If you searched for "CropsBook vs Seedsheet," you are probably weighing two very different ways to start a garden. Seedsheet sells a physical product — a biodegradable mat with seeds pre-placed in the right spots, ready to roll out on top of soil. CropsBook is a free iOS app that helps you plan, plant, and track crops across the entire season. One is a one-time purchase you bury in dirt. The other is software that lives on your phone and grows with you.
This comparison is honest. Seedsheet solves a real problem for first-time gardeners who want zero planning friction on day one. CropsBook solves a different problem: keeping records of what you planted, when, where, and how it performed — without a subscription, without an account, and without an internet connection. If you only need one growing season of hand-holding, a Seedsheet kit may be all you ever need. If you plan to keep gardening and want to learn from each season, you will outgrow the kit fast.
Below is a fair side-by-side breakdown so you can pick the right tool — or use both.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | CropsBook | Seedsheet |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever | $30–$100 per kit |
| Works Offline | Yes, 100% offline | N/A — physical product |
| Account Required | No | Yes, to order online |
| Best For | Solo operators tracking crops season after season | First-time gardeners who want zero planning |
| Platform | iPhone & iPad (App Store) | Physical mat shipped to door |
| Key Features | Crop planning, planting logs, harvest tracking, rotation history, notes | Pre-placed seeds, spacing guide, raised-bed compatible designs |
| Data Privacy | All data stays on device | Account & shipping data on company servers |
Pricing
Seedsheet kits run roughly $30 for a small herb mat up to $100+ for larger raised-bed kits with 25+ varieties. The price includes the biodegradable mat, the seeds, and a planting guide. That is genuinely useful value if you have never gardened — you skip the trip to the seed rack, you skip the spacing math, you skip the "did I plant carrots too deep" stress. But the kit is single-use. Next season, you buy another one. Three seasons in, you have spent $90–$300 on planting day convenience alone.
CropsBook is free. There is no trial, no paywall, no premium tier hiding the useful features. You download it from the App Store and start logging crops. That price holds whether you grow one tomato plant or run a half-acre market garden.
| Time Horizon | CropsBook | Seedsheet (one kit/year) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $0 | ~$5–$8 amortized |
| 1 year | $0 | $30–$100 |
| 3 years | $0 | $90–$300 |
| 5 years | $0 | $150–$500 |
Worth noting: these two costs are not strictly comparable, because Seedsheet includes seeds and CropsBook does not. A fair apples-to-apples comparison is "CropsBook + a $25 seed order from a catalog" vs "Seedsheet kit." You still save money on the CropsBook side after year one, and you get to choose which varieties you grow.
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
Seedsheet's best feature is the mat itself. Seeds are embedded in the right positions using the company's spacing research, so you cannot accidentally crowd lettuce next to a sprawling squash. You water the mat, the biodegradable backing dissolves, and the seeds sprout. For a brand-new gardener who finds graph paper intimidating, this removes the single biggest barrier to starting. The included planting guide also tells you roughly when to expect germination and harvest for each variety.
CropsBook's strength is what happens after planting day. You log each crop with planting date, variety, location, and notes. You record harvest weights or counts. You see which beds grew what last year, so rotation decisions are not a guess. You note that the Sungold tomatoes outperformed the Brandywines, or that the spinach bolted on June 12 — information you will desperately want next February when you are planning again. None of that is possible with a paper guide that decomposed into the soil.
CropsBook also covers crops Seedsheet does not address well: succession plantings, transplants you start indoors, perennials, garlic that overwinters, and cover crops. The app does not care whether your garden is a single 4x4 raised bed or six 100-foot rows — it scales with you.
If you also keep livestock or bees, the same approach is available across the family. Barnsbook handles animal records, breeding dates, and vet notes for ranchers and homesteaders. HiveBook covers hive inspections, queen tracking, and honey harvest logs for beekeepers. Same free, offline, no-account philosophy — just tuned to a different operation.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This is where the comparison stops being apples-to-apples and starts mattering for daily use. Seedsheet is a physical product, so "offline" does not really apply to the mat itself — but ordering one requires an account, an address, and a credit card on the company's servers. That is normal for any e-commerce purchase, but it is data you hand over.
CropsBook never asks for an account. There is no sign-up flow, no email verification, no password reset. The app stores everything locally on your iPhone or iPad. That has two practical benefits worth understanding:
- It works at the back of the garden where cell signal dies. Logging a harvest weight or jotting a pest observation does not require a connection. You can use the app in a hoop house, a remote field, or on a tractor with no service.
- Your garden data is not a marketing asset. Companies that store your data tend to monetize it eventually — recommendations, ads, partner emails, or sale to a larger ag-tech firm. CropsBook cannot do any of that because the data is not on a server. It is on your phone.
If you have ever lost notes when a service shut down or got migrated to a new owner, you know why this matters. The trade-off is real: no cloud sync between devices, no easy team sharing. For solo operators, that trade is almost always worth it.
Who Should Use Seedsheet
Seedsheet is a strong choice if you fit one of these profiles:
- Total beginner planting your first garden. If you have never grown anything and the idea of seed depth and spacing makes you anxious, the mat removes every decision. Roll it out, water it, watch things grow.
- Gift buyer. A Seedsheet kit is a genuinely nice gift — it is tangible, it photographs well, and the recipient gets a "starter pack" experience that an app cannot match.
- Urban container gardener with one raised bed. If your entire garden is one 4x4 box on a balcony and you have zero ambition to expand, the kit is a clean one-and-done solution.
- You hate keeping records. Some people garden purely for the joy of it and never want to log anything. Fair. The kit lets you skip the planning brain entirely.
Be honest with yourself: if you might still be gardening in three years, the per-season kit math gets expensive fast and you lose the institutional memory of what worked.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook is the better fit if:
- You want to learn from each season. Real garden improvement comes from noticing patterns — which varieties produce, which beds drain poorly, when the cabbage worms show up. You need notes for that.
- You grow more than one bed. Once you have multiple crops in multiple locations, keeping it all in your head fails. A simple log saves the season.
- You rotate crops. Knowing what was in bed three last year (and the year before) prevents disease buildup. A pre-planted mat cannot help with this; a logged history can.
- You sell what you grow. Market gardeners need harvest counts and weights for pricing, CSA shares, and tax records. Seedsheet does not pretend to solve this.
- You value privacy and reliability. No account, no cloud, no surprise paywall later. The app you download today behaves the same in five years.
- You are budget-conscious. Free is free. You can spend the $30–$100 you would have spent on a kit on better seeds, soil amendments, or tools.
The Bottom Line
Seedsheet and CropsBook are not really competing for the same job. Seedsheet is a planting-day product — brilliant for one season of zero-stress sowing, especially if you are new and want a tangible kit. CropsBook is a season-long tool — built for the gardener who wants to remember what they did, why it worked, and how to do it better next year.
The honest recommendation: if this is your first garden and you want to spend money on confidence, buy a Seedsheet kit and enjoy it. But install CropsBook alongside it. Log what you planted from the kit, log what germinated, log what you harvested. By the end of the season, you will have a record that makes next year's planning take ten minutes instead of an afternoon — and you will not need to buy another kit unless you want to.
For everyone past the first season — experienced gardeners, market growers, anyone running multiple beds — CropsBook is the obvious pick. It costs nothing, works without signal, keeps your data private, and grows with your operation.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.