FarmLogs earned its reputation with grain farmers. Field boundaries, rainfall tracking and yield maps make sense when you're managing a few hundred acres of corn and soybeans. But if you grow 40 crops on two acres, sow lettuce every ten days and sell at Saturday market, much of that toolset sits unused. The features you do need, like bed-level planting logs, succession schedules and harvest notes by variety, are either missing or hidden behind a paid plan.

That gap is why so many market farmers search for FarmLogs alternatives, and why most of them want something free. Margins on a small vegetable operation are thin. A monthly software subscription competes with seed, row cover and drip tape for the same dollars. Below are five options worth your time. They're ranked by how well they fit a diversified, bed-scale operation, with honest notes on where each one falls short.

Why People Switch From FarmLogs

Talk to enough small growers and the same complaints come up again and again:

  • It's built around fields, not beds. FarmLogs thinks in acres and field polygons. Market farmers think in beds, rows and blocks. Logging a single 100-foot bed of carrots feels like forcing a square peg into a round hole.
  • The crop list leans toward commodities. Corn, soy, wheat and cotton are first-class citizens. Tracking six varieties of cherry tomato, three sowings of radish and a patch of cut flowers is clunky at best.
  • Useful features sit behind a paywall. The free tier covers basics. Deeper planning, reporting and analytics push you toward paid plans priced for operations with commodity-scale revenue.
  • It needs an account and a connection. Cloud sync is handy until you're at the far end of the property with one bar of signal and dirt on your hands. Many growers also don't love handing farm data to a platform whose business model is tied to grain marketing.
  • Too much dashboard, not enough logbook. Small growers mostly want to answer simple questions. What did I plant where? When? How much came out? A lighter tool usually gets used more consistently, and consistent records beat detailed ones you abandon by July.

None of this makes FarmLogs a bad product. It's just a product for a different kind of farm.

1. CropsBook (Free)

Best for: Market gardeners, homesteaders and small diversified farms who want fast, private, bed-level records on their phone.

CropsBook was built for the grower FarmLogs overlooks. You log plantings by bed or plot, track varieties, record sowing and transplant dates, note inputs and treatments, and log harvests as they come in. The whole thing runs on your iPhone with no account and no internet connection. You never have to wait for a sync or remember a password in the field.

What it does well:

  • 100% offline. Everything is stored on your device. It works the same at the back fence as it does at the kitchen table.
  • No account, no subscription. Download it and start logging. There's no free tier that expires and no feature you'll be pushed to pay for later.
  • Built for vegetables and small plots. It fits succession plantings, many varieties and bed-by-bed crop rotation better than acreage-first tools.
  • Private by default. Your planting records, yields and notes stay on your device. They aren't used to sell you grain contracts or inputs.
  • Quick to use. Logging a harvest takes seconds. That speed decides whether records actually get kept in the middle of July.

Honest limitations:

  • It's iOS only, available on the App Store. Android users will need another option for now.
  • Because it's offline-first, there's no built-in multi-user cloud sync. It fits solo operators and small family teams better than a crew of ten logging at the same time.
  • It won't produce satellite imagery or field-level yield maps. If you manage large-acreage commodity ground, that's a real gap.

For most market farmers, those tradeoffs are exactly right. You get the records that matter, including what went where, when and how it performed, without the overhead. When you're planning next year's rotation or working out how much to plant, having clean harvest data by bed makes the math simple.

Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription, no account, works 100% offline.

2. Bushel Farm (Free)

Best for: Growers who also run commodity acres or sell grain through Bushel-connected elevators.

Bushel Farm is the closest like-for-like swap for FarmLogs users, since Bushel absorbed much of that product's lineage. It offers free field records, activity logging and grain contract and inventory tracking, which makes it strong for farms that deliver to elevators on the Bushel network.

Pros:

  • Free to use with solid field-activity logging.
  • Excellent if you sell grain. Contracts, deliveries and settlements all live in one place.
  • Available on both iOS and Android, with a web dashboard.

Cons:

  • It carries the same field-first, commodity-first design that frustrates market farmers.
  • It requires an account and depends on connectivity for much of its value.
  • Crop and variety handling isn't designed for dozens of vegetable varieties in small beds.

If you run 200 acres of soybeans alongside a one-acre vegetable patch, Bushel Farm covers the soybeans well. For the vegetables, most growers end up pairing it with something lighter. For a deeper look, see our CropsBook vs Bushel Farm comparison.

3. LiteFarm (Free, Open Source)

Best for: Diversified and certified-organic farms that want a free, web-based platform with team features.

LiteFarm is a free, open-source farm management platform developed with university and nonprofit backing. It was designed with small and sustainable farms in mind, and it covers crop planning, task management, field and bed mapping, and record-keeping that can support organic certification.

Pros:

  • Completely free, with no paid upsell tier.
  • Built with diversified, sustainability-minded farms in mind.
  • Task assignment is useful for farms with employees or volunteers.
  • Its certification-oriented records can help with organic paperwork.

