If you grow vegetables for market or tend a serious backyard plot, you have probably stumbled across Bushel Farm while searching for a way to track plantings, harvests, and field notes. It looks polished, it is free, and it carries the weight of a real agricultural software company behind it. CropsBook keeps showing up in the same searches with a very different pitch: free, offline, no account, built for the person holding the trowel rather than the person holding the combine key.
So which one actually belongs on your phone? The short answer depends on whether you grow corn and soybeans across hundreds of acres or carrots and tomatoes across a few dozen beds. This comparison walks through pricing, features, privacy, and the kind of grower each app was really designed for. No marketing spin — just an honest look at where each tool shines and where it falls short.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | CropsBook | Bushel Farm |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever | Free tier (paid add-ons for grain marketing) |
| Works Offline | Yes — 100% offline | Limited — requires sync to cloud |
| Account Required | No | Yes — email signup |
| Best For | Solo market gardeners, small CSAs, serious home growers | Commodity grain & row-crop operations |
| Platform | iOS (iPhone & iPad) | iOS, Android, Web |
| Key Features | Crop log, planting calendar, harvest tracking, bed-level notes | Field mapping, grain marketing, scale tickets, rainfall logs |
| Data Privacy | Stays on your device | Stored on Bushel servers |
Pricing
Both apps advertise a free tier, but the structure underneath differs a lot. Bushel Farm is free to start, and the core record-keeping really does cost nothing. The catch shows up in the upsells: grain marketing tools, scale ticket integrations, and premium analytics live behind paid plans aimed at operations selling truckloads of commodity grain. If you never touch those features, you can run Bushel Farm at zero cost — but the product roadmap is clearly pulling toward the commodity side, not the market-garden side.
CropsBook is free with no tiers and no upgrade path. There is no premium plan, no per-acre fee, no subscription waiting on the other side of a feature wall. The trade-off is honest: CropsBook does not try to be everything. It does crop tracking for small growers and stops there.
| Cost | CropsBook | Bushel Farm (with add-ons) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 base — add-ons vary by operation size |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 base + optional grain marketing fees |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 base + cumulative add-on costs |
| Hidden costs | None | Account required, data stored remotely |
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
Bushel Farm earns real respect on the commodity side. Field boundary mapping pulls from satellite imagery, rainfall logs tie to GPS coordinates, and the grain marketing tools let large operations track contracts, basis, and delivery schedules. For a row-crop farmer moving thousands of bushels, that workflow is hard to beat at the price. Scale ticket capture and integration with grain elevators is genuinely useful if your day ends at a co-op rather than a farmers market.
CropsBook is built around a different unit of work: the bed, the row, the variety. You log what you planted, when you planted it, where it went, and what came out. Succession plantings get their own entries. Harvest weights tie back to the specific variety so you can see which tomato earned its space next season. Notes attach to individual beds so you remember that the north end of bed 4 floods in May. None of this maps cleanly to a 200-acre corn field, and none of Bushel Farm's commodity tooling maps cleanly to a quarter-acre of mixed vegetables.
If your operation spans more than crops, the same offline, no-account approach extends across a small family of niche apps. Barnsbook handles livestock and barn records for folks running cattle, sheep, or goats alongside their gardens, and HiveBook covers hive inspections and honey harvests for beekeepers. Same philosophy, different specialty — each one focused tightly enough to actually fit the work.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This is where the two apps diverge most sharply. Bushel Farm is a cloud-first product. You create an account, your data syncs to their servers, and the app expects connectivity to do most of its work. That model makes sense for a multi-employee operation where the agronomist, the owner, and the truck driver all need to see the same field record. It makes less sense at the back of a hoop house where LTE drops to one bar and you just want to log that you transplanted lettuce.
CropsBook does not require an account and does not send your data anywhere. Everything lives on your device. You can run the app on a phone in airplane mode for a full season and never notice a missing feature. For growers who think their planting plan, yield numbers, and customer notes are nobody else's business, that matters. There is no terms-of-service change waiting to expose your records to a third party because there are no records on a third-party server.
Privacy aside, the practical reality of offline-first design is reliability. A connection drop never costs you a harvest entry. A company pivot never strands your historical data behind a paywall. Export your notes, back up your device, and the records belong to you the same way a paper notebook would.
Who Should Use Bushel Farm
Bushel Farm is a strong fit if you run a commodity grain or row-crop operation at scale. If your season revolves around corn, soybeans, wheat, or other bulk commodities, and your decisions hinge on basis, contracts, and elevator delivery windows, the marketing tools alone justify the setup. Field-level rainfall tracking and satellite-pulled boundaries save real time when you are managing dozens or hundreds of fields. Multi-user access matters when an agronomist, a partner, and a hired hand all need the same view.
If you have a smartphone glued to your dashboard, reliable cell service across your acres, and a workflow that ends at a grain elevator rather than a market table, Bushel Farm has been built for you. The team behind it understands commodity agriculture, and that depth shows.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook is built for the solo market gardener, the CSA operator running a few acres, the homesteader tracking a serious vegetable plot, and the small-scale grower who wants records without ceremony. If you plant by the bed rather than the field, sell by the bunch rather than the bushel, and want to know which variety of pepper outperformed the others over three seasons, this is the workflow.
It also fits anyone who has been burned by software companies before — the kind of grower who has watched a free app turn into a $15-a-month subscription, or seen a startup disappear and take the data with it. CropsBook gives you a tool that does not need a server, a login, or a credit card on file. Open it, log the work, close it. The records are yours.
It also fits the realist who knows cell service in a back field is unreliable. Offline-first is not a fancy feature; it is just how the app works. Nothing waits to sync, nothing fails to save.
The Bottom Line
Bushel Farm and CropsBook are not really competitors so much as tools for two different jobs. Bushel Farm is good software aimed at commodity row-crop agriculture. CropsBook is good software aimed at vegetable growers working at human scale. If you raise corn across a thousand acres, install Bushel Farm. If you raise carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, and a hundred other crops across a few beds or a few acres, install CropsBook.
The honest test is simple: open both apps, try to log a single transplanting of bok choy into a 30-foot bed. Whichever app makes that easier is the right one for you. For market gardeners and serious home growers, that is almost always going to be CropsBook — not because Bushel Farm is bad, but because it was never built for that bed.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.