The Best Gardening and Plant Identification Apps for Your Smartphone

Whether you simply want to identify the flowers growing in your backyard or you have big plans to become a pro mushroom forager, downloading a few key apps will put a bounty of information at your fingertips.

By Teresa Odle and Alexa Erickson | Updated Jul 31, 2023 05:40 PM

Your Gardening Sidekick

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Woman facing the wall watering houseplants against a wall

Outdoor gardens and prized houseplants are the healthy decor we all need. They’re vibrant, grounding, purifying, and are beautiful to look at. Unfortunately, indoor and outdoor plants don’t always thrive. Yellowing leaves, brown tips, stunted growth, root rot, and more make for sad sights. 

If you’re at a loss for what to do, there are helpful apps to get your houseplants and garden back on track or get you started growing. You can identify a plant, determine how much water it needs, check its sun exposure requirements, and get help with garden planning. Check out this list of 13 helpful apps you—and your plants—will love.

Related: The Best Plants for Every Room of the House

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The Best App for Solving Plant Problems

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Close up of phone with photo of Gerbera Daisy in a plant app

Knowing the type of plant you have is the first step in ensuring proper care. Garden Answers Plant Identification is a free app that allows you to simply take a picture of your plant and learn exactly what plant you have. If it’s rare, the app will suggest which plant family it’s likely in. The popular garden app also helps diagnose plant problems from photos. For even more help, submit a question on the app to a trained botanist for a small fee.

gardenanswers.com

The Best App for Houseplant Basics

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Close up of phone app showing a watering log

If you’re looking for a comprehensive app that will guide you through all things houseplant health, Indoor Plant Guide Pocket Edition has you covered. The app provides you with countless tools, like your plant’s requirements for water, food, soil, and more. It also provides you with helpful information on proper potting, like if it requires a high-drainage pot. It’s available only in Google Play.

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The Best Water-Scheduling App

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One of the most frustrating aspects of plant care is pinpointing how much water each of your houseplants requires and how often, and then remembering when you last gave your lovelies a drink. Vera: Plant Care App from Bloomscape helps take care of that. Set up a plant profile for each of your houseplants, and the app will send you watering reminders based on its requirements. 

Related: The Dos and Don’ts of Watering Plants

bloomscape.com

The Best App for Finding Sun Exposure

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The Best App for Finding Sun Exposure

Just because your plant adds aesthetics to that empty corner in your room doesn’t mean that’s the best place for your houseplant’s health. Different indoor and outdoor plants require different amounts of sunlight, from full sun (6 or more hours a day) to shade. 

If your plants aren’t thriving, it could be that they’re getting too much or too little sun. The Sun Seeker app helps you find optimal locations for your plants indoors and out. 

RELATED: 20 Plants for Where the Sun Don’t Shine

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The Best App for Sick Plants

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The Best App for Sick Plants

PictureThis is the remedy all plants in poor health need. A quick snap of your plant’s problem, from yellowing leaves to wilted ones, will give the app all it needs to suggest some issues. It also helps you identify houseplants that might be toxic for your pups and kitties. Upgrade from the free version to use the diagnosis tool, access the community forum for troubleshooting, and share tips.

The basic PictureThis app is free to use, but be ready for plenty of in app-nudges to upgrade to the premium version. In the end, ponying up for the premium version is worth it because PictureThis is probably one of the most helpful all-around plant ID and care tools.

RELATED: 14 Symptoms of an Unhappy Houseplant

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The Best App for Plant Maintenance Reminders

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Close up of a plant app on a phone

Planta is an all-around superstar for plant health. Its free features include logging your houseplants’ species, manually tracking light intensity, receiving notifications when it’s time to water, and detailed instructions on watering methods. Upgrade to the premium feature to receive fertilizing, misting, repotting, and pruning instructions and reminders.

getplanta.com

Best App for Detailed Plant Descriptions

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Closeup of app

The Blossom app is your all-inclusive database for understanding your houseplants through and through. Research more than 10,000 indoor and garden plants, and learn about their preferences for light, soil, water, temperature, humidity, potting, and propagation.

conceptiveapps.com

The Best App for Vegetable Gardeners

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The Best App for Vegetable Gardeners

Growing your own food is a smart, rewarding trend for urban gardeners and families. From Seed to Spoon can help you look for companion plantings for your favorite vegetables, and even determine the best time to plant your vegetables based on your GPS location. It also offers info on beneficial insects and how to treat problem pests organically, plus recipes!

RELATED: How to Plant a Vegetable Garden

seedtospoon.net

The Best App for Regional Flora and Fauna ID

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The Best App for Regional Flora and Fauna ID

When it comes to outdoor plants—especially native plants—it’s location, location, location. iNaturalist is a free app from a nonprofit partnership between the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. Using location data, the app can help identify native plants, insects, and other living organisms you encounter in your garden or on a hike. Its interface is more complex than some, but it includes a helpful community of scientists with a focus on nature.

#BBD0E0 »

iNaturalist

The Best Plant ID App for All Ages

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The Best Plant ID App for All Ages

Some plant identification apps are a little cumbersome to use, but Leafsnap is designed with a user-friendly interface to help identify plants from a snapshot of a leaf. Kids 8 years and older can get excited about plants by using the identification, plant care, and reminder functions. It’s not the most robust database of plants, but it’s a high-tech intro to the world of plants.

RELATED: The Best Garden Sets for Kids

Leafsnap

The Best App for Garden Journaling

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The Best App for Garden Journaling

Find helpful information on your favorite or desired plants and keep track of indoor and outdoor plants with Gardenize. Get regional information and build your own plant library, organizing your garden and keeping track of how they develop and what goes right or wrong. With a journal, you embrace all that goes on in your garden and this app can help you keep track.

Gardenize

The Best App for Foraging

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The Best App for Foraging

Mushrooms are delicious, especially when stuffed. But whether growing or foraging for the fungi, it helps to have reliable identification. Not all mushrooms are OK to eat, but the joy lies in finding which are. Armed with Picture Mushroom, you can ID the latest fungi in your lawn to address it, or add the tools of mushroom hunting and harvesting to forage for mushrooms on your next hike.

RELATED: How to Grow Mushrooms at Home

Picture Mushroom

The Best App for Social Gardening

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The Best App for Social Gardening

Gardeners are a close-knit community, and the popular Garden Tags app hosts a large social community of gardeners who offer advice, gardening tips, and help with plant ID. The app has 400,000 member plant photos you can peruse. It offers helpful scheduling as well, plus emphasizes inspiration to keep you pumped about your plant parenting efforts. 

Garden Tags

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