Honest Cooking Kitchen vs Simmer
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Honest Cooking Kitchen
Discover over 5,000 tested recipes with beautiful photos. This app helps you find meals based on ingredients you have, your schedule, and preferences. It also offers smart tools for meal planning and creating shopping lists.
- 5,000+ tested recipes
- Pantry search for ingredient-based meals
- Personalized weekly meal planner
- Automated shopping list generation
- Cook mode with step-by-step guidance
- Recipe collections and smart search filters
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The only cooking app you'll ever need. Honest Cooking Kitchen is 10,000+ professionally developed recipes with beautiful photos, every one tested in a real kitchen, plus the tools to figure out what to actually make tonight. 10,000+ Recipes Worth Cooking Recipes created by the best food bloggers and writers in the world. Browse by cuisine, course, season, ingredient, or dietary preference. The library is deep enough that you'll keep finding things you haven't tried yet, while at the same time creating your perfect dinner rotation. 100 Classics The 100 legendary recipes that will take your home cooking to the next level. From Italian to Indian and very much in between, these are the ones you'll come back to again and again. Track your progress and become a legend. 100 Basics The foundation of every home kitchen: the techniques and recipes you need to know, from dressings and sauces to baking and simple egg dishes. Track and evolve. Pantry Search Type in what's in your fridge and get real recipes built around it. Add what you're cooking tonight and it steers the results. Useful for using up that half a cabbage before it goes bad. Weekly Meal Plan Curated weeks of dinners, ready to cook. Pick a plan (a week in Italy, thirty-minute dinners, a vegetarian week, and more) or build your own from the full library. Answer a few quick questions and we'll recommend one to start. Swap any night, mark the nights you're eating out, and pin the recipes you want on repeat. Every plan becomes a shopping list that already knows what's in your pantry. Shopping Lists Tap any recipe and get a shopping list. It knows what's already in your kitchen, sorts by aisle, and you check things off at the store. It works. Save and Rate Save recipes into collections and rate what you cook. Your saves, ratings, and collections follow you across the app and the web. Search Filter by cuisine, course, difficulty, time, protein, or dietary need, and dial in calories and macros if you're tracking. Fast, and it doesn't bury what you're looking for. Cook Mode Cook hands-free: one step at a time, with your full ingredient list and timers a tap away, and a step overview so you always know where you are. FREE vs PREMIUM Free: Browse the full library of 10,000+ recipes and collections, and use standard search. No account required to look around. Premium: Full recipes, Cook Mode, the Weekly Meal Planner, Pantry Search, nutrition search, 100 Basics and Classics progress, saved collections, and pantry-aware shopping lists. $4.99/month or $29.99/year. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://honestcooking.com/privacypolicy
Simmer
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Tired of scrolling through life stories, pop-ups, and ads just to find a recipe? Simmer extracts the recipe from any website and saves it to your personal, clutter-free library. SAVE RECIPES IN SECONDS Paste a recipe URL or share it directly from Safari — Simmer automatically extracts the title, ingredients, steps, cook times, and photo. No account needed, no sign-up required. HANDS-FREE COOKING MODE Enter full-screen cooking mode with large, easy-to-read step cards. Swipe through steps while your hands are covered in flour. Turn on auto-speak and let your phone read each step aloud using natural-sounding iOS voices. SMART QUANTITY ADJUSTMENT Cooking for more or fewer people? Tap a multiplier and every ingredient quantity updates instantly. Fractions stay clean and readable — "1 ½ cups" not "1.5 cups." READ STEPS ALOUD Tap the speaker icon on any step to hear it read aloud. Simmer intelligently pronounces fractions, temperatures, and abbreviations so "½ tsp" becomes "one half teaspoon" and "350°F" becomes "350 degrees Fahrenheit." YOUR RECIPES, YOUR DEVICE All recipes are stored locally on your device. No cloud accounts, no tracking, no data collection. Your recipes stay private. ADD FAMILY RECIPES BY HAND Not every great recipe lives on a website. Use manual entry to type in grandma's secret recipe with ingredients, steps, and cook times. FEATURES • Extract recipes from any website with one tap • Share directly from Safari, Chrome, or any browser • Full-screen cooking mode with swipe navigation • Text-to-speech with natural iOS voices • Auto-speak mode for truly hands-free cooking • Adjust servings — all quantities scale instantly • Search your recipe library • Favorite your best recipes • Dark mode support • Works on iPhone and iPad • No account required
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Simmer at none against Honest Cooking Kitchen's 2. On price, update cadence, ads and device support 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
Both are free to download. Honest Cooking Kitchen sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Simmer asks for nothing beyond the download.
Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly weekly. The most recent releases landed on September 22, 2026 and September 12, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Honest Cooking Kitchen | Simmer |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Weekly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Freemium | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 15.1 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 55 MB | 82 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Kalle Bergman | Parent-AI LLC |
In-app purchases
Honest Cooking Kitchen
- Honest Cooking Premium7 Days trial$4.991 Month
- Honest Cooking Premium (Annual)7 Days trial$29.991 Year
Simmer
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Honest Cooking Kitchen free?
Is Simmer free?
Do Honest Cooking Kitchen or Simmer have ads?
Which is updated more often, Honest Cooking Kitchen or Simmer?
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