Today I’m doing something a little different on the blog: Reviewing options to make a DIY cookbook. And I’m not just reviewing them, I’m highlighting all their best features so readers can have a clear idea about the best platform to make a cookbook on.
But why? I make cookbooks as well, but the thing is: Savor Custom Cookbooks isn’t a DIY cookbook maker. We take great joy in providing one-of-a-kind experiences for our clients that include much more than just a book. For those of you who are new here or just need a refresher, Savor designs a fun, candid photo session with a professional photographer capturing you and your family making your special dishes together. Then you upload your recipes to the online system and a professional designer lays out your favorite photos with your recipes resulting in a high-quality family heirloom cookbook. We print on luxury materials with linen and buckram cover materials and smyth-sewn bindings that are sure to last generations.
But I get a lot of inquiries from people around the country where a Savor cookbook experience just isn’t right for them at this moment. So I wanted to provide a quick guide of the platforms I found that can help them put together their own DIY family cookbook.
Here I’ve listed out the highlights of 7 the best DIY cookbook platforms and give some details about their systems. I didn’t actually order any books from these platforms, but having gone through 75 printing companies to find the right one for my clients’ books, I’ve become pretty good at analyzing book quality from images alone. Read through to find more details about making a DIY cookbook with these companies and if you don’t want to go through this entire post, at the bottom of each section I’ve listed some highlights so you can easily compare.
Also, I didn’t look at printing companies like Shutterfly because I wanted to focus on platforms that are meant for DIY cookbooks specifically. Shutterfly and other DIY book printers print a wide range of books and their models are very different from these custom cookbook websites.
P.S. Though this post runs through cookbook specific websites, if you’d like more tips on making a cookbook, check out our post How to Make a Cookbook: Tips to Make Your Own Cookbook.
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Comparing DIY Cookbook websites
Create My Cookbook
Create My Cookbook is probably the biggest DIY online cookbook system. They’ve been around for awhile and have some pretty good reviews.
Book designing & features: Putting the cookbook together seems pretty straight forward. The editing software is all online and the tutorial when you first login takes you through every step of adding recipes, photos, and designing the book. There are a few set templates you can choose from or start from scratch with a blank template. From the blank template you can choose 9 layout options for recipe pages, either with or without a photo. You can also add pages with just photos, dedication pages, title pages, dividers, story pages and a few others. As far as customization goes, there seems to be a lot of options, including a number of font styles and sizes, which will be applied to all the recipes in your book. You can upload images from your computer or connect to Facebook and import photos from there. I can see the Facebook feature being useful to get photos from relatives to include in your cookbook.
You can add multiple contributors to your book so friends and family can directly input their recipes. The recipe box feature keeps track of which recipes you added to your layout, which is pretty handy.
Two pretty great features of Create My Cookbook are the We Type It and design services. Starting at $5, you can take pictures of your recipe cards and their staff will type everything up for you. It’s a huge time saver and helpful for those who have a hard time with old cursive handwriting. For a flat fee, you can upload up to 100 recipes and their team will design your entire cookbook, too.
You can calculate a base price before you sign up for a free account. The price depends on how many black and white vs color pages you want to print, so the price will be higher if you have a lot of color photos in your book.
Book types & quality: There are 4 book formats that all measure 7.75x9.75 and can hold up to 260 pages. The wire-o options include a softcover version and a hardcover version (basically a binder with a permanent wire inside). The wire-o versions lay flat and say the covers are spill-resistant. Next, there’s a ringed binder option. At first this option confused me since it just looks like a binder you can pick up at any office supply store. However, you can customize it with a photo and text, which makes it much more homey. It lays flat and is a great option for people who might want to add more recipe pages in the future.
The hardback book option also has a spill-resistant cover, and the quality of the binding looks pretty decent. They are casebound, and casebound books are not attached to the spine of the cover. So too much use and the contents of your book could come away from the cover. The pages do not lay flat but they look like a nice glossy paper that should hold up fairly well in the kitchen.
The E-cookbook is a great option and the price goes down if you order an E-book alongside a printed book. You can use the E-books online, or as a PDF on your computer, or on their app, and they are searchable.
Create My Cookbook Highlights
4 binding options, 1 size, no minimum order
Free account with the option to add contributors
Option to have book typed and designed for you for an additional fee
Software is easy to navigate and has Facebook integration
Lots of customization
E-cookbook option
Best for: Those who only want a few cookbook copies and like a lot of customization options. Also great for people who don’t want to type their recipes or fiddle with design software or want an electronic copy of their book.
Morsel
Morsel is new to the online cookbook game, and I have to say, I like what they’re doing a lot. Their focus is more on digital recipe archives and less on printed books, but you do have the option to request a printed book if you’d like.
Basically how Morsel works is you create an account and just start typing your recipes into their system. You can sort them how you like, and even divide your recipes between different family groups. Add photos and you’ve got an nice online recipe collection that can easily be shared with friends and family. The reason I think Morsel is a frontrunner when it comes to online recipes is that its design and usability outdoes anyone else on this list. It has a simple user interface, it’s clean, functional, and looks great. And! They have an app. The platform is subscription based, but if you have a lot of recipes and really need a place to securely store and share them, the price is definitely worth it. If you are looking for a centralized location for all your recipes that can be shared among all your family members, I think Morsel as on online cookbook maker is your best bet.
