing to make, because someone who installs the wrong app writes the one-star review about it eight weeks later.
3The one thing a list app cannot do
A list app records what you type into it. A planner records what you decided to eat and works out the rest.
The difference shows up in three places. Two recipes that each want an onion become one line that says two, rather than two lines both saying onion. Everything is multiplied by the number of people at your table, once, rather than in your head at the counter. And when Wednesday turns into a takeaway, you move the meal to Thursday and its ingredients travel with it — nothing to remember, nothing to hunt down and delete.
4Which annoyance are you actually fixing?
Go back to the evening that made you look for an app at all.
If you were writing down what to buy, and the problem was that the list was in three places and your partner could not see it, you want a list app. If you were deciding what to eat, and the problem was the twenty minutes afterwards turning six dinners into one shop without forgetting the onion, you want the plan to make the list.
5If it is the list, use AnyList
We are not going to argue you out of it, and a page that tried would deserve to be closed.
What Farro is for is narrower and it is the only thing it does: the week decides, and the shopping list writes itself — in aisle order, scaled to the table, moving whenever the week moves.
Questions people ask next
What is the difference between a shopping list app and a meal planner?
A shopping list app records what you tell it to buy. A meal planner records what you decided to eat and derives the list from that — so the same ingredient appearing in two recipes becomes one line with both amounts added together, everything scales to the number of people eating, and moving a meal to another day moves its ingredients with it.
Can two people share a Farro shopping list?
Not live. Farro has no account and no server, so there is nothing for two phones to share through. The list can be sent to someone as plain text, which covers sending a partner to the shop but is not a shared list.
Do I need a meal planner if I already have a list app?
Only if the part that goes wrong is the deciding, or the arithmetic after it. If your list app is working and the shopping is the easy bit, you do not have a problem worth installing anything for.
Does Farro work without a connection?
Yes. Planning, the shopping list, your recipes and the export all work with no signal, because there is nothing to connect to. The one exception is importing a recipe from a link, which has to fetch the page.
Can I add things to the list that are not in a recipe?
Yes. Bin bags, coffee, whatever the week needs. Those rows belong to no meal, and editing the list never changes the meals it came from.