If you're searching for "CropsBook vs FarmLogs," you're probably at the same point a lot of growers reach. You've outgrown the notebook in the truck, you want your planting dates, harvests and field notes in one place, and you're trying to work out whether you need a full farm management platform or something lighter. The two apps come from very different directions. FarmLogs grew up serving corn, soybean and wheat operations measured in hundreds of acres. CropsBook was built for vegetable growers, market gardeners and homesteaders who manage beds, rows and succession plantings. Neither one is "better" in general. The real question is which one fits the work you do every day. This comparison tries to answer that honestly.
One piece of context first. FarmLogs was acquired by Bushel in 2021, and much of its farm-records functionality has since moved under the Bushel Farm brand. If you're evaluating FarmLogs today, check what's currently offered under which name, because plans and features have shifted during that transition.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | CropsBook | FarmLogs |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free tier + paid plans |
| Works Offline | Yes, 100% offline | Limited; most features need an internet connection |
| Account Required | No | Yes |
| Best For | Vegetable growers, market gardeners, solo operators, small farms | Row-crop farms (corn, soybeans, wheat) at larger acreage |
| Platform | iOS (App Store) | Web + mobile apps |
| Key Features | Crop & planting logs, bed/field tracking, harvest records, task notes, season history | Field mapping, rainfall & weather tracking, crop health imagery, input/expense records, grain marketing tools |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device | Cloud-hosted on company servers |
Pricing
Price is often the deciding factor for small growers, so here's the plain version.
CropsBook is free. No trial period, no feature wall that shows up after your fifth crop, no per-acre fees. You download it and start logging. That's deliberate. Most market gardeners and homestead growers run on thin margins, and a software subscription is one more fixed cost competing with seed, compost and row cover.
FarmLogs has a free tier that covers basic record-keeping, with paid plans unlocking the more advanced features: satellite crop-health imagery, deeper analytics, profit tracking and marketing tools. Paid pricing has historically been annual and has scaled with operation size, so a row-crop farm with significant acreage could see a bill in the hundreds of dollars per year or more. For a 1,000-acre grain operation, that cost is small next to what the insights can save. For someone farming two acres of mixed vegetables, it's harder to justify, especially since most of the premium features (satellite imagery, grain marketing) aren't designed for bed-scale vegetable production anyway.
| Cost Period | CropsBook | FarmLogs (Free Tier) | FarmLogs (Paid Plans) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 (limited features) | Billed annually; varies by plan & acreage |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 (limited features) | Typically hundreds of dollars+ |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 (limited features) | 3× annual cost, subject to price changes |
FarmLogs/Bushel pricing changes over time and depends on your operation. Check their current pricing page for exact figures before you decide.
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
Here's where the two apps really diverge. They aren't solving the same problem.
What FarmLogs does well:
- Field mapping and boundaries. Drawing field boundaries on a map and tracking activity per field works well for large, uniform fields.
- Rainfall and weather tracking. Automatic rainfall estimates by field were one of FarmLogs' most popular features, and they're useful when you're managing fields spread across a county.
- Crop health imagery. Satellite-based vegetation imagery helps big operations spot problem areas without walking every acre.
- Input and expense records. Tracking seed, fertilizer and chemical applications against fields supports both compliance and cost analysis.
- Grain marketing integration. Under Bushel, the platform ties into grain elevator data, contracts and pricing. That's valuable if you sell commodity grain.
These are real strengths. If you grow 800 acres of corn and beans, FarmLogs and its Bushel successor offer tools that a simple logging app doesn't try to replace.
What CropsBook does well:
- Vegetable-scale crop tracking. CropsBook thinks in crops, varieties, beds and plantings, not section-sized fields. Logging "Sungold tomatoes, bed 4, transplanted May 12" is fast and natural.
- Succession and multi-crop management. Market gardens can rotate dozens of crops through the same space in one season. CropsBook handles many small plantings without the clutter of a system built for one crop per field.
- Harvest records. Log what came out of the ground and when. Over a few seasons this becomes your best yield-planning data, and it's exactly what you need for working out how much to plant.
- Notes and observations. Pest pressure, disease, variety performance, and what you'd change next year. Write it down in the field while it's fresh.
- Season history. Look back at previous years to plan crop rotations and catch patterns, like the bed where brassicas always struggle.
- Speed and simplicity. No onboarding wizard and no dashboard full of features you'll never use. Open it, log it, close it.
The honest summary: FarmLogs has more features overall, but most of them are aimed at commodity row-crop operations. CropsBook has fewer features, and nearly all of them are ones a vegetable grower uses every week.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This is CropsBook's clearest advantage, and it matters more than people expect until they're standing in a field with one bar of signal.
