If you're searching "CropsBook vs FarmLogs," you probably already know you need a better system than a muddy notebook and a phone full of random photos. Both apps help you keep farm records, but they were built for very different growers. FarmLogs grew up serving corn, soybean, and wheat operations that think in hundreds or thousands of acres. CropsBook was built for vegetable growers, market gardeners, and small farms where you might have thirty crops on two acres and the barn has no Wi-Fi. This comparison covers where each one shines, where each falls short, and which one fits the way you actually grow.
One note before we start: in 2022 FarmLogs was acquired by Bushel, and much of its functionality has since moved into Bushel's farm management products. If you're looking at FarmLogs today, check what is currently offered under the FarmLogs name and what has moved under Bushel. Plans and feature sets have shifted over time, so treat any pricing you find (including ours below) as a starting point and confirm it on their site.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | CropsBook | FarmLogs |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Limited free tier + paid plans |
| Works Offline | Yes, 100% offline | Needs internet for most features |
| Account Required | No | Yes |
| Best For | Vegetable growers, market gardeners, solo operators, small farms | Row-crop farms (corn, soybeans, wheat) managing many fields |
| Platform | iPhone (App Store) | Web + mobile apps |
| Key Features | Crop and planting logs, bed/field tracking, harvest records, notes, simple season history | Field mapping, rainfall and weather data, satellite imagery, marketing and grain-contract tools |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device | Data stored on company cloud servers |
Pricing
Price is often what settles this for small growers, so here are the plain facts.
CropsBook is free. No subscription, no trial that runs out, no feature that only unlocks with a credit card. You download it from the App Store and start logging. Nothing about the core app expires after 14 days.
FarmLogs has used a freemium model. The free tier has covered basics like field records and some rainfall tracking. The useful extras, such as advanced imagery, deeper analytics, profit tools, and marketing features, have sat behind paid plans. Those plans were priced for commercial row-crop operations, and the paid tiers have historically cost hundreds of dollars a year. For a 2,000-acre corn farm, that's a rounding error. For a market gardener grossing $30,000 from an acre and a half of mixed vegetables, it's real money that could buy a season of seed, a new broadfork, or a roll of row cover.
Here's an illustrative side-by-side. FarmLogs figures are estimates based on typical paid-tier pricing, so check their current rates before deciding.
| Cost Period | CropsBook | FarmLogs (Free Tier) | FarmLogs (Paid Plan, est.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 (limited features) | ~$20–$60+ |
| 1 Year | $0 | $0 (limited features) | ~$250–$700+ |
| 3 Years | $0 | $0 (limited features) | ~$750–$2,100+ |
Even at the low end of that range, three years of a paid farm platform costs more than many small growers spend on drip irrigation. If the paid features don't fit the crops you grow, you're paying for tools you won't use.
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
To be fair to both apps, they solve different problems. Comparing them feature for feature is a bit like comparing a combine to a wheel hoe. Both are good tools, but for different jobs.
What FarmLogs does well:
- Field mapping at scale. Drawing field boundaries and managing many large fields is where FarmLogs was strongest. If you farm 40 fields across three counties, that matters.
- Rainfall and weather tracking. Automatic, field-level rainfall estimates were one of FarmLogs' best-loved features. Row-crop farmers used them to plan field work and nitrogen timing.
- Satellite imagery. Crop health imagery can flag problem areas in big fields you can't walk every week.
- Grain marketing and profit tools. Tracking contracts, bushels, and break-even prices is built for commodity growers. Under Bushel, this side has only gotten stronger.
- Web dashboard. Office-style planning on a big screen suits larger operations with a farm manager or a bookkeeper.
What CropsBook does well:
- Built for many crops in small spaces. Vegetable growers juggle dozens of crops, varieties, and succession plantings. CropsBook is organized around that reality, not around one crop per 160-acre field.
- Planting and harvest logs. Record what went in, where, and when, then log harvests against it. Over a few seasons this becomes your most valuable planning data: what actually produced in which bed.
- Bed and field tracking. Track by bed, block, or field, which matters for crop rotation and for seeing which ground has been in brassicas three years running.
- Fast entry in the field. Open the app, log it, put the phone back in your pocket. No dashboards to scroll past, no login screen when your hands are dirty.
