| App | Best for | Free tier | A year costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grow To Eat | Knowing what to do this week | The whole sowing plan, uncapped | €44.99 |
| GrowVeg / Almanac | Drawing beds and rotating crops | None — 7-day trial | $35–50 |
| Seedtime | A year of varieties on one calendar | 1 calendar, 10 credits a month | $84–168 |
| Planter | Square-foot beds on a phone | One garden | $24.99 |
| VegPlotter | A free plot to draw on | Layout, 40 plantings a year | $22–35 |
| Gardenize | Photographing what you grew | Unlimited records, one photo each | $44 |
No app does all of it. If the part you find hard is knowing what to do in the garden this week, Grow To Eat is the one I kept open — and it is the one I build, which is why its section below is the longest list of faults on this page.
I love my vegetable garden and I love to grow my own food. So there is a lot to keep track of.
For years I kept my sowing plan as an excel sheet that then became scattered written notes on paper and on my phone. Day by daythe nice plan I had made at the beginning of the season eroded and was no longer accurate. I wanted a smarter way to make the plan and follow up what I grow in my garden so I started to test all of the tools on the market.
By now I have tried most of them. Ten, properly, over several seasons — some for a whole year, some for a few weeks before I gave up. I have paid for subscriptions I did not use, lost a plan when I cancelled one, and kept a paper notebook alongside the whole time because I did not trust any of it.
This is what I found. Six apps are worth writing about and they are below, with what each one does well and where it let me down. The other four are named at the bottom with the reason they are not here. One of the six is the app I decided to develop in the end, which you should know before you read a word of it.
The gap nobody fills
Almost every garden app is built for the growing season that has not yet started. You sit at your desk with a cup of something, draw your beds, drag crops into them, and the app produces a plan. It is a good feeling and I have done it many times.
Then the season starts and the plan stops working. You sow late. A tray fails and you sow again three weeks after that. The bed you drew for courgettes has last year’s leeks still standing in it. By the middle of May the plan on the screen describes a garden that does not exist. What you actually need is much more efficient way of maintaining the plan you made so that it works for the entire season. And you want help with with whats needs doing this weekend in the garden.
Very few of these apps answer these two questions, and the ones that do answer them in different ways. That is the differences I ended up caring about, and it is the one I have organised this piece around.
What I was checking
Where the dates come from. A hardiness zone is a band drawn across a map, so everyone inside it gets the same advice. A frost date is narrower. Your own location is narrower again.
What happens after you sow. Does logging a sowing change anything? Does the app know the beans went in late, and does it move potting on, planting out and the harvest window to match?
What the app shows you on any given date. The plan you drew in winter, or the three things that need doing today.
What the free tier actually covers. Nearly all of these have a free version, and the caps are where they differ. Some cap the number of plants. Some cap the feature you came for. One has no free tier at all.
Whether it works where I garden. I am in northern Europe. A good many of these are built around US postcodes, and a short cool season is the hardest case to get right.
GrowVeg — and the Almanac Garden Planner, which is the same app
Start here, because everything else in this category is measured against it. GrowVeg has been going for years and the layout tool is still the best one. You draw your beds to scale, drag crops in, and it works out spacing for you, flags companions, and warns you when a plant family is going back into a bed it was in too recently. It keeps five years of your plans to do that.
Worth knowing, because almost nobody says it plainly: the Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Planner is the same software. Same company — Growing Interactive — same layout engine, same climate data, same price. If you have been trying to choose between GrowVeg and the Almanac planner, you have been comparing one app wearing two logos. Pick whichever brand’s growing articles you would rather read.
Its planting dates come from your nearest of about 5,000 weather stations, which is better than a zone chart and not as close as your own garden. Through the season it emails you twice a month with what to sow next, and there is a journal where you can log what you did and set your own reminders.
What stopped me using it is that it lives in a browser. There is no app on the App Store or Google Play, and their own advice for using it outdoors is to open the website on your phone. Standing at a bed with wet hands, that is the difference between checking something and not bothering.
Where it shines
- ✓The best drag-and-drop layout tool of the six
- ✓Crop rotation warnings across five years of your own plans
- ✓Plant spacing worked out as you place crops
- ✓408 plant types and 21,657 named varieties
- ✓A square-foot mode as well as ordinary beds
- ✓Frost dates from your nearest of about 5,000 weather stations
Where it falls short
- ✗No native app — the planner runs in a browser
- ✗No free tier at all past the 7-day trial
- ✗Your plans go when the subscription does
- ✗In-season help is an email twice a month, not a weekly list
- ✗The library spans ornamentals and trees, so a food grower reads past a lot
Best for: Anyone who wants a drawing of their actual garden rather than when, and who plans at a desk.