Offline reliability. CropsBook works 100% offline. Every feature, every time. Rural farms often have patchy cell coverage, and even farms with good coverage have dead spots: the back field, the hoop house with the metal frame, the walk-in cooler. If your record-keeping app needs a connection to save an entry, you'll end up writing it on your hand and promising yourself you'll enter it later. Most of us know how that goes.
FarmLogs is a cloud platform at heart. Its mobile apps have offered some offline capability over the years, but much of the value (weather data, imagery, syncing across devices) depends on a connection. That's a reasonable design for its target users, who often check data from the office or the cab with good coverage. It's a worse fit for someone logging transplants on their knees in a bed.
Data privacy. CropsBook doesn't require an account. There's no email signup, no password, and no farm profile on a company server. Your crop records live on your device. For a lot of small growers that's a real comfort. Your yields, varieties, and what's working on your farm are your business information, and you shouldn't have to hand them to a third party just to keep a planting log.
FarmLogs, like most cloud farm platforms, stores your data on its servers. That's how it enables multi-device sync, team access, and integrations with grain buyers. Those are real benefits, but they come with trade-offs: your data's future is tied to the company's policies, its ownership changes (FarmLogs has already been through one acquisition), and its continued operation.
If you've ever lost access to records because a service shut down, changed hands, or moved features behind a paywall, you already understand why "your data stays on your device" matters.
Who Should Use FarmLogs
To be fair, FarmLogs (and Bushel Farm, where it now lives) is the better choice for some growers:
- Row-crop farmers with significant acreage. If you grow corn, soybeans, wheat or similar commodity crops on hundreds or thousands of acres, field mapping, rainfall tracking and satellite imagery give you real value.
- Operations that sell grain through elevators. Bushel's grain marketing and elevator integrations are a genuine differentiator.
- Multi-person teams. If several people need to see and update the same records from different devices, a cloud platform with shared accounts makes sense.
- Farms that need detailed input compliance records. Larger operations that track chemical applications across many fields for regulatory or insurance purposes will get a lot out of FarmLogs' structured input logging.
- Growers who mostly work from a desk. If you plan and review in an office with good internet, the cloud dependency isn't much of a downside.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook's sweet spot is the grower FarmLogs was never really designed for:
- Market gardeners growing 20, 40 or 60 different crops on a few acres or less, with lots of succession plantings.
- Solo operators and small family farms who need records but don't need, or can't justify paying for, enterprise farm software.
- Homesteaders and serious backyard growers who want to track varieties, planting dates and harvests from one season to the next.
- Anyone farming with spotty cell coverage who needs an app that works the same in the back field as on the porch.
- Privacy-minded growers who'd rather keep their farm data on their own phone than in someone else's cloud.
- Growers just starting to keep records. If you're starting a market garden, a simple free tool you'll actually use beats a powerful one you'll abandon by July.
A lot of small farms are diversified too, and the crops are only one part of the operation. If you keep a few head of cattle, goats or laying hens alongside your vegetable beds, Barnsbook handles livestock records, animal health and barn management with the same offline, no-account approach. And if you keep bees for pollination (your squash and cucumbers will thank you) or sell honey at the same market stand as your produce, HiveBook tracks hive inspections, apiary notes and honey harvests. Each app does one job well instead of cramming everything into one bloated platform.
The Bottom Line
FarmLogs is a capable platform built for a specific kind of farm: large-acreage row-crop operations that benefit from field mapping, weather data, satellite imagery and grain marketing tools. If that describes you, it's worth evaluating, though you should check what's currently offered under the Bushel Farm brand.
Most people searching for a "FarmLogs alternative" aren't running that kind of operation, though. They're growing vegetables on a few acres or less. They need to log plantings and harvests quickly, often without signal, and they don't want to pay a recurring fee for features built for someone else's farm.
For those growers, CropsBook is the better fit:
- It's free. $0 now, $0 next year, $0 in three years.
- It works offline. Every feature, anywhere on your farm.
- It's private. No account, and your data stays on your device.
- It's built for vegetables. Beds, varieties, successions and harvests, not section-sized fields.
- It's simple. You'll actually use it in the middle of the season, which is the whole point of record-keeping.
Our honest recommendation: if you farm commodity grain at scale, look at FarmLogs/Bushel. If you grow vegetables, run a market garden, or manage a small diversified farm on your own, start with CropsBook. It costs nothing to try, and good records are worth more the earlier you start keeping them.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.