AnyList vs Cozi: A Paid Meal Calendar or a Free Family Hub? (2026)

Verdict: Choose AnyList if one person runs the household’s lists and wants a paid meal calendar with cloud backup, and you accept a $9.99 yearly fee. Choose Cozi if you need a free shared calendar for a family, and you can accept a weaker privacy rating and a free tier whose ad status we did not check. Basis: the 2026.10 score table, where AnyList totals 64 of 100 (rank two) and Cozi totals 52 (rank four).

This is a desk review of public pages read on 2026-10-16. We did not open accounts or run a family setup. In this post, a meal planning app is a product that builds a menu from recipes and, in most cases, produces a shopping list.

Scorecard

Verified fields only. Where a field was not verified, the table says so.

AnyList: where it wins

AnyList Complete adds the meal-planning calendar, recipe photos and calendar cloud backup, according to its Complete page, and includes priority customer support. AnyList also states that every account is backed up to its servers and can be restored on a new device. A restore is not an export, so we score it 3 of 5 on D5 rather than 5.

At $9.99 a year for one person, Complete is the lowest paid annual price in our set. The household plan is $14.99 a year, and Cozi Gold ($39) and Plan to Eat ($49) cost more per year.

Cozi: where it wins

Cozi’s free plan covers a shared family calendar, shopping and to-do lists, and a recipe library. Its homepage says you can plan dinners on the calendar, save recipes and send ingredients to the shopping list. At $0 on the core path, it is the lowest-cost option in this comparison.

The cost sits in the details. Cozi’s pricing page lists “No ads” as a Gold feature, which suggests the free tier may show ads. We did not open the free app to check. The AI Meal Planner appears only in Max at $79 a year.

Privacy and data

AnyList’s privacy policy was last revised on 2021-01-18. A dated policy is not proof of bad behaviour, but it may not describe the service as it runs today, so we cap its privacy score at 3 of 5.

Cozi is rated Warning by the Common Sense Privacy Program. The stated basis is that personal information is sold or rented to third parties and that personalised advertising is used. We could not confirm Cozi’s current privacy policy: the text we retrieved was an older version, and we did not record its date. Cozi’s privacy score therefore rests on the third-party rating alone.

Neither app has a documented export we could verify. AnyList documents cloud backup and restore, which scores 3 on D5.

Who each one suits

• AnyList suits one person who runs the lists and a weekly plan, and who will pay $9.99 a year.
• Cozi suits a family that shares one calendar and does not want a subscription, provided it can live with a free tier whose ad status is unverified.
• Neither replaces advice from a professional for diet or health. In the pages we read, neither app presents nutrition as its main feature, and we did not score nutrition. This is not medical advice. Consult a registered dietitian or your doctor.

Checks before you choose

1. Confirm the AnyList Complete price on the checkout page for your region.
2. Read Cozi’s current privacy policy directly, not a search snippet or a third-party summary.
3. Check whether the Cozi free app shows ads before you rely on it.
4. Look for an export before you rely on either app for records you cannot rebuild.

Evidence and method

Sources: the AnyList Complete page and the Cozi homepage, both read 2026-10-16; the Common Sense evaluation of Cozi, a third-party summary retrieved 2026-10-16; and the AnyList privacy policy revision date from our research archive. No account was opened and no family setup was run. Cozi’s current policy text remains unconfirmed. Each cell’s basis is documented on the scoring rules page, and the home page carries the full ranking.