AnyList Review: The Best Shared Grocery List, Honestly

Most shopping list apps are either free and full of ads or free and abandoned. AnyList is neither, and it has been quietly good for long enough that it is worth explaining precisely what you get without paying and what you do not.

Short version: the shared list, which is the actual product, is free. The meal planner, which is what a lot of people install it for, is not free at all.

What You Get Without Paying

The free tier carries no ads, which by itself puts it ahead of most of the category.

• Sharing lists with family or flatmates, with real-time check-off. This is the core and it is not paywalled.
• Autocomplete on item names and automatic categorisation of common groceries, so the list sorts itself into aisles without you doing anything.
• Recipes you type in yourself, unlimited.
• Siri for adding items hands-free.
• Phone and tablet apps on both iOS and Android.

What Costs Money, Stated Plainly

AnyList Complete is $9.99 a year for an individual or $14.99 a year for a household. Annual billing only, there is no monthly option, and you can buy it directly from anylist.com rather than through the app stores.

1. The entire meal planner. Every row of it: adding a recipe to a date, generating a shopping list from the plan, sharing the plan. If meal planning is why you are installing this, budget for the subscription from day one.
2. Web recipe import beyond five recipes. Free accounts can save five recipes from the web in total, for the lifetime of the account, not five per month. This one surprises people.
3. The Mac app, the browser-based web app and the Apple Watch app.
4. Item photos, item prices and a running total, multi-store assignment, list folders and location-based reminders.

What It Genuinely Does Better Than Anyone

Three things stand out after real use.

• The shared list is the best in the category and it is free. Two people in a supermarket ticking items off the same list in real time, with the list already sorted by aisle, is the whole job and AnyList does it without friction.
• Recipe capture is low friction when you are paying. There are proper browser extensions for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Edge, plus an iOS action extension and an Android share target.
• The meal planner was properly rewritten on 1 January 2026 rather than left to rot. It gained a Queue for recipes you want to cook soon without committing to a date, and an Ideas tab that suggests from what you already saved.

Where It Falls Short

• The paywall sits in an awkward place. A grocery list app whose meal planning is entirely paid will feel free until the exact moment you try to use the feature you came for.
• In German-speaking Europe, Bring simply has more people on it. Features are not the issue, network effect is: a shared list only works if the other person will install it.
• The Alexa skill has been broken for most users since March 2026 and has not been fixed, although Siri still works. AnyList's own comparison page still advertises both.
• Google Assistant integration is gone entirely, and has been since Google shut down third-party notes and lists on 20 June 2023. Older reviews still list it.

Who Should Actually Pay for It

Buy Complete if you plan meals for more than one person and want the list to fall out of the plan automatically. At $14.99 a year for a household that is good value and there is nothing cheaper that does it as cleanly.

Stay on the free tier if you just want a shared list that works, which is most people. And skip it entirely if what you actually want is for something to decide what to cook, because AnyList deliberately does not do that. It organises decisions you have already made.

The Gap AnyList Leaves Open

A planner assumes you know what you want to eat next Tuesday. Plenty of people do not, which is why so many carefully built meal plans quietly stop being used by the second week. If that is the pattern, the missing piece is the decision, not the list. Our guide on how to meal plan a week ahead covers the planning side, and best meal planner apps compares the field.