The Best Gardening Apps of 2027: Which Garden App Fits You

The short version: the best gardening app depends on what you need it to do. Percy, the app I make, is the garden journal that remembers: what you planted, what you mean to do next, and the first-tomato, hummingbird-at-the-zinnias moments most tools have nowhere to put. It does the record-keeping, so the garden stays the fun part. Seedtime is built for serious crop planning; GrowVeg is best for laying out beds. Seek and iNaturalist are excellent for identifying plants and wildlife. Planta is strongest for houseplants. And Wildr Places is the best for gardening to support wildlife. Here's how to find the right one (or two, or three).

I should tell you up front that I make one of the apps on this list.

This is the point where a reasonable person closes the tab, and I've been that reasonable person.

But as biased as I may be, I'm also a genuine fan of some of the other apps here, and I use them regularly.

I've also read a lot of "best gardening apps" lists. After a while I started to suspect that some of these guides were written by people who have never lost a tomato to an especially spiteful squirrel.

So this is my attempt at a different kind of list. These are the gardening apps I actually use and admire, written by someone with a glaring conflict of interest, who is going to try to be honest anyway. That includes the parts where another app is simply the better choice for what you need.

I looked at what each app is actually best at: journaling, planning depth, plant identification, troubleshooting, reminders, ecological usefulness, ease of use, overall design and whether it gives you something meaningfully different from the others.

One other thing before we start.

You probably don't need only one gardening app. You probably need two or three, because they do different jobs well. The app that tells you what's munching on your kale is not the app that plans your spring beds, and neither of them is the app that remembers you grew kale last year or that it was also munched.

Disclosure: I make Percy, one of the apps below. I've tried to be honest with myself and with you about where another app is the better fit. It has not been easy.

The best gardening apps of 2027, by what you need

Availability, free features, and subscription prices change often — check each app's linked site or app-store listing for current details.

The best garden journal

Best garden journal: Percy

Percy is the app I make, which I'll now try to describe as fairly as a parent describes their own child. Which is to say, not very, but I'll try.

Percy is the garden journal I'd choose for people who want the record without having to keep the record. It's built around one idea:

A garden journal should add to the enjoyment of gardening, not become a second garden you have to tend.

That's why, instead of asking you to log progress, Percy just asks you to talk about your garden, and it takes over the work from there.

You hold a button like a walkie-talkie and just talk about your garden like you'd talk to a friend. Say what you see. "First ripe tomato of the season. The Sungolds are always first." (You can also type it, or just add a photo.) Percy shows you the note to check, in case it heard "Sungolds" as "sun gods," you save it, and ten seconds later you're back to gardening.

Percy organizes it, remembers it, and records the weather at that moment so you don't have to.

Percy remembers everything you'd expect a great garden tool to handle: what you planted, what you harvested, what went wrong, what you're planning next. It just does it from a sentence instead of a form. And it remembers all of it across seasons, without asking you to maintain a notebook or a spreadsheet.

It remembers what you mean to do, too. Say "move the peonies in the fall" or "remind me to water the containers every three days," and Percy keeps it in Twigs, the part of the app that holds what you want to do next and brings it back when it's time. It's the same idea as the rest of it: the garden remembers, so you don't have to.

Because Percy remembers where you live and what you're growing, your record turns into knowledge: it answers your questions, connects what happened across seasons, and gives you advice for your garden. Ask Percy something you've already forgotten, like when you planted the cucumbers or which tomatoes were worth growing again, and it knows, because you mentioned it. Ask a general gardening question and it answers with your garden in mind: your beds, your soil, your slugs, rather than generic advice for your zone. It gives you a heads-up in the app when frost, a heat wave, heavy rain, or a dry spell is on the way, and about every two weeks it sends a Garden Letter, an email about your own garden with a naturalist's note tucked in.

Percy remembers the practical things, but it also keeps the moments you'll want to remember most: the day your kids petitioned to keep the baby deer they found hiding in the hydrangeas, the way the garden smelled after the rain, or the swallowtail that took a special interest in your dill. Those are not particularly useful pieces of data. But they're the reasons many of us garden. Percy remembers the things that make a season feel like a season and have never had anywhere to go. It also helps you notice more of them, telling you whether that new plant is native or invasive where you garden and whether the bug on it is a friend or a foe.

All of it goes into The Nest, a searchable record of your season. It feels like a coffee table book about your garden that writes a new page every time you share a note. And at the end of the season, it comes back to you as a Migration Report, a year-in-review portrait of your whole season in the garden. (The first Migration Reports arrive in January 2027, and you can see a sample now.)

