If you are comparing CropsBook and Seedsheet, you have probably hit the moment most growers hit in their first or second season: you know roughly what you want to grow, but you are not sure how to lay it out, when to start it, or how to remember what you did. Both products claim to help. They help in completely different ways, and a fair comparison has to start by saying that out loud — Seedsheet is a physical product you buy once and plant, while CropsBook is a free app you use every week for years. One is a planting solution. The other is a record-keeping and planning solution. Plenty of growers end up using both.
This comparison is written by the team behind CropsBook, so read it with that in mind. We have tried to be straight about where Seedsheet genuinely wins, because sending the wrong person to the wrong product wastes their money and our reputation. If you want a weed-suppressing mat with seeds already spaced correctly, we do not sell that and we are not going to pretend an app substitutes for it.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | CropsBook | Seedsheet |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no subscription, no in-app purchases | $30–$100 per kit, per planting |
| Works Offline | Yes — 100% offline, no signal needed in the field | N/A — physical product, no software to run |
| Account Required | No account, no email, no sign-up | Account needed to order online |
| Best For | Tracking plantings, harvests, and notes across seasons | First-time growers who want a done-for-you planting day |
| Platform | iOS app (iPhone and iPad) | Physical fabric sheet plus seed pods |
| Key Features | Crop logging, planting and harvest dates, bed and plot notes, variety records, season history | Pre-seeded pods, correct plant spacing, weed-blocking fabric, curated variety sets |
| Data Privacy | All data stays on device — nothing uploaded, no analytics on your records | Order and shipping data held by vendor |
Pricing
Seedsheet pricing is honest and easy to understand: you pick a sheet sized for your bed or container, and you pay somewhere between roughly $30 for a small container sheet and $100 for a larger raised-bed kit. That price includes the fabric, the seed pods, and the layout design work. For what it is — a physical good that gets shipped to you — that is not unreasonable. Seed alone for a 4x8 bed runs $20–$40 if you buy quality varieties, and weed fabric costs money too.
The catch is that it is consumable. The seeds germinate once. Next spring you are buying again. If you are running three raised beds and you replant in spring and again for a fall crop, you are looking at real annual spend, and none of that spend leaves you with a record of what you grew.
CropsBook is free. Not free-tier-with-an-upsell, not free-for-30-days. There is no paid plan to graduate to, no per-field pricing, no export paywall.
| Cost Over Time | CropsBook | Seedsheet (3 beds, replanted each spring) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | N/A — per-kit purchase, not monthly |
| Year 1 | $0 | ~$150–$300 |
| Year 3 (cumulative) | $0 | ~$450–$900 |
To be fair to Seedsheet: that column is not a subscription you forgot to cancel. It is seed and material you actually consume and eat. The point is not that Seedsheet is overpriced — it is that the two costs buy different things, and only one of them gives you something that compounds season over season.
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
What Seedsheet does well. The core idea is genuinely smart. Seeds are embedded in dissolvable pods at correct spacing inside a weed-blocking fabric sheet. You lay it over prepared soil, cut open the pods, water, and you are done. It removes three failure points that sink beginners: bad spacing, forgetting which variety went where, and weeds outcompeting seedlings in weeks two through five. The curated variety sets — salsa garden, salad garden, herb garden — also solve the paralysis problem of staring at a seed catalog with 400 tomato varieties. For someone planting their first container or raised bed, that is real value, and the fabric keeps working all season after the seeds are up.
What CropsBook does well. CropsBook starts where Seedsheet stops. You log what you planted, where, and when. You record the variety, the source, the transplant date, the first harvest, total yield, and any note worth remembering — that the bed in the corner stayed soggy, that the Sungolds cracked after the rain, that the second succession of beans outproduced the first by a mile. Next season that history is sitting right there when you plan.
