Planter vs Leaftide: Which garden planner fits your garden?
Planter is a polished mobile app for planning vegetable beds with a great companion planting grid. Leaftide goes further with fruit trees, climate-aware scheduling, and care routines. Here's how they compare.
Both apps help you plan a vegetable garden, but they serve different stages of a gardener's journey. Planter excels at quick, visual bed layouts on your phone; Leaftide picks up where that leaves off, adding climate intelligence, harvest timing, and long-lived plant tracking for gardeners who want to manage an entire plot across seasons.
At a glance
What they share
- ✓ Drag-and-drop garden bed layout
- ✓ Custom plants and varieties
- ✓ Planting calendar based on frost dates
- ✓ Lifetime purchase option available
Where Leaftide differs
- 🌳 Tracks fruit trees, shrubs, and permanent plants
- 📍 Climate data specific to your location, not just frost dates
- 🌡️ GDD-based harvest predictions
- ✂️ Pruning schedules and care routines
- 🌍 Available in 6 languages
Feature comparison
| Feature | Planter | Leaftide |
|---|---|---|
| Visual bed planner | ✓ | ✓ |
| Square foot gardening grid | ✓ | ✗ |
| Companion planting | Visual grid | List-based |
| Planting calendar | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom plants and varieties | ✓ | ✓ |
| Seed box / inventory | ✓ | ✗ |
| Notes and events | Premium | ✓ |
| Permanent plants (fruit trees, shrubs) | ✗ | ✓ |
| Pruning and care routines | ✗ | ✓ |
| Harvest predictions (GDD-based) | ✗ | ✓ |
| Container planner | ✗ | Dedicated mode |
| Climate data | Frost dates | Your specific location |
| Mobile app | iOS, Android, Fire | iOS, Android |
| Web app | Premium only | All tiers |
| Multi-language support | English only | 6 languages |
| Free tier | 1 garden | Full features, limited plants |
| Lifetime purchase option | $99.99 | ✓ |
Pricing: Planter is $24.99/year or $99.99 lifetime. Leaftide is £5/month or £99 lifetime.
Containers, schedules, and fruit trees in one planner
Free for up to 30 plants. No credit card required.
Key differences explained
🌳 More than vegetables
Planter is built around annual vegetables and herbs. If that's all you grow, it does the job well. But many gardeners eventually add an apple tree, a blueberry hedge, or a row of raspberries, and that's where Planter's model runs out. Leaftide treats permanent plants as first-class citizens: you log planting year, track age, set up pruning windows, and record yearly observations like bud break or first harvest. Over time, Leaftide builds a timeline of your tree's behaviour so predictions improve year on year. If your garden is purely annual veg, you won't miss this; but the moment you plant something that outlives the season, you'll want it.
🌡️ Climate-aware harvest predictions
Planter uses frost dates to tell you when to sow and transplant, which is a reasonable starting point. Leaftide goes a step further: it uses growing degree days (GDD) and climate data specific to your location to predict when your crops will actually be ready to harvest. In practice, this means two gardeners 30 miles apart get different harvest windows if one is on a cold hilltop and the other in a sheltered valley. The result is more accurate timing, especially in cooler or unpredictable climates like the UK, where frost dates alone can be weeks off. If you've ever wondered "is my sweetcorn actually going to ripen this year?", GDD predictions answer that honestly rather than optimistically.
🌍 Web access and language support
Planter's web app is locked behind the Premium subscription. With Leaftide, the web app is available on all tiers, including free, so you can plan on a large screen without paying extra. This matters if you prefer mapping out beds on a laptop and then checking progress on your phone in the garden. Leaftide also supports English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and Italian, while Planter is currently English-only. For non-English-speaking gardeners, that's often the deciding factor before features even come into play.
GDD predictions and pruning schedules, not just frost dates
Free for up to 30 plants. No credit card required.
⚖️ Where Planter does better
- Planter's companion planting grid is one of the best in any garden app. When you drag a plant onto the grid, it immediately highlights which neighbours are friends and which are foes. It's visual, intuitive, and genuinely useful.
- The mobile app is fast and polished, with a clean UI that feels native on both iOS and Android. It's also available on Amazon Fire tablets.
- Planter offers a $99.99 lifetime purchase. Leaftide also has a lifetime option, but Planter's is cheaper.
- At $24.99/year, Planter Premium is cheaper than Leaftide's £5/month plan. If you only grow vegetables and want a straightforward planner, it's good value.
Who should choose which
Choose Planter if you...
- Want a fast, polished mobile app you can use one-handed in the garden
- Rely heavily on companion planting and want to see compatibility at a glance
- Only grow annual vegetables and herbs in raised beds or square-foot gardens
- Prefer a simple bed layout tool without scheduling complexity
- Want a seed inventory to track what you already have on hand
Choose Leaftide if you...
- Grow fruit trees, berry bushes, or perennial shrubs alongside vegetables
- Want harvest predictions based on your actual climate, not just frost dates
- Need pruning reminders and care routines for permanent plants
- Track your garden across multiple seasons and want year-on-year data
- Grow in containers and want a dedicated container planning mode
- Need a garden planner in Spanish, French, German, Dutch, or Italian
The bottom line
Planter is one of the best mobile garden planners available, and its companion planting grid is genuinely hard to beat. If your gardening stays within annual vegetables in a few raised beds, it's a great choice and cheaper on the yearly plan. But gardens grow. The moment you plant a fruit tree, want to know when your tomatoes will actually ripen based on this year's weather, or need a planner that speaks your language, Leaftide is built for that next step. Both offer lifetime purchases, so you're not locked into a subscription either way.
Growing more than annual veg?
Leaftide tracks fruit trees alongside your beds, with GDD predictions and pruning schedules. Free for up to 30 plants.
Plan your whole gardenNo credit card required
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Last updated: July 2026