Ultimately, Percy builds a record that feels most like a true journal. Our gardens are beautiful, and I built Percy so the record of yours would be too: every note you share becomes part of a keepsake of your season.

That's why I think Percy is the strongest garden journal here. Which brings me to one it's often compared with.

Gardenize

Gardenize is probably most like a traditional garden diary, translated into an app. You add plants to your garden either manually or by taking a photo, then enter detailed information about each one, and over time you can build a record of your garden by hand.

I found its interface less intuitive than most of the other options here, and it can be a bit hard to find your way around at first. But once you've gotten the hang of it, there's a lot you can capture. It has a place to keep your to-do list and detailed care instructions for any plant you've added to your garden.

If you're someone who enjoys the act of keeping a record, adding the photo and plant details, and logging your notes, Gardenize is a good option.

Gardenize gives you excellent tools for keeping a manual garden record. Percy was built on a different philosophy: the tool should do all the work for you, so you can enjoy the garden instead of staring at a screen. (I compared the two in more detail here.)

The best garden planners

Best advanced garden planner: Seedtime

Some gardeners like control. If that's you, Seedtime is the most satisfying way to manage a garden. Its dashboard lets you get deep in the weeds (no pun intended) of planning, with drop-down menus for dialing in your planting, cultivation, and harvest dates, specific varieties, and even color-coding for easier browsing.

There's a lot of structure to work with — crops, beds, dates, tasks, and the relationships between them — and it's smart about keeping it all in sync: drag a planting on the calendar and every related date shifts right along with it, and your layout stays in step with your planting schedule. Seedtime also has an AI chatbot, Sprout, that answers gardening questions like companion planting, plus a separate AI planning feature that can suggest your next-best seeding date.

Seedtime is also a helpful education resource. The founders host frequent live webinars, keep a library of classes on the site, and have a large Facebook community that trades tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software.

Seedtime has a mobile app, but I find its deeper planning experience most satisfying on a desktop. If you enjoy managing a detailed growing plan — or if project management is your love language — Seedtime gives you an impressive amount of control. A well-made plan is a lovely thing, and this is a well-made plan.

Best visual bed layout: GrowVeg

GrowVeg is one of the most well-established garden planners, and it's the one I'd pick for visual garden layouts. Its planning beds make it easy to map out what you're growing: drag and drop your beds, sort out spacing, and get crop-rotation and companion-planting suggestions. It also offers expert advice through the subscription along with a deep library of learning resources.

GrowVeg's YouTube channel is an incredible resource. The videos are beautifully shot and the host, Benedict Vanheems, has infectious energy for gardening. His videos taught me a lot of what I now know about vegetable gardening. I'm a big, appreciative fan of this one.

Best for beginners planning a food garden: GrowIt and Seed to Spoon

Two more beginner-friendly options, each with its own bent.

GrowIt: Garden Planner (the AI planner by Glority) leans visual and practical: a square-foot-style layout, plant spacing, a planting calendar tuned to your frost dates, care guidance, and photo-based disease identification. It's an approachable way to plan a first garden and know roughly when to do what.

Seed to Spoon is built specifically around food gardening. It gives you growing information, planting dates for your location, pest and disease identification, and even recipes — and it has an AI assistant, Growbot, that answers gardening questions on the spot. It keeps everything centered on the reassuring fact that you eventually get to eat something, which is a good way to keep a new gardener going.

Both will remind you, often, that a paid version unlocks the rest.

One note on Percy here: it takes a different approach to planning. Tell it what you mean to do, and it remembers and brings it back when it's relevant. It isn't a visual bed-layout tool or a detailed crop-scheduling system, so if that's what you want, I'd pair it with GrowVeg or Seedtime. (More on the best garden planner apps.) Percy is a great complement to either, a way to remember how your plans actually unfolded and carry that into next season.

The best plant identification apps

Best plant & wildlife ID in the wild: Seek and iNaturalist

Point your phone at a plant, a bug, a mushroom, or a bird, and Seek tells you what it is, in real time, for free. There are badges, which can give you bragging rights if you have both a botanical interest and a competitive streak. It's also one of my favorite gardening apps for kids.

Entries give a helpful overview of the plant's scientific name, plant family, native range, and seasonality, and link out to each plant's Wikipedia page for more.

Seek is made by iNaturalist, a nonprofit built to help improve biodiversity research and education.