Price: 7-day trial, no card. Then $35 a year recurring, $50 for one year, $85 for two.
A sowing plan for your garden, free
Dates from your location and a weekly list of what to do next. No credit card required.
Seedtime — the calendar that reschedules itself
Seedtime is the closest thing on this list to what I wanted, and I want to be straight about that because it would be easy to leave it out.
It starts from your frost dates and lays your whole year out as coloured bars: start indoors, transplant, direct sow, harvest, for every variety you add. Drag a planting along the timeline and the dates that depend on it move with it. Miss a task and the schedule reworks itself. That is the behaviour I spent years wanting from a garden app, and Seedtime has it.
It goes wider than that too. Harvest records with weights and a value, totals and graphs at the end of the year, an estimate of how much longer a crop will take under row covers through winter, a journal with photographs on the free tier, inventory, a classroom, a community.
Where it lost me is the bill and the metering. Basic is $84 a year and Unlimited is $168, which makes it the most expensive thing on this page by far. The free tier gives you one calendar and ten credits a month, and the credits are spent on the seeding-date suggestions — the part you came for. In February, when you are changing your mind about everything, ten is not many.
Where it shines
- ✓The whole year visible at once, at the level of the named variety
- ✓2,650+ varieties built in
- ✓Drag a planting and every dependent date follows
- ✓Harvest records with weights, totals and graphs
- ✓A photo journal with unlimited entries, free
- ✓Works in the southern hemisphere by reversing your frost dates
Where it falls short
- ✗A messy calendar interface in the mobile app where it's difficult to work with and edit your plan
- ✗$84 a year for Basic, $168 for Unlimited — the dearest here
- ✗The free tier meters seeding-date suggestions at ten a month
- ✗Automatic frost dates only for US locations; elsewhere you enter your own
- ✗The layout tool is simpler than GrowVeg's and sits on the paid tiers
- ✗A lot of app to set up before it does anything for you
Best for: Growers running many named varieties who want the whole season mapped, and who do not mind the price.
Price: Free tier: one calendar, ten credits a month. Basic $84 a year, Unlimited $168.
Planter — the one I recommend to people starting their first bed
Planter does less than the two above and does it without any fuss. You make a garden, tap to place plants on a square-foot grid, and it colours the companions green and the bad neighbours red. There is no manual and you do not need one.
It was built for a phone and it shows. Most planners are desktop tools that have been squeezed onto a small screen; this one is the other way round. The seed box, where you keep track of what packets you actually own, is a small thing that I wish more apps had.
At first glance the free tier seems to be the most generous of any paid app here: a whole garden, the calendar and your own custom plants, without paying. But a garden really only means one garden bed.
What it does not do is carry on helping once the bed is drawn. I think the planting calendar is messy when you have more than a few plants. It is more of a layout tool with a calendar attached, and it is honest about being that.
Where it shines
- ✓The easiest of the six to pick up
- ✓A square-foot grid with companion colours on the tiles
- ✓Built for a phone rather than squeezed onto one
- ✓A free tier including one garden bed, the calendar and custom plants
- ✓A life time subscritpion of $99.99, if you want it
- ✓A seed box for the packets you actually have
Where it falls short
- ✗The help mostly stops when the layout is finished
- ✗Todo list in paid tier
- ✗No crop rotation tracking
- ✗Planting dates are less specific to your location than the schedulers here
- ✗80+ plants, the smallest library of the six
Best for: A first raised bed, a small garden, or anyone put off by how much the bigger tools ask of you.
Price: Free with one garden. $24.99 a year, or $99.99 once.
VegPlotter — the free plot drawer
VegPlotter gives away the thing most of these charge for. Draw a plot of any shape, place crops in row beds or square-foot beds, get rotation and companion guidance while you do it, and pay nothing. There is a slider that runs through the months so you can watch the plot fill and empty, which is the clearest way I have seen of spotting that you have nothing at all coming in during August.
The free plan stops at 40 plantings in a planning year, which sounds like a lot until you count a row of lettuce sown four times as four. It carries around 200 plants including fruit and flowers, so an ornamental border fits alongside the vegetables.
Its in-season help is a jobs list, and the list is monthly. A month is a long time in a garden — sowing, potting on and planting out for the same crop can all fall inside one, and the list will not tell you which is due on the Saturday you actually have free. Ticking jobs off as you do them, and filtering the list, are on the paid plans.
