I’m looking for a good way to share grocery lists in my household. Currently we’re using Grocy but it has too much bells and whistles.
It’s really nice that Grocy suggests known products and can be used with the android app. But the process of adding new products feels a bit tedious.
I’m curious what other setups there are. Any suggestions?
My wife likes AnyList so I use it too. If you’re looking for privacy-focused group lists I would suggest Home Assistant to-do lists (assuming you’re running Home Assistant already).
We use anylist and it’s pretty good, except for the lube and buttplugs that someone keeps adding to the grocery list.
We’ve been using KitchenOwl (on f-droid) for a few months and we’re hapoy with it.
Link for reference: https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.tombursch.kitchenowl/
This is the best suggestion yet. Thank you, will be checking it out.
My family uses a custom Todo list on home assistant. I’ve got a separate dashboard of items we can just click to add to the grocery list, and then when shopping, checking them will move them out of the way. Very convenient, quick, and shared. So if you use HA, it might be good option, especially since you’re wanting something simpler (I was in the same boat)
that is an idea I might take :) how does this handle being offline? for example i sometimes lose connection in same stores here, but I still need to at least see the entries on the list :)
Hmm that’s actually something I hadn’t thought about, but yeah it probably wouldn’t work for an offline mode… If the app is already open, maybe it would work, but I’m not 100% sure. In general, it does require internet to connect to your home assistant (my phone is setup with wireguard to VPN into mind so it’s not internet facing). So yeah unless it can be used during those random connection drops, maybe not a perfect option :(
oh ok. I am using Nabu Casa Cloud for mine so i am always online via cloud. i tested it with enabling flight-mode and the app goes directly to the disconnected state. Altought the app I developed for a share grocery-list has the same issue, so I will give HA a try anyway :) so still a good recommendation 😀👍
i use https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.tombursch.kitchenowl/ And once you set it up with all your products, it becomes really easy to manage the household.
My wife and I use SimpleNote. I know it’s not a proper grocery app but it works really well. One person can create the grocery list initially then share with another. Either of us can then add to the list if we think of things we need or tick the box if we have bought it. Instantly updated on each others tablets, phone, desktop automatically. It’s free too!
I’ll add another vote to how good Google Keep is for this, but as this is a privacy community, I’m not sure that is a suggestion that you want to hear.
I’ve also had good luck sharing documents with Syncthing, but because we tend to only have it sync on wifi it didn’t work as well for groceries specifically because you can’t add items to the list after the person shopping has left the home and expect them to see them.
I haven’t seen Our Groceries listed yet. I don’t know Grocy so I don’t know how this one compares, bells-wise, but it’s pretty straightforward, you can share a list with any number of users, and manage/add/edit/remove lists and items via a web app or mobile app.
I’ve sent the devs more than one feature suggestion / bug report, and they were impressively responsive and forthcoming.
You might also be able to make that work with syncthing 🤔
We use Google Keep. Simply a shared list with checkboxes.
An app named “Bring!”. It’s pretty barebones, the only few features in it are
- shared list
- organise items by category
- recipe ingredients (as in save the ingredients for a recipe and then add the recipe to add all the ingredients to the list)
It’s pretty much all we need.
Yep, this is what we use. I always found the others too prescriptive. I don’t need to add the type, size or brand of cheese, I just want to put cheese, and me or my wife knows what sort of cheese to buy.
If we need something specific, you can add that detail too.
Super quick, super simple. I would love a self hosted alternative, bit there is nothing as simple that I have found.
You can use https://webxdc.org/ apps with XMPP or Deltachat and shared grocery or task lists are a common use-case.
Nextcloud notes, but the setup isn’t obvious:
- Create a list with user A
- Share the list .md file from the Notes folder via regular Nextcloud Files to user B
- As user B, move the shared note file to the Notes folder in the Files app
And you have a shared note. The Notes folder refers to the folder containing the user’s note files, not sure what the English name is.
Not sure how well concurrency is handled, as Notes doesn’t really support sharing, but if it’s for groceries, I doubt it’s a frequent issue. Has been working well for 2 years now.
It drives me crazy that notes does not reorganize the list when you check things, but that’s probably because it’s just markdown. My wife also refuses to use it. Carnet is the google keep like alternative that I think would work for me, but the sharing isn’t working currently, whenever the note is updated the share is removed.
Out of Milk is one, not sure privacy wise though. there’s an ‘Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Info & Limit Use of My Sensitive Personal Info’ button down, but who knows how much they respect that.
Otherwise, I’ve used it a couple times with my roommate and it works well for listing products and synchronizing between devices. The interface is really simple and it even lets you scan barcodes
Listonic works well for us.
Yeah we use that too. Works fine. A bit slow to update between us, but a refresh usually solves it
Hedgedoc or etherpad work.