I use this app often and, not to brag, but let's just say I have a healthy collection of badges.

If you want to go further, the separate iNaturalist app lets you post what you found and have its identity refined by a community of naturalists and citizen scientists. Your observation can become part of a much larger biodiversity dataset used by researchers and conservationists to help protect species. You go outside to identify one strange moth and come back having participated in ecology.

If identification itself is what you care about, Seek and iNaturalist are where I'd start — both for accuracy and ease of use, and for the way your IDs can help do some good. (I compared the best plant identification apps in more detail here.)

Pl@ntNet

PlantNet is a free citizen-science plant ID app. When you use it, your observations can be shared with a community to help improve plant identification. It also lets you view other users' photos of the plant you're looking at (organized by leaf, stem, flower, bark) so you can decide for yourself whether it's gotten the ID right. If you're only looking for the plant's name, this one is worth a look — that breakdown of the different plant parts is genuinely helpful for deciding whether the ID is accurate. If you want to learn more than just the name, that's mostly self-directed through Pl@ntNet's links out to other botanical references.

PictureThis

Fast at plant ID, PictureThis is helpful because it will also try to diagnose a sick plant, which is useful when the leaves are yellowing and you don't know if it's because you overwatered it, underwatered it, or just made eye contact in a manner that rubbed the plant the wrong way. It includes detailed care instructions for anything you identify, including helpful flags for pet toxicity. PictureThis is enthusiastic about its premium subscription and will bring it up often. If you can live with that, it's very good at what it does.

Google Lens

For those who don't want to bother downloading an app, Google Lens does a very good job of identifying plants and linking them to search results, where you can choose your own adventure of how far down that plant's rabbit hole you want to go. (You can also identify literal rabbit holes.)

Best plant ID for gardeners, especially native and invasive plants: Percy

If what you really want is not just "What is this?" but also "What does this mean for my garden?" and "What do I do about it?", Percy is a different kind of plant-ID tool.

Take a photo and Percy can help identify the plant or bug, but it doesn't stop at the name. It can also tell you whether an insect is a friend or a foe, whether a plant is native or invasive where you live, whether it's useful to pollinators or other wildlife, and what its presence means in the context of the garden Percy already knows.

That's an important distinction.

Plant ID tells you what something is. Regional context tells you whether it belongs.

Percy can also help identify possible plant diseases, pests, and other growing problems. Share a photo and ask "what's wrong with this?" and Percy helps you work out what's likely going on, then suggests organic-first ways to address it.

And because Percy remembers your garden, the plant identification doesn't disappear once you've closed the result. It becomes part of your garden's memory. So when the same plant starts to grow again next year and you wonder whether you've been lovingly tending a weed, Percy remembers that's where you planted your asters.

If you want the longer version of why the name is only the starting point, I wrote about how plant ID is only the beginning, using the English ivy I spent two summers lovingly encouraging up a stump before I found out it was invasive.

If I wanted to identify a plant or an unfamiliar moth in the woods, I'd use Seek or iNaturalist, both for accuracy and because every observation you share can contribute to real ecological research. Percy is stronger when the next questions are "does it belong here?" and "why does that matter?"

Best gardening app for beginners

Just starting out? I wrote a whole list for you: the best gardening apps for beginners.

Best beginner gardening app: Percy

This is another category where I'd pick Percy.

Not because it contains the most gardening information. It doesn't.

It's because gardening becomes confusing very quickly when you're new to it. Leaves turn yellow. Something makes a hole. A plant appears that you don't remember planting. A seed packet tells you to sow "after danger of frost," which is somehow considered sufficient instruction.

It's not hard to go search for the information. There's effectively an infinite amount of that on search engines, advice forums and AI chatbots. It gets overwhelming fast. And the hard part is knowing which information applies to this garden, this plant, in this place, right now.

Plenty of apps can answer a gardening question now. Seed to Spoon and Seedtime both have capable AI assistants. What I think makes Percy especially good for a beginner is that the advice, your actual garden, and your reminders all live in one continuous experience. You can ask a question today, tell Percy what you tried, and come back weeks later to find out what happened last time, with help that's always in the context of your location and the garden Percy already knows. It feels like asking a friend who happens to know a lot about gardening where you live, and who remembers your garden as well as you do.

Then Percy remembers what happened. So you gradually become someone with a record of what works in your own yard. You don't have to learn all the answers or become an armchair master gardener. Percy lets you ask the questions.