Where it shines
- ✓A full layout planner, free, with no time limit
- ✓A month slider that shows the plot filling and emptying
- ✓Crop rotation and companion guidance while you place crops
- ✓Row beds and square-foot beds both
- ✓Around 200 plants, fruit and flowers included
- ✓The cheapest paid tier of the six at $22 a year
Where it falls short
- ✗The free plan caps you at 40 plantings a year
- ✗The jobs list is monthly rather than weekly
- ✗Ticking jobs off and filtering them are on the paid plans
- ✗Browser-first, with the apps a secondary way in
Best for: Allotment holders and anyone who wants to draw a proper plot without paying for the privilege.
Price: Free layout planner, capped at 40 plantings a year. Essentials $22, Advanced $35.
Gardenize — not a planner, and not pretending to be
Gardenize comes up in every conversation about garden apps, and it is worth being clear about what it is, because a lot of people install it expecting a planner and find something else.
It is a diary. You add your plants, your areas and dated events with photographs, and over years you build a searchable record of the garden. When did the apple first fruit. Which tomato actually cropped. What that shrub by the fence is called. It holds over 45,000 species, runs in eight languages including Swedish, and will export the whole lot as a PDF, a spreadsheet or a gallery, which none of the others will do.
What it will not do is tell you what to sow, or when. There are reminders, but they are ones you set yourself. There is no bed layout and no sowing plan. If your problem is that you cannot remember what you grew, this solves it completely. If your problem is that you do not know what to do next, it will not help at all, and no amount of using it harder will change that.
I keep it alongside a planner rather than instead of one, which I suspect is how most of its users end up.
Where it shines
- ✓The best photographic record of the six, and the only real one
- ✓45,000+ species, the whole garden rather than the edible part
- ✓Export to PDF, spreadsheet or photo gallery
- ✓Eight languages, including Swedish
- ✓Several gardens on one account
- ✓A free tier with unlimited plants, areas and events
Where it falls short
- ✗No sowing plan and no planting dates of any kind
- ✗No bed layout or design tool
- ✗Reminders are ones you set yourself
- ✗One photo per plant, area and event on the free tier, and photos are the point
- ✗Nothing tells you what needs doing next week
Best for: Remembering a garden rather than planning one — and it is the best thing here at that.
Price: Free tier with one photo each. Basic $1.90 a month, Plus $4.40 a month or $44 a year.
Grow To Eat — a great option if you want to grow food
Full disclosure: I make Grow To Eat. You can read the marketing page yourself, so there is no point in me writing another one here. What follows is why it exists and the list of things it does not do, which is longer than the list for anything else on this page.
I built it because of the problem at the top of this article. It takes your location rather than a zone or a postcode, sets your sowing dates from that, and then works everything after them out from the day you actually sowed. Sow the beans a fortnight late and potting on, planting out and the harvest window all move with you. Open it on a Saturday and the home screen is already showing this week’s sowings, the next step for everything in the ground, and whatever is ready to pick.
The library is 120+ crops and every one is food — vegetables, herbs, edible flowers, berries, the kitchen-garden perennials. Behind each is an extensive growing guide that runs from propagation through to preserving what you pick. You can filter crops by what will grow in shade, what feeds pollinators, what is forgiving in a first season, and how thirsty or hungry it will be. All of that is free, with no cap, and so is harvest tracking. The drag-and-drop bed planner, succession planting and adding your own crops are the paid part.
It is made to be your vegetable garden companion and help you stay on track week by week in your garden. And, the point of the app is for the plan that you made at the beginning of the season to be accurate all the time – so that you can learn and ultimately become more knowledgeable about what works in your garden and grow more food.
Where it shines
- ✓Sowing dates from your location, with no frost dates to look up
- ✓Excellent overview of your garden and the status for each plant in each bed
- ✓Every date after sowing worked out from the day you actually sowed
- ✓A weekly view: sowings, next steps and harvests on one screen
- ✓120+ crops, all edible, each with a full A–Z growing guide
- ✓Crop filters for shade, pollinators, difficulty, and water and feed needs
- ✓The free tier caps none of that, and harvest tracking is in it
Where it falls short
- ✗Northern hemisphere only — no use south of the equator
- ✗No push notifications yet; the list waits for you to open the app
- ✗No photo journal
- ✗Rectangular beds only, no square-foot grid, and the bed planner is Premium
- ✗No plant spacing warnings
Best for: Growing food to a schedule on a phone, when the part you find hard is what to do next.
Price: Free with no time limit. Premium €7.49 a month or €44.99 a year.