- Notes that live with the crop. Pest pressure, disease, variety observations, what you'd change next year. The details you always mean to remember and never do.
What CropsBook doesn't do: it doesn't pull satellite imagery, run grain-marketing tools, or estimate rainfall automatically. If those are must-haves, CropsBook isn't the right tool, and that's fine. For most vegetable growers, though, those features solve problems you don't have.
Many small farms raise more than vegetables. If you also run a few head of cattle, goats, or laying hens, Barnsbook is our sister app for livestock records and barn management. If you keep bees for pollination and honey alongside your crops, HiveBook handles hive inspections and apiary records. Both follow the same idea: free, offline, no account.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This is where the gap is widest, and for a lot of growers it decides everything.
Offline: Farms are notorious dead zones. Think of the back field behind the treeline, the walk-in cooler, the hoop house at the bottom of the hill. Cloud-based platforms like FarmLogs depend on a connection to sync and load most features. When you lose signal, you either can't log or you're trusting the app to queue entries and sync later.
CropsBook works 100% offline, always. Every feature runs on your phone. You can log a transplant in the middle of a field with zero bars and it's saved right then. There's nothing to sync and no spinner to wait on.
If you've ever stood in a bed with a flat of seedlings in one hand, watching an app try to load, you already know why offline matters.
Privacy: FarmLogs requires an account, and your field data lives on company servers. That's normal for cloud software, and many farmers accept it. But farm data has value: yields, planting dates, acreage, and practices. Ownership has also changed hands once already. When a platform is acquired, its data policies can change too.
CropsBook takes the opposite approach. No account, no sign-up, no email address. Your records stay on your device. Nobody is aggregating your harvest data, and nothing is tied to an identity you have to hand over. For solo operators who just want to keep their own records, that's a simple and reassuring setup.
Who Should Use FarmLogs
FarmLogs (and the Bushel tools it's now part of) is a solid choice if:
- You grow row crops like corn, soybeans, wheat, or cotton, on substantial acreage.
- You manage many large fields and want mapping, satellite imagery, and field-level rainfall data.
- You sell grain and want contract, marketing, and break-even tools in one place.
- You have reliable connectivity and want a web dashboard for office planning or for sharing data with an agronomist, landlord, or lender.
- The cost of a paid plan is small compared to your gross revenue.
For that kind of operation, FarmLogs' features are built for the job, and a free vegetable-focused app won't replace them.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook is the better fit if:
- You grow vegetables, whether as a serious home gardener, a CSA farmer, or a market grower selling at farmers markets and to restaurants.
- You're a solo operator or a small crew and don't need multi-user dashboards or enterprise reporting.
- You work in places with spotty or no cell service and need an app that never depends on a connection.
- You want simple record keeping: what you planted, where, when, and what it yielded, without learning a commodity-farming platform.
- You care about privacy and don't want to create an account or store farm data on someone else's servers.
- You'd rather spend $0 on software and put the money into seed, soil, and infrastructure.
A practical example: a one-acre market garden running 25 crops in 60 beds, with succession sowings of lettuce every two weeks and three plantings of carrots. FarmLogs' field-centric design was never meant for that density. In CropsBook, every planting, bed, and harvest has an obvious place to go.
The Bottom Line
FarmLogs is a capable platform for what it was designed for: row-crop farms managing big acreage, weather data, and grain marketing. If that's you, it's worth a serious look, along with Bushel's current offerings.
But if you searched for a FarmLogs alternative because the free tier felt limited, the app kept stalling without signal, or the whole platform felt built for someone else's farm, you're not wrong. It was built for someone else's farm.
CropsBook is built for vegetable growers and small operators. It's free, works fully offline, needs no account, and keeps your data on your phone. It won't map 40 fields from space. It will help you remember exactly when you seeded that fall carrot block, which tomato variety outyielded the others, and which beds need a rest from nightshades next year. For most small growers, those are the records that make next season better.
Our recommendation: if you farm commodity row crops at scale, use FarmLogs or Bushel. If you grow vegetables on a small farm or market garden, start with CropsBook. It costs nothing to try, and you'll know within a week whether it fits your workflow.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.