Specifically, CropsBook handles:
- Planting records — crop, variety, bed or plot, date sown or transplanted
- Harvest logging — dates and quantities, so you learn actual days-to-maturity for your site rather than the number on the packet
- Bed and plot organization — see what is in every bed right now, and what was there last year for rotation decisions
- Season history — multi-year records, which is the whole point; one season of data tells you almost nothing, four seasons tell you what your ground actually does
- Free-form notes — pest pressure, weather events, what you would do differently
What CropsBook does not do: it does not ship you seed, it does not suppress weeds, and it will not lay out a bed for you. If your problem is "I do not know how to start," Seedsheet addresses that directly and CropsBook does not.
Worth noting if your operation is broader than vegetables: the same offline, no-account approach shows up in Barnsbook for livestock and barn management and HiveBook for apiary and honey records. Growers running a mixed small farm — a market garden plus a few hives plus some poultry — often end up with all three, because the record-keeping problem is identical across all of them and none of them should require a cell signal in a back field.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This section is a little odd in a kit-vs-app comparison, because a fabric sheet obviously works without internet. But it matters when you are choosing among apps, and most CropsBook-vs-Seedsheet searchers are really asking a broader question: what is the low-friction way to run my garden?
CropsBook works completely offline. Every record is stored on your device. There is no server round-trip when you log a harvest, which means no spinner, no sync failure, no "could not save, retry" in the middle of a row. If you garden at a community plot with bad reception, or farm a piece of ground where cell service drops out past the tree line, this is the difference between a log that gets kept and a log that gets abandoned in June.
On privacy: there is no account, so there is nothing to breach. We do not collect your field locations, your yields, or your notes. That matters more than it sounds for commercial growers — yield data, input costs, and plot maps are competitive business information, and the agtech industry has a long and well-documented habit of aggregating grower data into products the grower never agreed to.
Seedsheet's privacy footprint is ordinary e-commerce: they need your name, address, and payment method to ship a box. That is normal and unavoidable for a physical product. Nothing sinister — just worth knowing that the data relationship ends when the package arrives, which is also true of the product relationship.
Who Should Use Seedsheet
Buy Seedsheet if you fit one of these:
- You are planting your first bed or container. The spacing and variety-selection decisions are the hardest part of starting, and Seedsheet removes both.
- You want a gift that works. A sheet plus a bed is a legitimately good present for someone who says they want to garden. Seed packets alone usually die in a drawer.
- Weeds have beaten you before. The fabric is the underrated part of the product. Early-season weed pressure kills more beginner gardens than any pest.
- You want zero planning. If you want to skip the planning step entirely and just get plants in the ground this weekend, a kit gets you there faster than any software will.
- Small scale, containers, patios. The economics work best at small scale, where $40 covers your entire growing area.
If that is you, buy the kit. Then — if you want — log what came up in a free app so year two is informed by year one.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook is built for the grower past the first-bed stage:
- Solo operators and small market gardens. You are managing more beds than you can hold in your head, and you need to know what was in bed 7 last year before you plant brassicas there again.
- Anyone doing succession planting. Successions are impossible to manage from memory. Sowing dates, the gap between them, and which one actually hit peak market window are things you have to write down.
- Growers who save seed or trial varieties. Comparing four tomato varieties across three seasons requires records. There is no substitute.
- People who already own a shelf of seed. If you buy your own seed and lay out your own beds, a kit solves a problem you already solved. Tracking is the open problem.
- Anyone who wants to stop paying for farm software. Most crop-planning tools run $15–$50 per month for features a solo grower barely touches. Free and offline covers the actual job.
- Growers with poor connectivity or privacy concerns. Offline-first and no account, permanently.
The Bottom Line
These are not really competitors. Seedsheet sells you a good planting day. CropsBook gives you a good season, and then a better one next year because you wrote down what happened.
If you are brand new and the blank bed is intimidating, buy a Seedsheet. It is a well-designed product that solves a real beginner problem, and it will get you eating something you grew, which is what matters in year one.
If you have a season or two behind you, run multiple beds, sell any part of what you grow, or just want to stop relearning the same lessons every spring — the kit is not your bottleneck. Memory is. A free offline log costs you nothing to try and pays off the first time you need to know what was in a bed eighteen months ago.
And if you are somewhere in the middle: use both. Plant the kit, log it in the app, and by next spring you will know enough about your own ground to buy your own seed and lay out your own beds.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.