Switching from Paprika to Chive
Paprika is a genuinely good recipe manager — a one-time purchase that clips recipes from the web, plans meals, scales servings, and builds a grocery list. If your recipe box lives in Paprika, it's probably well organized. This page covers the part Paprika leaves to you, and how to move your recipes over. The move itself is one file.
Where Paprika stops
It's 6pm. You have two hundred saved recipes and no idea which one you can actually make. Paprika can't answer that, because it doesn't know what's in your kitchen. Its pantry is a list you type in and update by hand — it will store an expiry date if you enter one, but it never reminds you before the date arrives.
Cooking a recipe doesn't take anything out of that pantry. Buying groceries doesn't put anything in. So the list drifts from your real kitchen within a week or two, and once you stop trusting it, you stop updating it. That isn't a flaw in Paprika so much as the failure mode of every hand-maintained inventory: the upkeep is the product, and nobody keeps it up.
What changes when you switch
Chive builds the pantry from the grocery list you already keep. Check items off while you shop, tap Done Shopping, and they land in the right storage spot — fridge, freezer, pantry, spice rack — each with an estimated best-before date. Scan a receipt or a barcode and those land too. The list is the input; the pantry is the record it leaves behind.
From there, your recipes start answering questions. Open any recipe and Chive shows what you have, what's close, and what's missing — then adds the missing items to your list in one tap, scaled to your servings and sorted by aisle. Log a cook and Chive deducts what you used and offers to put the empties back on the list. When the spinach is about to turn, your phone tells you before it happens, not after. Shop, track, cook — and the list refills for the next trip.
Compared June 2026 against Paprika's official site, App Store listing, and help documentation. Paprika remains a strong recipe manager — grocery lists, aisle sorting, meal planning, and recipe scaling all work well.
Bringing your recipe box
Chive reads Paprika's own export format directly. No retyping, no per-recipe copy-paste.
Honest caveat: the importer covers recipes. Paprika's pantry entries and meal plans don't come over — there's no importer for those. The pantry isn't really something you copy anyway: in Chive it rebuilds itself from your first few shopping trips.
What Chive doesn't do
Chive runs on iPhone and the web — there's no Android app yet. There's no Paprika-style desktop app or proprietary sync service; recipes come in from URLs, social posts, photos of cookbook pages, and files like your Paprika export. Paprika's one-time price is real value, and worth naming: Chive has a free tier, but its heavier features sit in a paid plan. And Chive's allergen and diet flags are in beta — useful for surfacing what you avoid, not a safety guarantee. If all you want is a beautifully organized recipe box, Paprika already does that. Chive is for the moment you want that recipe box to know what's in your fridge.
