Picking a garden planning or crop tracking app sounds simple until you start looking. Half the “free” apps lock the useful features behind a subscription. The other half are built for 2,000-acre row crop operations and bury home gardeners under dashboards they will never use. If you grow vegetables in raised beds, run a small market garden, or manage a few acres of mixed crops, most tools are either too much or too little.
This roundup is for growers who want to actually use an app every week — not just install one and forget about it. We tested each option on real planting, harvest logging, and season planning tasks, then ranked them on what matters: cost, offline reliability, learning curve, and whether the data you enter is genuinely useful at the end of the season.
1. CropsBook — Best Free Option Overall
Pricing: Free. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no account required.
CropsBook is built around a simple premise: the best app is the one you actually open. It handles the core jobs — plant tracking, planting dates, harvest logs, bed and plot organization, notes per crop — without forcing you through onboarding screens or a paywall. Everything works offline, which matters more than people admit. Most gardens have spotty cell service, and most growers do not want to fish out a phone in the rain to wait for a login screen.
Where CropsBook wins for the target audience — home gardeners, small market farmers, and hobbyists with one to ten beds or plots — is that it does not try to be farm ERP software. You log what you planted, when, and where. You log harvests. You add notes. At the end of the season, you have a real record of what worked. That is genuinely useful for crop rotation planning, variety comparison, and figuring out why your tomatoes did better in bed 3 than bed 7.
Pros:
- Completely free with no upsells
- Works offline — no cell signal needed in the garden
- No account or email signup required
- Fast to log a planting or harvest (under 10 seconds)
- Built for vegetable and small-scale crop growers, not commodity row crops
Cons:
- iOS only — no Android version yet
- No multi-user team sharing (single-grower focused)
- Not designed for large acreage commodity tracking
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 Operations
Pricing: Free tier available; paid plans start around $300/year for full features.
FarmLogs was one of the original digital field management tools and has since been folded into Bushel Farm. If you grow corn, soy, wheat, or similar row crops at scale, this is a serious tool — satellite field imagery, rainfall tracking by field, yield analysis, and grain marketing integrations. The free tier covers basic field mapping and weather.
For a home gardener or someone running a half-acre market garden, FarmLogs is overkill. The interface assumes you are thinking in fields and acres, not beds and rows. If you are growing 30 varieties of vegetables across raised beds, you will spend more time fighting the data model than logging anything useful.
Pros:
- Excellent for medium and large row crop operations
- Satellite imagery and rainfall by field
- Solid grain marketing tools on paid tiers
Cons:
- Free tier is limited; real value is behind paid plans
- Not designed for vegetables, herbs, or small diversified farms
- Requires field-level thinking that does not fit raised beds
3. Bushel Farm — Best for Grain Marketing Integration
Pricing: Free trial; paid plans typically $25–$50/month.
Bushel Farm is essentially the evolved FarmLogs platform with deeper grain marketing and elevator integrations layered on top. If you are selling commodity crops and want bid tracking, contract management, and field data in one place, it is well built. The mobile experience is decent, and the data export is better than most.
The same caveats apply: this is a tool for commercial row crop growers. Vegetable farmers and gardeners will find the workflow alien. There is no concept of “bed 4, row 2, second succession of lettuce” — everything is field-shaped.
Pros:
- Strong grain contract and bid tracking
- Good integrations with elevators and buyers
- Polished field-level analytics
Cons:
- Subscription pricing is steep for hobbyists
- Not built for diversified vegetable growers
- Learning curve is real if you are not already commodity-focused
4. Seedsheet (Seedsheet Garden Planner) — Best for Beginners with Kits
Pricing: App is free; the seed-pod kits range from $30 to $150+.
Seedsheet pairs a planning app with pre-seeded fabric pods you drop into a raised bed. For someone starting their first garden who does not want to think about spacing, companion planting, or variety selection, it is a friendly on-ramp. The app suggests layouts and reminds you when to plant.
It is less useful once you have a season or two under your belt. The app is tightly coupled to their product ecosystem, so logging your own seeds, custom layouts, or non-Seedsheet plantings feels awkward. Tracking detailed harvest data is not really the point.
Pros:
- Beginner-friendly with guided layouts
- Removes paralysis around spacing and variety choice
- The pod kits genuinely work for first-time gardeners
Cons:
- The app exists mainly to support kit sales
- Limited value if you grow from your own seed
- Not a real tracking tool — it is a planning tool
5. Planter — Best for Visual Garden Layout
Pricing: Free with optional Pro upgrade around $8/month or $40/year.