Best gardening app for houseplants

Best houseplant care: Planta

If you're especially interested in houseplants, or you want a focus on troubleshooting, Planta is a good option. It builds a care schedule, reminds you when to water, and has a light meter that will tell you that the corner your fiddle-leaf fig lives in is not as bright as either of you had hoped. It's beautifully designed and intuitive, and it has kept a lot of my houseplants alive well past their expected date. It's freemium — the reminders and logging are free, and the deeper tools are paywalled — and worth the upgrade if those reminders are all that stand between you and another calathea.

The best apps for native plants and ecological gardening

This is where I stop being quite so even-handed, because a few of these apps are doing work in service of something bigger than just a better harvest. (For the full field, including free websites and tools for reporting invasives, see the best native plant and pollinator apps.)

Best app for gardening to support wildlife: Wildr Places

Wildr Places, from the team at Plan it Wild, is the best app I've found for gardening in a way that supports wildlife. It gives your yard a Wildr Score based on how you tend it (how much is lawn, whether you use pesticides, whether you leave the leaves in fall) and suggests steps to raise it. Add the native plants you're growing and it shows how many species each one supports, which ones they are, and which are rare or imperiled. It recommends natives for where you live, and it now identifies plants and wildlife too, with ID powered by iNaturalist.

Its Science Advisory Board includes ecologist Doug Tallamy, co-founder of Homegrown National Park, and Becca Rodomsky-Bish of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Wildr believes what we believe here at Percy: that a garden can be beautiful and also be a working piece of the ecosystem. If you've ever wanted your garden to do some good beyond the fence line, Wildr helps turn that feeling into a real plan. I wrote more about it in the best native plant and pollinator apps.

Where Percy fits: remembering your whole garden

Percy is the garden journal that remembers, built for the beautifully messy reality of a general home garden, where tomatoes, dahlias, fruit trees, weeds, native flowers, ornamental shrubs, herbs, birds, and beetles are all happening at once. We believe the path to taking care of the world around us runs straight through your tomato garden.

Percy remembers what you planted and who came to visit, tells you when a plant is native or invasive where you garden, and gives advice based on your garden's history, with organic solutions first.

Percy is also a member of 1% for the Planet, committing 1% of annual sales to vetted environmental nonprofits, including Homegrown National Park and The Wildlife Trusts.

So the two work best together: use Wildr to plan a garden that supports wildlife, and use Percy to remember what happened in it.

Seek and iNaturalist, again

Seek and iNaturalist belong in this category too. Their deeper mission isn't identification — it's attention. They're built on the idea that if people start noticing the living things around them, they'll start to care about them, and that all that noticing, gathered from millions of people, becomes something science can use.

I think Wildr, Seek, iNaturalist, and Percy are after the same thing from different directions. We all believe that paying close attention to the living world is how you begin to make a real difference.

A word about Percy, from the person who made Percy

Launched in April 2026, Percy is the newest app here by a wide margin, and part of what I'm asking you to believe in is what happens over time: what a few years of your own garden's history will be worth. Year one is a searchable memory of everything you noticed. In year two, Percy starts connecting what happened this season to last. By year three, the hope is that it knows your specific garden (your microclimate, your varieties, your spiteful squirrels) better than any general guide could. I believe that. I can't fully prove the three-year version to you yet.

Here's where I think Percy is genuinely new.

The other apps on this list help you identify the garden, plan it, tend it, or plant the right things in it. And several do that very well. Percy tries to connect those jobs through memory, and to do it in a way that adds to the pleasure of gardening instead of competing with it.

The plant you identify becomes part of your garden's record. The question you ask gets answered in the context of what's already growing there. The thing you mean to do later goes into Twigs. And at the end of the season, all those small pieces become the story of the garden you actually had. That combination is what I've been trying to build. It's a category that doesn't quite have a name yet.

And if you'd like to try the one I made: your first full growing season on Percy is free (then $39 a year), which is long enough to see whether a garden that remembers itself is worth keeping.

So which gardening app should you choose?

I still don't think you need to choose only one. Seek and Percy make an excellent pair. So do Wildr and Percy. A serious vegetable grower could easily use Seedtime for the master plan and Percy for everything that happens once the season starts.

They get along better than you'd expect.

And whichever you choose, the fact that you're looking at all suggests you already have the one thing none of these apps can give you: the urge to pay a little more attention to the small piece of the living world you've been put in charge of.

The squirrels, I should warn you, will be paying attention too.