FarmLogs earned its reputation honestly. For a corn and soybean operation running thousands of acres, field-boundary mapping, rainfall tracking, and yield-per-acre analytics are genuinely useful. But most people typing "FarmLogs alternatives free" into a search bar are not running thousands of acres. They are running two acres of mixed vegetables, or a half-acre market garden, or twelve raised beds that supply a farmstand and a small CSA. For that operation, FarmLogs feels like renting a combine to weed a salad bed.
The other reason people go looking: pricing changes. Free tiers get narrowed, features move behind paid plans, and a tool you built your season around starts asking for a subscription at exactly the moment cash flow is tightest. This guide covers five real alternatives, what each is actually good at, and where each one falls down. Some of these will fit you better than CropsBook does — we will say so where that is true.
Why People Switch From FarmLogs
Across grower forums and App Store reviews, the same handful of complaints come up repeatedly. They are worth naming clearly, because the right alternative depends on which one is driving you.
Acreage-first design. FarmLogs organizes everything around fields. That works when a field is 80 acres of one crop. It works poorly when your "field" is a 100-foot bed hosting three successions of lettuce, then bush beans, then garlic. Market farmers think in beds, rows, and plantings — not fields and acres. Forcing bed-scale work into field-scale containers means either a dozen fake "fields" or records too coarse to be useful.
Commodity crop assumptions. Yield in bushels per acre. Inputs in gallons per acre. Grain price feeds. None of it maps to pounds of tomatoes per bed-foot or bunches of carrots per succession. You end up doing mental conversion every time you enter data, which is exactly how record keeping dies by week six.
Cost creep. The free tier exists, but the features most growers want tend to sit above it. For an operation grossing $15,000 a season, an annual software subscription is a real line item competing with seed, compost, and irrigation supplies.
Connectivity requirements. Cloud-first tools need a signal. Plenty of growing ground has none — hoophouse interiors, rural properties, the back corner of the field. "I will enter it when I get back to the house" is the beginning of a record-keeping gap that never closes.
Account and data friction. Sign-up flows, email verification, password resets, and the uneasy question of who owns your yield history. Some growers want a notebook that happens to be digital, not a platform relationship.
1. CropsBook (Free)
CropsBook is built from the opposite starting point: the bed, not the field. You create plantings, log what went in the ground and when, track harvests in the units you actually sell in, and keep notes on what worked. It is free, requires no account, and works entirely offline because everything lives on your device.
What it does well. Planting records tied to specific beds and successions. Harvest logging in pounds, bunches, pints, or whatever you use. Variety notes that carry across seasons, so next February you can look up whether the Provider beans actually outperformed the Contenders. Task and observation notes that turn into the seasonal memory most growers otherwise keep in their head and lose by March. No signal needed — it works in the hoophouse, the back field, and the truck.
Where it will not fit you. It is iOS only. If your crew runs Android phones, this is a dead end and one of the other options below is a better use of your time. There is no satellite imagery, no equipment telematics, no grain marketing, and no multi-user sync — deliberately, since those features are what push tools toward subscriptions and accounts. And because records live on your device, your backup strategy is your device backup strategy. If you need a shared login for three employees updating records simultaneously, CropsBook is the wrong shape.
Who it is for. Solo growers and small crews doing mixed vegetables on under ten acres who want good records without a subscription, a login, or a dependency on cell coverage.
Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription, no account, works 100% offline.
Worth noting if your operation runs beyond vegetables: the same approach exists for other enterprises. Barnsbook handles livestock, ranching, and barn management for growers running animals alongside crops, and HiveBook covers apiary management and honey production if you keep bees for pollination or as a second income stream. Diversified farms often need three sets of records that do not belong in the same app.
2. Bushel Farm (Free)
Bushel Farm — formerly FarmLogs, after the acquisition — is the most direct successor to what people originally signed up for. If your frustration is pricing rather than fit, this is the first place to look.
Strengths. A genuinely capable free tier with field mapping, rainfall tracking, and crop-year record keeping. Satellite field imagery is included at no cost, which is useful for spotting irrigation or fertility problems across larger blocks. Web and mobile access with sync, so records entered on a phone show up on a laptop. Strong on the grain-marketing and contract side for growers selling commodities.
Weaknesses. It inherits FarmLogs' acreage-first worldview, because it largely is FarmLogs. Bed-scale vegetable work still does not map cleanly. Advanced features and deeper reporting sit behind paid tiers, so the free-tier ceiling arrives eventually. It requires an account and a connection for most workflows, and satellite imagery on a quarter-acre plot tells you essentially nothing you could not learn by walking it.
Who it is for. Row crop growers, hay producers, and anyone above roughly 50 acres of single-crop blocks who wants the FarmLogs feature set without the FarmLogs bill.
3. Seedsheet ($30–$100 per kit)
Seedsheet is not software, and including it in a software comparison requires honesty about that. It is a physical product: a weed-blocking fabric sheet with seed pods pre-placed in a planned layout. You roll it out, water it, and the plan is executed for you.