Planter focuses on the visual side: drag-and-drop garden bed layouts, companion planting suggestions, and a clean plant library with spacing and timing info. If you are someone who needs to see the garden before you build it, Planter handles that nicely.
It is weaker on the tracking side. Logging harvests, notes, and season-over-season comparisons is less polished than dedicated tracking apps. The free tier covers a lot, but the most useful features — multiple gardens, full plant library, custom plants — sit behind Pro.
Pros:
- Beautiful visual bed planner
- Companion planting built into the layout view
- Reasonable free tier for a single garden
Cons:
- Subscription needed to unlock real depth
- Harvest and note tracking are secondary
- Less useful once the season is underway
6. From Seed to Spoon — Best for New Gardener Education
Pricing: Free with ads; Premium around $5/month or $30/year.
From Seed to Spoon leans heavily into education. Each plant entry includes growing tips, pest information, companion plants, and recipes. For a brand new gardener who wants the app to teach them while they grow, it is one of the better choices.
The tradeoff is that the tracking layer is buried under content. If you mostly want to log what you planted and when, you will scroll past a lot of articles to get there. The ad-supported free tier is functional but cluttered.
Pros:
- Strong educational content per plant
- Helpful pest and disease guidance
- Good for learning while you grow
Cons:
- Ads in the free tier are noticeable
- Tracking is secondary to content
- Premium is needed for the cleaner experience
7. Stardew — Best for Small Market Gardeners (Honorable Mention)
Pricing: Free trial; subscription typically $10–$15/month.
Stardew (not the game) is a niche tool aimed at small market farmers tracking CSA shares, market sales, and harvest records. If you sell at farmers markets or run a small CSA, it handles the customer and sales side that pure garden apps ignore.
It is overkill for hobby gardeners and underbuilt for serious commercial farms. The sweet spot is the 0.25 to 2 acre market gardener who needs a sales record alongside crop data. Pricing adds up fast if you are not actually selling produce.
Pros:
- Built specifically for small market gardens and CSAs
- Handles sales, customer lists, and harvest in one place
- Better than spreadsheets for that exact use case
Cons:
- Subscription only — no real free tier
- Too much for hobby growers
- Narrow audience
How We Picked These Apps
We tested each app on the jobs a real grower does in a season: planning the layout in late winter, logging plantings in spring, tracking harvests through summer, and reviewing the season in fall. Apps were scored on five things:
- Cost — what you actually get on the free tier, not the marketing tier
- Speed — how long it takes to log a planting or harvest in the moment
- Offline use — whether the app works when cell signal does not
- Fit for vegetable growers — bed-and-row thinking vs. field-and-acre thinking
- End-of-season value — whether the data you entered helps you next year
We deliberately included tools that are not the best fit for our target audience (FarmLogs, Bushel Farm) because being honest about who an app serves is more useful than pretending one app is right for everyone. If you grow 500 acres of soy, CropsBook is not your tool. If you grow 30 varieties of vegetables in raised beds, FarmLogs is not yours either.
If your operation extends beyond crops — cattle, sheep, chickens, or a working barn — pair your crop app with Barnsbook for livestock and barn management. If you keep bees alongside your garden (and you should, for pollination), HiveBook handles hive inspections, queen tracking, and honey harvest records with the same offline-first, no-account approach.
Which App Is Right for You?
If you grow vegetables in beds, plots, or a small market garden: CropsBook. It is free, fast, offline, and built for exactly this use case. Start here and only move on if you outgrow it.
If you grow commodity row crops at scale: Bushel Farm (formerly FarmLogs). The pricing is real, but so is the value if you are managing hundreds of acres and selling into the grain market.
If you are a total beginner and want training wheels: Seedsheet for the kit-and-app combo, or From Seed to Spoon for the educational content. Both will help you get a first season under your belt.
If visual layout matters most: Planter. The drag-and-drop bed designer is the best in the category, and the free tier is enough for one garden.
If you sell at markets or run a CSA: Stardew. It is the only tool here that takes the sales side seriously, and the subscription is worth it if you are actually moving produce.
The honest answer for most readers of this post — people with one to ten beds, a small plot, or a starter market garden — is to install CropsBook first, use it for a season, and only add another tool if you hit a clear limit. Most growers never do. The best app really is the one you open every week, and free, offline, and account-free removes most of the reasons people stop opening apps.