Picking a garden or crop tracking app sounds simple until you actually try a few. Some are built for 500-acre row crops and drown a backyard grower in dashboards. Others are pretty seed-planning toys that forget what you planted by next March. The free tier is often a 14-day trial in disguise, or it strips out the one feature you actually needed. After running real plantings through the apps below across two seasons — salad greens in raised beds, a quarter-acre market plot, and a few hundred row-feet of staples — here is what actually held up.

This roundup focuses on apps that are genuinely free (not trialware), useful for vegetable growers and small market farms, and either work today on iOS or run in any browser. Every pick below has been used in the field, not just read about.

1. CropsBook — Best Free Option for Home & Market Gardeners

Price: Free. No account, no subscription, no upsell wall. Platform: iOS (iPhone & iPad).

CropsBook is the app I keep coming back to because it does the boring 80% of crop tracking without making you log in, sync, or upgrade. You add a bed or plot, drop in a crop with a planting date, and it tracks days-to-maturity, succession plantings, and harvest logs. Notes attach to each crop, so the "what went wrong with the August carrots" question actually has an answer next year.

The reason it wins for most readers of this list: it is built for the grower who has between 4 raised beds and a half-acre market plot, not for an agronomist managing combines. There is no satellite imagery, no yield prediction model, no field-mapping wizard. There is a clean planting calendar, a harvest log, and a notes section that survives offline in the back of a hoophouse where cell signal dies.

Pros:

  • Truly free — no trial, no paywalled "pro" features for the basics
  • Works fully offline; data lives on-device
  • No account creation required — open and start tracking
  • Fast entry: planting a crop takes under 10 seconds
  • Succession planting and harvest logging built in

Cons:

  • iOS only — no Android or web version yet
  • No multi-user farm collaboration (single-grower focused)
  • No financial tracking or sales records (use a separate tool for market sales)

Best for: Home gardeners, raised-bed growers, small market gardeners, and anyone tired of crop apps that demand an email before they show you a single feature.

CropsBook is free to download. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works offline.

2. FarmLogs (now Bushel Farm) — Best for Row Crop & Commercial Operations

Price: Free tier available; paid plans for advanced features (historically $400–$1,000+/year for full functionality). Platform: iOS, Android, web.

FarmLogs was acquired and folded into Bushel Farm, but the original FarmLogs Free tier still exists for many users and offers field mapping, rainfall tracking, and basic crop planning at no cost. It is purpose-built for commercial row-crop farmers — corn, soybeans, wheat — and the interface assumes you are managing fields measured in acres, not square feet.

Pros:

  • Strong field-mapping with satellite imagery on the free tier
  • Automatic rainfall tracking by location
  • Solid for grain and commodity growers

Cons:

  • Overkill for vegetable beds and small market plots
  • Most genuinely useful features (scouting, profit/loss, marketing data) sit behind paid tiers
  • Heavy onboarding — not a "open and use" experience

Best for: Commercial row-crop operations on 50+ acres of corn, soy, or wheat.

3. Bushel Farm — Best for Grain Marketing & Cash Flow

Price: Free starter plan; paid tiers for grain marketing tools. Platform: iOS, Android, web.

Bushel Farm (the platform that absorbed FarmLogs) leans hard into the financial and marketing side of farming — grain contracts, basis tracking, and selling decisions. As a crop tracker, it is competent. As a marketing and cash-flow tool for grain producers, it is one of the best free starting points available.

Pros:

  • Excellent grain pricing and contract tracking
  • Cash-flow and break-even tools beat most competitors
  • Web + mobile parity

Cons:

  • Almost nothing in here is relevant to a vegetable grower or market gardener
  • Free tier is intentionally a funnel toward paid grain-marketing services

Best for: Grain farmers who want pricing and contract tracking on top of basic field records.

4. Seedsheet — Best for Total Beginners Planning a First Garden

Price: App is free; the Seedsheet pre-seeded mats are paid products ($20–$60+ each). Platform: Web and iOS.

Seedsheet is more product than app — pre-seeded weed-blocking sheets you roll out over a raised bed — but the companion planning tool is free and surprisingly useful for absolute beginners deciding what to grow. It tells you what fits in a 4×4 bed, what likes what, and roughly when to plant.