Strengths. Eliminates the two hardest steps for beginners — deciding what to plant where, and spacing it correctly. The fabric suppresses weeds meaningfully in the early season. For someone who has failed at gardening twice and wants one clean win, it is a reasonable purchase.
Weaknesses. Per-kit cost recurs every season, and $30–$100 per bed does not scale to market production — ten beds is $300–$1,000 annually for what seed packets would cost under $50. Variety selection is whatever the kit includes. Nothing is tracked: no harvest records, no yield history, no notes for next year. And the layout is fixed, so succession planting — the core practice of market growing — is not really supported.
Who it is for. Complete beginners with one or two beds who want a guided first season. Not a FarmLogs replacement in any functional sense, but it shows up in the same searches, so it is worth knowing what it actually is.
4. A Spreadsheet You Build Yourself
Underrated, and genuinely the right answer for some growers. A Google Sheet or Excel workbook with tabs for plantings, harvests, and sales costs nothing and bends to exactly your operation.
Strengths. Infinite flexibility. You define the columns, the units, and the math. Easy sharing with a business partner or bookkeeper. Exports cleanly for taxes and CSA reporting. No vendor can change the terms on you.
Weaknesses. Entering data on a phone in a spreadsheet, in the field, with dirty hands, is miserable — and that friction is why most farm spreadsheets go stale by July. You maintain it yourself, including the formulas that break at the worst moment. Offline editing on mobile is inconsistent depending on your setup.
Who it is for. Growers who already live in spreadsheets and will reliably sit down weekly to enter records from paper notes.
5. Paper Field Notebook
The tool with the highest completion rate in actual practice. A weatherproof notebook costs under $15, never runs out of battery, and works in the rain.
Strengths. Zero learning curve, zero cost, zero dependencies. Fastest possible capture in the moment — which matters, because a record you take immediately beats a better-structured record you meant to take later. Nothing to sync, nothing to update.
Weaknesses. No search. No totals without manual adding. Comparing this year's tomato yield to last year's means flipping through two notebooks. One flood, one lost bag, and three seasons of history are gone. Sharing means photocopying.
Who it is for. Growers who have tried apps and abandoned them. Also excellent as a capture layer feeding any of the above — scribble in the field, enter it properly that evening.
What to Look for in an Alternative
Before switching, get clear on which of these actually matter to you. Most people overweight features and underweight friction.
- Scale match. Does the tool organize by bed and planting, or by field and acre? This single question eliminates most mismatches. A tool designed for 500 acres will never feel right on two.
- Offline capability. Walk your growing space and check your signal. If there are dead spots — and there usually are — a cloud-only tool will produce gaps in your records precisely where you spend the most time.
- True cost over three seasons. Not the sticker price today. Free tiers narrow, and per-kit products recur. Multiply by three and compare honestly.
- Entry speed. Count the taps between opening the app and logging a harvest. Anything over about five and you will stop doing it in August, when you are tired and it is 95 degrees.
- Data ownership and exit. Can you get your records out? What happens if the company is acquired — which, as FarmLogs itself demonstrates, is not hypothetical?
- Platform reality. Check what phones your crew actually carries before committing.
Making the Switch
Switching tools mid-season is how records get lost. A few practical rules keep that from happening.
- Switch at a season boundary. Late fall or winter, after final harvest and before seed ordering. You get months to learn the new tool before it matters, and your records stay coherent within each season.
- Export from FarmLogs first — before you cancel. Pull every CSV and report the platform will give you while your account is still active. Access to historical data after cancellation is not guaranteed. Store the exports somewhere you will find them in two years.
- Do not migrate everything. The temptation is to re-enter five years of history. Resist it. Carry forward only what changes decisions: variety performance notes, planting dates that worked, yield-per-bed figures for your top ten crops. The archived CSV holds the rest.
- Run both for four weeks. Overlap one month of real entries in old and new. If the new tool is slower or more awkward in actual field conditions, you have found out cheaply.
- Start narrow. Track plantings and harvests only for the first month. Add task notes, input records, and sales tracking once the basic habit holds. Systems that start comprehensive get abandoned; systems that start small get extended.
- Set one fixed logging moment. End of each harvest day, or Sunday evening with your field notebook. The tool matters less than the trigger that gets you to open it.
The best record-keeping system is the one you still use in August — not the one with the longest feature list in January.
For most market farmers leaving FarmLogs, the honest ranking is straightforward. If you grow mixed vegetables at bed scale on iOS, CropsBook fits the work and costs nothing. If you are above 50 acres of row crops, Bushel Farm is the closer successor. If you are on Android or need multi-user access, a well-structured spreadsheet paired with a field notebook beats forcing a mismatched app. And if you have abandoned three apps already, buy the $12 waterproof notebook and stop shopping.