Cons:

  • It needs an account and works best with a reliable connection.
  • Setup takes real time. Mapping your farm and configuring crops is an afternoon project, not a five-minute one.
  • The interface can feel heavy for a solo grower who just wants to log a harvest and move on.

LiteFarm is a genuinely good option for small farms with a crew. Solo operators often find it more system than they need.

4. Google Sheets or Excel (Free)

Best for: Spreadsheet-comfortable growers who want total control over their record structure.

Don't dismiss the humble spreadsheet. Plenty of profitable market farms run on a planting calendar tab, a harvest log tab and a sales tab. Google Sheets is free, shareable and works on any device.

Pros:

  • Free and infinitely customizable.
  • Easy to share with a partner or bookkeeper.
  • Formulas can calculate bed-feet, seed quantities and yield per foot automatically.
  • Free farm templates are widely available from extension services and grower communities.

Cons:

  • Entering data on a phone in the field is painful. Tiny cells and muddy thumbs don't mix.
  • Every structural decision is on you, and one careless sort can scramble a season of data.
  • There's no built-in reminders, rotation history or crop-specific structure unless you build it yourself.
  • Google Sheets offline mode exists but is finicky on mobile.

A common pattern that works well is logging in the field with a mobile app like CropsBook, then summarizing the season in a spreadsheet over winter. Our guide to what records vegetable growers should track is a good starting point for either approach.

5. Seedsheet ($30–100 per Kit)

Best for: Beginner gardeners who want a pre-planned, plant-and-go starting point.

Seedsheet isn't free, and it isn't really software. It's included here because it comes up constantly in the same searches. Seedsheet sells biodegradable fabric sheets with seeds pre-embedded in a planned layout, priced roughly $30 to $100 per kit. You lay it on a bed, water it and grow.

Pros:

  • It removes the layout and spacing guesswork for new gardeners.
  • Fast setup with a tidy, planned-looking result.
  • A fun, low-stress entry point for backyard growers.

Cons:

  • It costs money every season, and those costs scale badly past a few beds.
  • Variety and layout choices are limited to what's in the kit.
  • It's not a record-keeping system. You still need somewhere to log what grew and how it did.
  • It doesn't fit market-farm scale or succession planting schedules.

Seedsheet solves planting, not tracking. For a market farmer, it's not a real FarmLogs replacement. For a first-year gardener, it can pair nicely with a free logging app. We break this down further in our CropsBook vs Seedsheet comparison.

What to Look for in an Alternative

Before you commit a season of records to any tool, run it against this checklist:

  1. Does it think in beds or in fields? If you grow on permanent beds, your tool should let you log at that level. Otherwise you'll lose the detail that makes crop rotation and succession planning work.
  2. Does it work offline? Test it in airplane mode. If it stalls, picture that happening at the far end of your plot in August.
  3. How fast is a single entry? Time yourself logging a harvest. Over 30 seconds, you'll quietly stop doing it by midseason.
  4. What does "free" really mean? Is it free forever, free with limits, or a free trial? Read the pricing page before you enter a year of data.
  5. Who owns your data? Can you get it back out? Is it stored on your device or on someone else's servers? Is your data part of the company's business model?
  6. Does it cover your whole operation? Many market farms are diversified. If you also keep laying hens, a few goats or a beef steer, a dedicated livestock tool like Barnsbook handles animal health, breeding and feed records far better than a crop app stretched to fit. And if you keep hives for pollination and a honey side-line, HiveBook tracks inspections, queens and harvests per colony. Focused tools that each do one job well usually beat one bloated platform that does everything poorly.
  7. Will you still use it in September? The best record-keeping system is the one you actually keep. Simplicity is a feature.

Making the Switch

Moving off FarmLogs doesn't have to be a big project. Here's a practical path:

  1. Export what you have. Pull whatever field records, planting dates and yield data you can from your current account. Even a rough CSV or a handful of screenshots preserves your rotation history.
  2. Map your beds first. Before entering any plantings, set up your beds or plots in the new tool with consistent names like "North Block Bed 1" or "Hoophouse Bed 3". Consistent naming is what makes multi-year rotation records useful.
  3. Enter only last season's key records. You don't need five years of history on day one. Log last year's crop in each bed so rotation planning works this spring, and let the rest go.
  4. Switch at a natural break. Winter planning season or the first seeding of spring are ideal. Switching mid-harvest means split records and gaps.
  5. Build the habit early. Log every seeding and transplant for the first two weeks, even when it feels tedious. Once the habit sticks, harvest logging follows naturally.
  6. Review monthly. Spend 15 minutes at the end of each month looking at what you've logged. Spotting gaps early keeps your end-of-season data trustworthy.

The goal isn't perfect data. It's enough data to make next season better than this one: which varieties paid, which beds struggled and when to start that second planting of beans.

FarmLogs remains a capable tool for commodity farms. But if you're a market farmer who wants fast, private, bed-level records without a subscription, CropsBook is the most practical free alternative available today. Download it, log your next planting and see how it feels by the end of the week.