Morsel Highlights
Online-focused, but you can request a printed book.
Clean and easy-to-use interface.
Has its own app to centralize your recipes.
Can easily segment and share recipes with family and friends.
Best for: Those who want an electronic recipe solution, simple user interface, and want to instantly share their recipes and access them on their phone.
Heritage Cookbook
Heritage Cookbook is another platform with a number of binding options, the software just lays everything out differently. It’s a subscription-based platform with free 30 day trial. You can invite any number of contributors at no extra cost, and the free trial is kind of a great way to impose a deadline on all your family members to get them to upload their recipes as soon as possible.
Book designing & features: There are over 90 templates to choose from, some of which you can personalize with a photo on the cover. Or you can upload your own design. The first steps they walk you through have you choose a few style options that are universally applied to your book, like justification and line styles. You also have to option to add an index, which is a great feature if you are building a large cookbook. The recipes tab in the design center has a number of predetermined categories you can list your recipes under, or you can make your own. When adding a recipe, you can choose from 3 layout designs, with or without a photo. You can choose to make your photo grayscale so you don’t pay for a color page if you don’t want to.
Here’s what I found cook about the Heritage Cookbook recipe system: You can upload your own photo or choose one of their stock photos. They have 17 stock photo categories and a LOT to choose from within each category. So even if you don’t have great photos of your own, your book can still look swanky with their images.
Heritage cookbook doesn’t seem to give complete design control over your book. You can only add one photo to a page (but their FAQ section gives some tips on how to get around this), and the software automatically sorts recipes to save page space. You organize your recipes by the sections you want (appetizers, main dishes, desserts, etc.) and the recipes are sorted within those sections by length, then alphabetically. This works well for folks who want the most efficient page space available and don’t want to accidentally pay for extra pages. It might irk those who want their recipes in a very specific order.
Book types & quality: Again there are 4 binding types: plastic coil (holds up to 400 pages) wire-o (up to 150 pages) and both 6x9. These book types are pretty universal and quality doesn’t usually differ from company to company. The soft cover (holds up to 400 pages) and hard cover (up to 400 pages) are both 7x10, and from what I can see in the photos look pretty nice. I’d say the hardcover book looks nicest option out of all the companies I looked at for this post.
Heritage Cookbook Highlights
4 binding types, 2 sizes
Best looking hardcover book out of the sites listed here
Minimum order is 4 books
Large page counts
Stock photo options for book design
Sorts recipes to save space
Option to automatically index recipes
Best for: Those who want a higher-quality hardcover book or a long cookbook, and don’t need absolute control over every design aspect. Also great for families who need a deadline (get the book done before your 30-day trial is up!). Those who are ordering books for the whole family (the minimum book order is 4 copies).
Cookbook Create
Cookbook Create is a cookbook designer but also a foodie social media platform. You can upload a profile picture that the rest of the community will see, and make the recipes you upload public. I think the main draw of this site is the fact that you can make a cookbook with your own recipes, but you can also search the thousands of recipes uploaded by other users and include them in your book as well. If you upload a cherished recipe you don’t want others to see, you have the option to keep it private and only you can use it.
Book designing & features: The cookbook editor is pretty basic, but that can be a plus for those who don’t want to mess with all the bits and pieces of book customization. You organize your recipes into chapters, and the software automatically creates a table of contents for your first page. You can choose from a few themes with cover photos or you can upload your own photo for the cover. There are three cover layout options and 12 font styles to choose from for the entire book. When you are ready to add recipes to your chapters, the software keeps track of which recipes are in what chapters, which is great for organization and avoiding duplicates.
On the recipe pages in the book, you can add a photo, though it can only be cropped to one horizontal size, which might affect what photos you can use. But next to each recipe is a dedicated photo page where you can upload one large photo, or change the layout to four photo boxes, which can also be changed to text boxes. So you can have two photos and two text notes on that page. You can also make the entire page a text page to add a story or cooking notes. If you’ve added recipes from the Cookbook Create community, those pages will automatically populate with the photos the community member uploaded, or you can change the photo if you don’t like theirs.
It’s pretty easy to drag and drop pages in the editor to order everything how you like. Once you are ready to order, you choose your book format at the end and the price calculator does its work. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to estimate the cost without signing up for an account, but it wasn’t much different than the Heritage Cookbook or Create My Cookbook.
Book types & quality: There is only one size of book and it’s square, and three formats: hardcover, softcover, and spiral. Unfortunately, there aren’t very many pictures of the books on Cookbook Create’s website or social media pages so I couldn’t really try to estimate the quality. The hardcover books are casebound and don’t lay flat, but they look comparable to the other companies on this list. If you’ve ever held a Shutterfly or Costco hardcover photo book, they look a lot like those.
