Comparison

Chef Edition vs Paper Chef

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Chef Edition

Organize your kitchen life with this app that lets you build a personal cooking profile, save recipes with notes and photos, and plan meals with friends. It's a digital space for your food stories and practical cooking needs.

Highlights
  • Personal cooking profile creation
  • Save and organize recipes
  • Meal planning for events
  • Connect and share with friends
  • Digital cookbook with notes
  • Recipe collections
Features
Read full description

Chef Edition is a recipe organizer, cooking profile, and meal planning app for home cooks who want their kitchen life to feel organized, personal, and easy to share. Keep family recipes, new cooking ideas, favorite dishes, photos, notes, friends, and meal plans in one calm place. Create a cooking profile that shows your kitchen style. Add your name, kitchen name, profile photo, background image, short bio, favorite recipes, and the dishes you love to make. Your profile becomes a simple way to answer what you cook, what you enjoy, and what kind of meals you like to share. Save recipes with names, images, descriptions, tags, and step-by-step instructions. Build a searchable personal cookbook for everyday dinners, family classics, holiday dishes, weekend experiments, and ideas you want to try later. Keep substitutions, timing notes, serving ideas, and cooking memories attached to the recipe instead of scattered across messages or notes. Use Chef's Collection to keep important recipes close. Mark the dishes you return to often, organize favorites, revisit meals you want to cook again, and build a kitchen library that grows with you. Chef Edition is designed for people who want more than a plain recipe list: it keeps your food story and practical cooking notes together. Connect with friends by email, phone number, or QR code. Accept requests, organize groups, favorite close friends, and share recipe updates when something good is cooking. Chef Edition keeps the social side food-first: real people, real kitchens, and meals worth making together. Plan gatherings in Good Times. Create an event, invite cooks or guests, attach recipes, choose whether it repeats, and keep the meal plan clear before everyone arrives. Use it for family dinners, potlucks, birthdays, weekend brunch, holiday tables, cooking nights, and casual meals with friends. Free users can begin with the core experience, while premium access unlocks more room for unlimited recipe organization and Chef's Collection. Purchases are handled securely through the app stores and RevenueCat, with restore support for your Chef Edition account. Chef Edition uses Supabase for account, recipe, friend, event, and storage sync. Your profile, recipes, images, friends, calendar plans, and premium state are designed to stay connected across supported devices when you sign in. Use Chef Edition to collect family recipes, plan dinner with friends, prepare a themed night, organize a personal cookbook, keep cooking notes, remember what worked, coordinate who is bringing what, and make shared meals easier to enjoy. Support and feedback: https://www.notestep.com/chefedition Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

About

Paper Chef

Features
Read full description

Tired of messy cookbooks, oil-stained recipe cards, and food blogs buried in ads? Paper Chef is your personal AI-powered recipe manager — scan, import, and organize every recipe in one clean, ad-free place. WHY PAPER CHEF? AI RECIPE SCANNER Point your camera at any cookbook or handwritten note. Our OCR and AI technology instantly extracts ingredients and steps into a structured digital recipe — no typing needed. AD-FREE WEB IMPORT Paste any recipe URL and Paper Chef strips away the ads, pop-ups, and life stories — keeping only the ingredients and instructions you actually need. SMART GROCERY LISTS Add ingredients from any recipe directly to your shopping list. Shop smarter and never forget a key ingredient again. DISTRACTION-FREE COOKING MODE A clean, minimal interface built for the kitchen. No clutter — just you and your recipes. FULL PERSONALIZATION Add notes, adjust cooking times, upload your own photos, and make every recipe truly yours. ORGANIZE YOUR RECIPE BOOKS Create and name your own cookbooks: "Grandma's Desserts," "Quick Dinners," or "Kitchen Experiments." Move recipes between books without losing any data. PRIVACY FIRST Your recipes stay on your device. No accounts, no cloud uploads, no data sharing. KEY FEATURES OCR Scanner — scan physical books and handwritten notes with high precision URL Importer — save recipes from any website in seconds Manual Entry — add recipes the classic way Grocery List — integrated shopping list synced to your recipes Recipe Books — full library organization with custom names Pro Upgrade — unlimited AI scans and advanced features Now available in multiple languages. Download Paper Chef and start building your personal digital cookbook today. End User License Agreement: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Screenshots

Chef Edition4 screens
Paper Chef4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is iOS requirement: Chef Edition at 15.0 against Paper Chef's 18.0. On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Chef Edition sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per 3 months and Paper Chef sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Chef Edition ships an update every 2 weeks, Paper Chef weekly. The most recent releases landed on November 5, 2026 and November 9, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference · 8 level
Chef Edition versus Paper Chef: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterChef EditionPaper Chef
PriceFreeFree
Rating5.0 (1 ratings) — better—
Number of ratings1 — better—
Update frequencyEvery 2 weeksWeekly — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
MonetizationFreemium—
DevicesiPhone, iPodiPhone, iPad
Requires iOS15.0 — better18.0
Further details — not scored
Size66 MB26 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperNotestep IncJose Carlos Valenzuela Nieto

In-app purchases

4 purchases

Chef Edition

Subscriptions2
  • Chef Edition – Quarterly$9.993 Months
  • Chef Edition – Yearly$19.991 Year
One-time2
  • Chef Edition – Lifetime$39.99
  • Chef Edition - Lifetime$39.99
2 purchases

Paper Chef

Subscriptions2
  • Paper Chef Pro$2.991 Month
  • Paper Chef Pro Yearly$29.991 Year

Questions

Is Chef Edition free?
Chef Edition is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Paper Chef free?
Paper Chef is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Do Chef Edition or Paper Chef have ads?
Neither Chef Edition nor Paper Chef shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Chef Edition or Paper Chef?
Chef Edition ships an update every 2 weeks, and Paper Chef weekly. Most recently, Chef Edition was updated on November 5, 2026 and Paper Chef on November 9, 2026.

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