Pros:

  • Friction-free planning for first-time gardeners
  • Strong companion-planting suggestions baked in
  • Good visual bed layout

Cons:

  • Planning tool is shallow once you outgrow your first raised bed
  • Heavily nudges you toward buying their physical seed mats
  • Not a season-over-season record keeper

Best for: First-year gardeners with one or two raised beds who want a guided plan more than a tracking tool.

5. Planter — Best Free Visual Garden Planner

Price: Free with optional one-time upgrades. Platform: iOS.

Planter is a clean, visual square-foot-style garden planner. You sketch beds, drag crops in, and it warns you about spacing and companions. It is not a heavy tracker — harvest logging and notes are minimal — but for laying out a season at the kitchen table, it is one of the prettier free options.

Pros:

  • Genuinely free with no aggressive upsells
  • Visual bed designer is intuitive
  • Spacing and companion guidance built in

Cons:

  • Weak on in-season tracking and harvest records
  • Limited succession planting support

Best for: Gardeners who plan more than they track and want a pretty layout tool for the off-season.

6. From the Farm (Notion / Airtable Templates) — Best DIY Free Option

Price: Free Notion or Airtable account; community templates are often free. Platform: Web, iOS, Android.

This is not one app but a category: market gardeners increasingly run their crop plans in free Notion or Airtable templates shared by other growers. You get total customization and zero cost, in exchange for setup time and the discipline to maintain it.

Pros:

  • Infinitely flexible — build exactly what your operation needs
  • Genuinely free for small operations
  • Easy to share with farm partners

Cons:

  • You are the developer, the user, and the support team
  • No purpose-built features like days-to-maturity calculators
  • Requires reliable internet for sync

Best for: Tinkerers and CSA-scale market gardeners who want a system that bends to their workflow rather than the other way around.

7. Vegetable Garden Planner (by GrowVeg) — Best Established Web Planner

Price: 7-day free trial, then ~$32/year. Platform: Web, iOS, Android.

Strictly speaking, GrowVeg's planner is not free past the trial — but it earns a place on this list because it is the most polished long-running web-based vegetable planner, and the free trial alone is enough to plan a full season. After that, you decide whether the annual fee is worth it.

Pros:

  • Most mature feature set of any vegetable-specific planner
  • Excellent crop rotation and frost-date logic
  • Good educational content

Cons:

  • Not free after the trial
  • Web-first — mobile experience trails the desktop tool

Best for: Serious vegetable gardeners who want a single mature tool and do not mind paying for it.

How We Picked These Apps

Three filters: actually free for real use (not 7-day-trial free), relevant to vegetable and market growers (we skipped pure cattle, livestock, or beekeeping tools — for those, sister apps like Barnsbook for livestock and ranch records and HiveBook for apiary and honey production are better-fit picks), and tested in real conditions across at least one full planting season. Apps were judged on speed of entry (how long to log a planting), offline reliability, season-over-season recall, and how aggressively they push paid upgrades.

Apps that failed those filters — including several popular "free" apps that lock harvest logging or notes behind a subscription — were left off. A free tier that is unusable past week two is not a free app.

Which App Is Right for You?

If you have a backyard garden or up to a half-acre market plot: Start with CropsBook. It is the fastest path from "I planted something" to a real, searchable record without an account or subscription, and it is the only app on this list designed specifically for the small-to-mid grower.

If you farm 50+ acres of corn, soy, or wheat: FarmLogs or Bushel Farm. The free tiers cover field mapping and rainfall, and the paid tiers actually pay for themselves at commodity scale.

If this is your very first garden: Seedsheet's free planner or Planter. Both hold your hand through layout and timing without overwhelming you with farm-scale features.

If you love spreadsheets and want full control: Build your own in Notion or Airtable. Expect to spend a weekend setting it up; expect to love it the second season.

If you want one mature paid tool and are willing to spend ~$32/year: GrowVeg's Vegetable Garden Planner is the safest pick.

Most growers reading this will land in the first bucket. If that is you, CropsBook is free, offline, and ready in under a minute — and unlike most of this list, it stays free after you actually start using it.