Cookbook Create Highlights
1 size, 3 binding options
No minimum order
Share recipes publicly
Search community of thousands of recipes to use in your book.
Easy and minimal design platform.
Automatic table of contents
Best for: Individuals who want a nice, easy, minimalist platform to make a cookbook. For those who want to add more recipes than just their own to their books and who want to share recipes with an online community.
Honestly, Family Cookbook Project’s site is…retro? It looks like it was built in the early 2000s and never updated, but it works and is somewhat easy to navigate. There are 2 membership options, personal (free) premium (free 30 day trial). The free personal version only allows for one contributor, so if you need to add more people to upload recipes, you’ll need to do within the trial period or pay for a membership (ranging from $8 per month to $95 for life).
Book designing & features: Your cookbook workspace is divided into categories. In the recipes section, you can add your recipes and sort them into set categories (you can’t make your own). What I like about their recipe uploader is that you can add a special symbol next to each recipe, flagging it as heart healthy, kid friendly, kosher, etc. You can also add special characters in the directions box, like fractions, degree symbols, or characters from French and Spanish. And there is a list of measurement abbreviations so you can standardize your recipes.
Upload pictures to go with your recipes or to put throughout the book, add contributors who can add recipes and photos. When you add a recipe you can opt for all contributors on your project to get an email notification, which is handy if you’re waiting on someone to upload material. Each design element is housed in a different section so there is a bit of back and forth to do between screens to get everything done. There are a number of cover options to choose from or you can upload your own. If you don’t use a custom cover, their options aren’t the most chic styles but they will work for people who just want a basic cookbook. If you upgrade to a paid account, you have more customization options, can create multiple cookbooks at the same time, and you have access to their platform to sell your cookbook.
Book options & quality: There are two sizes: 5.5 x 8.5 and 8.5 x 11. Both these options are plastic coil bindings, but you can choose the color of the coil: black or white. There are a number of cheap upgrades you can add, like laminating the front and back cover and changing the paper type. The quality doesn’t look as nice as the previous companies who offer spiral bound, but can be a great cheap option if ordering many books. There are no minimum book purchases, but if you only order 1 or 2 books, it can be expensive. The more book copies you order, the cheaper per book it becomes. Luckily, you can calculate the potential cost of your book before you sign up for an account. If you decide to upgrade to a paid membership, you can download a PDF proof of your book and take it to a printer, like Kinko’s.
Family Cookbook Project Highlights
2 sizes, 1 binding option
No minimum order, but ordering just a few can be pricey.
Basic layouts, but unlimited free black and white photos
Detailed recipe uploader
More options in paid subscription
Can download PDF and have it printed elsewhere
Best for: Those ordering lots of copies of a basic book and don’t need hardcover options. Also good for those who want to round up recipes from multiple people and store them online.
Recipe Card Cookbook
Recipe Card Cookbook is identical to Family Cookbook Project’s system—they are actually the same company. But Recipe Card Cookbook is designed to be more barebones and simple. There is only one account option and it’s free but you can’t add contributors. What you get is a book that is a compilation of your handwritten recipe cards.
Book designer & editor: In the recipe card cookbook editor, you upload pictures of your recipe cards and those images are printed directly into the book. You can add a recipe title, or type in the whole recipe if you want and the text will be printed alongside the card. There’s also an option to add other photos.
Book types & quality: Like Family Cookbook Project, you can only order 1 or 2 books if you like and the prices are cheaper. They have the same size and binding options as Family Cookbook Project and cover design options. After you order, they’ll keep your recipes in your account as well so you can make other books if you want.
Recipe Card Cookbook Highlights
2 sizes, 1 binding option
Compilation of handwritten recipe cards
Order 1 or 2 books at cheaper prices
Very limited customization
Best for: Those who want the most basic cookbook and a way to save their handwritten recipe cards.
Simply Cookbooks
Simply Cookbooks is exactly what the title says: simple cookbooks. The website again is pretty basic and seems to be targeted toward church groups and fundraising organizations. The minimum order for books is 12 and they have additional fundraising and marketing options to help out group missions.
Book designing & quality: Customization is pretty limited, with 3 font sets to choose from design wise, 4 divider styles, and 21 covers. There are 4 covers that you can customize with a photo for an extra fee per book, and there are several colors of plastic coil to choose from. You can add 4 personal pages for stories one of which can have a photo, and you can insert some of their stock art to mix things up a bit. My favorite part of this cookbook site is the fact that each book comes with 24 pages of cooking tips. For the most part, it seems like a really easy way to type in recipes and have a book made quickly.
Book types & quality: They are all one uniform size and plastic coil bound. These books have some mix and match options with the dividers and covers, but they are cheap. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you are looking to make profit off of fundraising.
Simply Cookbooks Highlights
1 size and binding
Set cover styles and divider styles
Clip art to fill space
Resources for fundraising groups
24 pages of cooking tips
Minimum order is 10 books
Best for: large groups, fundraisers, and families who want a basic book with few frills fast.
So there you have it! I hope you found this comparison of DIY cookbook platforms helpful. Which is the best DIY cookbook maker for you?
Sarah Yeoman
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