7 apps to keep your plants alive and well

Yellowing leaves, brown tips, dry fronds. Whenever a plant displays its first signs of sickness, I immediately start to think what I might have done wrong. 

Did I give my plant root rot by overwatering it? No, I’m probably under-watering it. Wait, maybe it’s just due for a re-pot, or does it just need a little more shade?

Plants have different needs, and react to sunlight, water, and fertilizer in a variety of ways. Learn about their needs, and you might be able to stop the damage in time. Use a little extra TLC, and they might even flourish.

Not sure where to start? Here are eight apps to help you figure out what your plants need and how you can nurture them. 

Best overall: Planta

Free on iOS. In-app purchases available for premium features.

Planta is a great one-stop-shop for all your plant problems — but only if you have the premium upgrade. 

Still, there’s plenty to love about what the app offers for free: You can log the different species of plants you have at home, manually keep track of the light intensity of the room in which they’re placed, and get push notifications about when you should water them based on the weather in your area. The app’s best free feature? Detailed instructions about different watering methods — water over the soil, bottom watering, or water bath — based on your baby’s needs.

Looking for more? The premium version will give you a boatload of other helpful tools. With the upgrade, you’ll get fertilizing, misting, repotting, and pruning instructions and reminders. You’ll also get features that use your phone camera to automatically identify plant species and estimate the light levels in your rooms. But there’s more! You get overwintering instructions, care guides and articles, as well as plant recommendations based on your skills and your home’s environment.

The premium upgrade is available at $7.99 a month, $17.99 for three months, and $35.99 for a year.

Best free app: Florish

Free on iOS.

Florish may not have nearly as many features as Planta, but it’s got plenty of goodies for a completely free app.

Manually enter your plant babies’ species into the app, and you’ll get a brief description of what your plants should look like when they’re healthy, care instructions with their water and light preferences, and a list of common issues that cause them to fall ill. But the app doesn’t just tell you what your plants need; it also teaches you to fulfill those needs with watering reminders and plant care tips.

The light meter is what makes this app stands out, though. Not quite sure if your room has bright, medium, or low light? This feature uses the phone camera to estimate light intensity in different areas in your home and to recommend plants based on those light settings. But really, it’s just a useful tool for determining whether the plants you already have are getting the right amount of light. If you’re not a fan of camera-enabled light meter, you can also determine light levels around your home with a three-question plant quiz.

Most informative: Blossom

Free on iOS. In-app purchases available for premium upgrade.

If you’ve ever tried to Google a question about your plant, you’ve probably come across a few tips by The Spruce at some point. Good news: They have a whole app dedicated to your plant babies. And let me tell you, it’s oh-so neatly designed.

The app is split into four bottom tabs: a “search” tab that functions like a library for detailed plant descriptions and care tips, an “explore” tab for discovering new plants, a “reminders” tab for setting up push notifications for watering, fertilizing, and repotting, and a “my garden” tab designed for quick access to information about your plants.

Sure, the app doesn’t come with other fancy features like light meters and personalized plant recommendations (it does come with a camera-enabled plant identifier, though), but what it lacks, it makes up for with clear presentation and depth of knowledge. Blossom has a database of more than 10,000 indoor and garden plants, each of which comes with a page about its preferences for light, soil, water, temperature, humidity, potting, and propagation.

You get all these features for free up to a certain amount of uses. You can unlock an unlimited amount of reminders and camera-enabled plant identification, though, if you upgrade to premium version for $6.99/month or $19.99/year.

Best for sick plants: PictureThis

Free on iOS and Android. In-app purchases available for premium upgrade.

Like many other apps on the list, PictureThis comes with a camera-enabled plant identifier and detailed plant care guides. But once you upgrade to either the gold or premium membership, the app will also let you access tools that no other app offers: an AI that diagnoses your sick plants, as well as a community forum for troubleshooting and sharing tips.

With a gold membership — which costs $1.99/week or $4.99/month — you’ll also get unlimited plant identifications, one customized advice from IRL plant experts, and weed identifications. Upgrade it to premium for $29.99 a year, and you’ll get all that plus three extra pieces of customized advice.

Best for keeping track of progress: ThePlantMe

Free on iOS. In-app purchases available for premium upgrades.

ThePlantMe comes with a clean, simple design that makes it easy to keep track of your plants.

To start, search for your babies in the app’s database and add them to your list. Toggle one tab over to “your plants,” and you’ll see a lineup of plants you’ve added. Think of them as Pokémon cards for plants. Open up the card for a description of the plant’s needs and to set up schedules and reminders for watering and fertilizing.

But the star of the show is the “history” feature. Upload photos of your plant to the card once in a while, and you’ll have a visual record of your plants’ progress overtime. Maybe it’s getting better, maybe it’s getting worse — this feature will help you know for sure so you can adjust your gardening treatments to suit its needs.

Best for reminders: Gardenia

Free on iOS and Android. 

If you’re looking for an app that’s concise and to the point, look no further than Gardenia.  This app won’t go into too much details about your plants — you can use a different app for that — but it will walk you through what you absolutely need to know and help you set up reminders to take care of those basics.

Add a plant from the app’s database to your list, and immediately you’ll see six icons that indicate the plant’s ideal level of water, fertilization, sun exposure, its ideal soil type, its blooming seasons, and the minimum temperature it needs for survival. In a way, it reads like a pictograph report card for plants.

Here’s what makes Gardenia different. Unlike other apps, which generally offer reminders for only watering and fertilizing, Gardenia will let you set up notifications for a much wider range of tasks. You can schedule for not only watering and fertilizing, but also repotting, applying pesticides, sowing, harvesting, and pruning. You can even create a custom notification if you’d like.

The best part? All of this is free — no in-app purchases, no limits. 

Best for plant parents who already know the basics: Vera

Free on iOS and Android. 

Vera is a blank canvas. There are no guides, no tips, no nothing. In practice, it functions more like a journal for plant parents who already know what they’re doing.

To start, snap a photo of your plant, give it a name, identify its species, document its location, note its adoption date, and add any care instructions based on what you’ve learned. Once you create that journal entry, you’re free to log any activity — watering, fertilizing, repotting, misting, and rotating — and add any extra notes about the plant on a day-to-day basis. If it helps, you can also enable push notification for watering and fertilization reminders.

This app is great if you want to approach plant parenting more mindfully. After all, even the same plant can react differently in different environment. An observation-based, individualized plant care regimen can be a lot more rewarding than boilerplate methods if you take the time to learn about your plants basic needs.