These two products get compared a lot, which is odd when you look at them side by side. Seedsheet is a physical thing: a fabric sheet with seed pods stitched into pre-spaced pockets that you roll over a bed, cover with soil, and water. CropsBook is software: a free iPhone app for planning beds, logging plantings, and tracking harvests. One is a way to get seeds into the ground. The other is a way to remember what happened after.
People compare them anyway because both show up when you search for "garden planning." If you have never grown vegetables and you are staring at an empty raised bed in April, both promise to solve the same anxiety — what do I plant, where, and how far apart. They just answer it in completely different ways, and the difference matters most in year two.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | CropsBook | Seedsheet |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $30–$100 per kit, per season |
| Works Offline | Yes — 100% offline, no connection ever needed | N/A (physical product); companion content is web-based |
| Account Required | No | Yes, to order |
| Best For | Solo growers and small market farms tracking plantings, harvests, and beds across seasons | Absolute beginners who want a bed planted correctly on the first try |
| Platform | iPhone and iPad (App Store) | Physical fabric sheet, shipped |
| Key Features | Bed and plot layout, planting log, harvest records, succession scheduling, notes per crop | Pre-spaced seed pods, weed-blocking fabric, curated variety sets, spacing done for you |
| Data Privacy | All data stays on your device — no servers, no telemetry, no signup | Standard e-commerce account and order history |
Pricing
Seedsheet's pricing is straightforward for what it is. A kit runs roughly $30 for a small sheet up to around $100 for a larger multi-bed setup or a bundle with a container. That covers the fabric, the seed pods, and the layout work someone already did for you. It is not an unreasonable price — you are buying seeds, a weed barrier, and a spacing plan in one package, and buying those separately would cost something too.
The part worth being clear-eyed about is that it is consumable. The seeds germinate, the sheet does its season, and next spring you are buying again if you want the same convenience. Multiply that across a few beds and a few years and the number gets real.
CropsBook is free. Not free-tier-with-an-upsell, not free-for-30-days. There is no paid version, no subscription, no account to create.
| Cost Over Time | CropsBook | Seedsheet (2 beds/year) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | ~$8–$17 amortized |
| 1 year | $0 | $100–$200 |
| 3 years | $0 | $300–$600 |
To be fair to Seedsheet: that money buys physical seed, which CropsBook does not give you. You will still buy seed either way. The honest comparison is Seedsheet's price against buying seed packets plus landscape fabric yourself — usually cheaper, but you do the spacing math. That math is exactly what CropsBook helps with, for nothing.
Save money. Try CropsBook free today. Download CropsBook on the App Store — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
Seedsheet does one thing genuinely well: it removes every decision between "I want a garden" and "seeds are in the ground correctly spaced." Spacing is the single most common beginner mistake — radishes shoulder-to-shoulder, tomatoes at eight inches, lettuce so tight nothing heads up. The sheet makes that error physically impossible. The weed-blocking fabric also handles the second most common beginner failure, which is losing the bed to weeds in July. For someone who has never done this, that is real value, and it is a legitimately clever product.
What it does not do is remember anything. When the season ends, the sheet is spent and the information is gone unless you wrote it down somewhere else. Which variety of bush bean was that? Did the cherry tomatoes go in April 12th or May 3rd? How many pounds did you actually pull off that bed? Seedsheet was never built to answer those questions.
CropsBook is built for exactly that. You lay out beds and plots, log what went in and when, record harvests as they come, and keep notes per crop — germination rates, pest pressure, which variety bolted early. Over two or three seasons that log turns into the thing that actually improves your garden: your own local data. You stop guessing at planting dates because you have three years of your own frost-to-first-harvest numbers.
It also handles succession planting, which is where most kit-based approaches stop being useful. A sheet plants once. A real bed gets lettuce, then bush beans, then fall brassicas, and keeping that sequence straight across six beds is a scheduling problem, not a spacing problem.
If your operation is broader than vegetables, the same logging approach carries over. Barnsbook covers livestock and barn management on the same offline, no-account model, and HiveBook handles hive inspections and honey production for anyone running bees alongside the beds. Small diversified operations tend to end up with all three.
Want to try CropsBook for free? Download CropsBook on the App Store — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
CropsBook works with the phone in airplane mode. Every record lives on the device. There is no server, no sync, no account, no email harvested at signup, and nothing transmitted anywhere.
That is not a privacy talking point — it is a practical one. Gardens and market plots are frequently outside cell coverage. Rural properties, community garden sites behind buildings, the back half of a leased field. A cloud-dependent app is useless exactly when you are standing in the bed with dirty hands trying to note that row 4 germinated at 40%. CropsBook opens and writes instantly because it is not waiting on anything.
The tradeoff is real and worth stating: no cloud means no automatic backup and no sync across devices. Your data lives where your phone lives. Use your normal device backup and you are fine, but if multi-device sync is a hard requirement, that is a genuine limitation.
For market growers there is a second angle. Yield numbers, cost data, and what you planted where is competitive information. Keeping it on a device you own, with no third party holding a copy, is a defensible position.
Who Should Use Seedsheet
Seedsheet is the right call if:
- You have never grown anything. Spacing, variety selection, and companion arrangement are all handled. That removes the most common reasons first-year beds fail.
- You want it done in an afternoon. Roll, cover, water. No seed catalog, no spacing chart, no planning session.
- You are gardening with kids or in a classroom. The tactile, foolproof format is genuinely good for teaching.
- You garden one small bed and want it low-effort. If the goal is a handful of salads and some herbs, a kit is a reasonable, honest purchase.
- You want the weed barrier built in. The fabric earns its keep in a bed you will not weed weekly.
None of that is faint praise. Seedsheet solves a real onboarding problem and solves it well.
Who Should Use CropsBook
CropsBook fits when you have moved past the first bed:
- You are growing more than one season. The value compounds. Year one is a log; year three is a planting calendar tuned to your actual site.
- You run multiple beds or plots. Tracking six beds through three successions each is a record-keeping job that a physical kit cannot touch.
- You sell what you grow. Market growers need harvest weights, planting dates, and bed history — for pricing, for planning, and often for buyers who ask.
- You are offline in the field. No signal required, ever.
- You do not want another subscription. Free, no account, no recurring anything.
- You already buy your own seed. If you are ordering varieties you chose, you do not need someone else's spacing plan — you need somewhere to record the results.
The sweet spot is the solo operator: one person, a handful of beds or a small market plot, who wants to know what worked without keeping a shoebox of receipts and a notebook that got rained on.
The Bottom Line
These are not really competitors. Seedsheet is a way to start; CropsBook is a way to keep going. If you are planting your first bed and the spacing chart is intimidating, buy the kit — it works, and $30 to not fail in year one is money well spent.
But if you have already gotten things in the ground, if you are running more than one bed, or if you are selling any of it, a consumable kit stops earning its price. What you need at that point is a record: what went in, when, and what came out. CropsBook does that for free, offline, with no account and no data leaving your phone.
The gardener who remembers last season beats the gardener who starts over every spring.
Plenty of people should do both — use a kit for a tricky bed, log the results in CropsBook, and by next spring you will not need the kit.
Ready to switch? Download CropsBook on the App Store — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.