How Paprika, Cook'n, CopyMeThat, and BigOven Handle Your Data

If you're going to trust a recipe app with your collection, you should know exactly what that app does with your data -- how it stores recipes, what it lets you export, and what gets lost in translation. This is a factual comparison of four popular recipe managers: Paprika, Cook'n, CopyMeThat, and BigOven.

We'll give credit where it's due and flag limitations where they exist.

Paprika Recipe Manager

What It Does Well

Paprika stores recipes in a structured, well-organized internal format. Each recipe has discrete fields for title, source, servings, prep time, cook time, ingredients, directions, notes, categories, ratings, photos, and nutritional information. This structured approach means data is cleanly separated rather than dumped into a single blob of text.

Paprika also offers built-in cloud sync across devices, so your collection stays consistent between your phone, tablet, and computer.

The Export Situation

Paprika exports to its proprietary .paprikarecipes format. Under the hood, this is a gzip-compressed archive containing individual JSON files for each recipe. The data inside is well-structured and reasonably complete -- most recipe fields, including photos, are preserved.

Paprika also offers HTML export, which produces a visually formatted version of your recipes suitable for printing or viewing in a browser.

The limitation is that .paprikarecipes files are not readable by any other recipe application without a conversion tool. The format is not documented as an open standard. If Paprika disappears tomorrow, you'd need to know that it's gzip-compressed JSON to extract anything useful from the file -- not exactly intuitive for a non-technical user.

What Gets Preserved

Titles, ingredients, directions, notes, categories, ratings, prep/cook times, source URLs, photos. Paprika's export is among the most complete of the apps we're comparing.

What Can Get Lost

If you export to HTML rather than .paprikarecipes, the structured data is flattened into a display format. Categories, ratings, and other metadata may not survive a round-trip through HTML export and re-import elsewhere.

Cook'n by DVO Enterprises

What It Does Well

Cook'n has been around since 1992, which gives it an enormous recipe database of bundled content. The desktop software is full-featured with meal planning, nutritional analysis, and a built-in cookbook library. For users who want an all-in-one desktop cooking application, Cook'n offers depth that most modern apps don't attempt.

Cook'n also supports a .ckn export format that bundles recipe data for portability.

The Export Situation

Cook'n's primary export mechanism is the .ckn file format. Like Paprika's format, this is proprietary and not natively readable by other applications. Cook'n also supports exporting individual recipes or groups of recipes, but the bulk export workflow is not always straightforward.

The .ckn format preserves recipe content, but the structure inside is specific to Cook'n's data model. Moving that data into another system requires conversion.

What Gets Preserved

Recipe titles, ingredients, instructions, and basic metadata are preserved in the .ckn format. Cook'n's recipe cards can also include images.

What Can Get Lost

Cook'n's rich feature set -- meal plans, shopping lists, nutritional data tied to specific recipes -- doesn't necessarily transfer cleanly to other formats. If you've built extensive meal plans around your recipe collection, that organizational layer may not survive migration.

CopyMeThat

What It Does Well

CopyMeThat's strength is its simplicity and price. At $1 per month for unlimited recipes (with a free tier for up to 40), it's one of the most affordable recipe managers available. The browser-based clipper makes it easy to save recipes from the web, and the interface is clean and straightforward.

CopyMeThat does offer an export function, which puts it ahead of some apps that provide no export at all.

The Export Situation

CopyMeThat exports in two formats: HTML and plain text (TXT). Both are available as bulk exports, usually delivered as a ZIP archive containing individual files or a combined file.

The HTML export preserves visual formatting and includes recipe content in a browser-readable format. The plain text export strips everything down to raw text.

What Gets Preserved

Recipe titles, ingredients, instructions, and source URLs are generally preserved in both formats. The HTML version retains some visual structure. Photos from the original recipes may be referenced but are not always embedded in the export.

What Gets Lost

This is where CopyMeThat's export falls short. Plain text exports lose all structure -- there's no reliable way to programmatically distinguish ingredients from instructions from notes in a flat text file. HTML exports retain visual formatting but don't use consistent structured markup, making automated parsing unreliable.

Categories, tags, and personal ratings are often missing from exports. If you've organized your CopyMeThat collection into folders or categories, that organizational structure may not come through.

BigOven

What It Does Well

BigOven has a large community-contributed recipe database, making it useful for discovery as well as storage. The mobile apps are polished, and features like grocery list generation and meal planning are well-implemented. BigOven Pro, at $2.99/month, removes ads and unlocks additional features.

BigOven also publishes a public API, which in principle allows programmatic access to recipe data.

The Export Situation

This is where BigOven differs significantly from the others: there is no bulk export function for individual users. You cannot download your entire recipe collection as a file. There is no "Export All" button.

The API exists but costs $99 per month -- a price clearly aimed at commercial developers building integrations, not at individuals who want to back up their personal recipes.

What Gets Preserved (If You Can Get It Out)

Individual BigOven recipe pages often include Schema.org structured data (JSON-LD), which means tools that can scrape URLs can extract well-structured recipe information including title, ingredients, instructions, prep time, cook time, yield, and images.

What Gets Lost

Since there's no bulk export, the practical challenge is scale. If you have 200 saved recipes on BigOven, extracting them means processing 200 individual URLs. Any personal notes, custom modifications, or organizational structure you've built within BigOven won't appear in the Schema.org data on the public recipe pages, because that structured data describes the published recipe, not your personal annotations.

The Bigger Picture

No recipe app in this comparison is deliberately malicious about data portability. Paprika's export is genuinely comprehensive, even if the format is proprietary. Cook'n's long history means the data model is deep, even if export options are limited. CopyMeThat at least provides an export function at a low price point. BigOven's lack of bulk export is a significant gap, but the app provides value in other ways.

The real issue is that none of these apps export to truly open, universally readable formats by default. That's where conversion tools become essential.

MoveMyRecipes.com bridges this gap. It imports from Paprika (.paprikarecipes), Cook'n (.ckn), CopyMeThat (ZIP/HTML/TXT), and BigOven via URL scraping. It exports to seven open formats: JSON (Schema.org compliant), CSV, Markdown, CookLang, PDF, HTML, and Open Recipe Format (YAML). Free, no account required.

Whichever app you use, knowing what your data looks like on the way out is just as important as knowing what the app looks like on the way in. Check your export options before you need them -- not after.