Bar Assistant vs Mealie
Both are self-hosted recipe management projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.
| Bar Assistant | Mealie | |
|---|---|---|
| Health score | 66/100 | 86/100 |
| Commits (11 mo) | 250 | 1219 |
| Commits (last 3 mo) | 103 | 328 |
| Stars | 1.1k | 13k |
| Latest release | 23 Sept 2026 | 24 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| Built with | PHP, Docker | Python |
| Typical RAM | 1 GB | 1 GB |
Bar Assistant
Manage your home bar while adding your ingredients, searching for cocktails and creating custom cocktail recipes.
Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.
Commit activity more than 48% of tracked projects; popularity more than 36%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
Mealie
Material design inspired recipe manager with category and tag management, shopping-lists, meal-planner, and site customizations. Mealie is focused on simple user interactions to keep the whole family using the app.
High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.
Commit activity more than 82% of tracked projects; popularity more than 83%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
How to read this
Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.
What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.
See every option in this category: self-hosted recipe management.