Know what to do in the garden this week
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The six compared, feature by feature
| Feature | Grow To Eat | GrowVeg / Almanac | Seedtime | Planter | VegPlotter | Gardenize |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where the sowing dates come from | Your location | Nearest weather station | Your frost dates | Frost dates | Frost dates and zone | No sowing dates |
| If you sow two weeks late | Every later date moves | Edit the dates yourself | Drag it; dependent dates follow | Not stated | Not stated | — |
| What to do this week | Weekly list in the app | Email, twice a month | Auto-compiled task list | No | Monthly jobs list | Reminders you set |
| Visual bed planner | Premium | Yes | Paid tiers | Yes | Free | No |
| Square-foot grid | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Crop rotation warnings | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| Harvest tracking | Free | In the journal | Weights and analytics | No | Harvest dates in the plan | Logged as an event |
| Full growing guide per crop | Free, all 120+ | Yes | Partial | Yes | Grow guides | Care tips |
| Library | 120+ edible crops | 408 types, 21,657 varieties | 2,650+ varieties | 80+ plants, 1,000+ varieties | ~200 plants | 45,000+ species |
| Native phone app | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile experience | Excellent | Fair | Good | Good | Fair | Good |
| Free tier | Whole sowing plan, uncapped | None — 7-day trial | 1 calendar, 10 credits a month | One garden | Layout, 40 plantings a year | Unlimited records, one photo each |
| A year costs | €44.99 | $35–50 | $84–168 | $24.99 | $22–35 | $44 |
Which one is right for you
You know what you want to grow, but you lose track once it is in the ground.
Grow To Eat. That is the one problem it was built for: the dates follow what you actually sowed, and the week's jobs are on the home screen. The free tier covers all of it, so it costs nothing to find out whether it helps.
Your real question is where things go, not when.
GrowVeg, or the Almanac Garden Planner, which is the same app. Nothing else here draws a bed as well, and the rotation warnings pay for themselves over a few years in the same plot.
You are laying out your first raised bed and the other apps look like hard work.
Start with Planter: free for one garden, a square-foot grid you understand in a minute, and companion planting shown as colours rather than a panel to go and read.
You want a proper plot drawn and you do not want to pay.
Draw it in VegPlotter. The layout planner is free and capped at 40 plantings a year, which is more than a first season needs.
You want a lot of named varieties.
Seedtime is worth the look if the price does not stop you: the most capable calendar of the six, and also the dearest at $84 to $168 a year.
You cannot remember what you planted last year, or what that shrub is called.
That is what Gardenize is for — a diary rather than a planner, and the best one of those I have used. Most people who need it need a planner as well.
Why planting dates differ so much between apps
Ask six apps when to sow a tomato and you get six answers. It is worth knowing why, because it tells you how much to trust any of them.
A hardiness zone is the bluntest. It is a band drawn across a map based on winter lows, and it says nothing about how long your summer is. Two gardens in the same zone can have six weeks between their last frosts.
A frost date is much better, and most of these apps use one. The question is where they get it. GrowVeg looks up your nearest of about 5,000 weather stations, which could be thirty kilometres away and two hundred metres lower than you. Seedtime fills it in automatically for US locations and asks you to type it in everywhere else.
Your own location is narrower again, and it is what Grow To Eat uses, though I will not pretend that a location alone knows about your frost pocket or your south-facing wall.
The honest position is that all of these are estimates, and the gap between the best and the worst of them is a week or two. That matters at the two ends of the season and hardly at all in the middle. It matters far less than whether the app does anything useful with the date once you have sown.
The four I left out, and why
Ten apps, six write-ups. Here are the other four and the reason each one is not above.
The Almanac Garden Planner is not really a tenth app — it is GrowVeg with different branding, from the same company. It is covered in the GrowVeg section rather than given its own.
Gardenate is a free planting calendar. Pick a climate zone and a month and it lists what can go in, with a real growing guide behind each plant, in six countries including Australia and New Zealand. It is not on the list because it does not plan anything: the list is the same for everyone in your zone, and next month it shows you another one. If that is all you want, it is free and it is the first thing I would try.
Seed to Spoon works from a US zip code. Inside the United States it is a capable app with an assistant you can ask questions of and a large reference library. App can not be downloaded outside of the US.
Planta is a (house) plant care app rather than a planner. It tells you when to water, feed and repot the plants you already own, adjusted to your weather, and it does that better than anything here. It has no sowing plan at all, so it is answering a different question.
I have also left out a handful of apps launched in the last year or two. Some look promising and I will come back to them, but there is not enough of a track record yet to say anything useful, and a comparison of things I have used for three weeks would not be worth your time.
Sources
Prices and features checked September 2026, each shown in the currency that app charges in. Links are to each company's own pages.
Grow To Eat works out the next step for every crop you sow.
Free sowing plans and full A–Z growing guides. No credit card required.