OurTab vs shopping list apps
Your list ends at the checkout. Your week doesn't.
The list is the easy part
Dedicated list apps are good: fast to add to, shared instantly, organised by aisle. If all you need is a synced list, they're hard to beat and OurTab isn't trying to.
But the list is the start of the job, not the end
The moment the shopping is home, a list app forgets. It doesn't know what you now have, so it can't tell you whether you already own passata, can't suggest a dinner from what's in, and certainly can't tell you that you're £40 up on the month because you did the last two shops.
In OurTab, ticking something off doesn't delete it — it moves into your inventory. That single difference is what makes the rest possible.
What you get past the checkout
- Live inventory — what's actually in the house, so "do we need milk?" has an answer.
- Meals from stock — suggestions built from your cupboards, with missing ingredients added straight back to the list.
- A shared ledger — the shop becomes an expense, split the way your household splits things.
- Import instead of typing — paste a supermarket order and the whole thing lands, priced.
It works with no signal, which is where lists are used
The one thing a dedicated list app has always done better is keep working in the middle of a big shop, where the signal dies. That's fixed: the OurTab list now works offline. Add an item, change it, tick it off, mark something as already at home — it all happens on your phone and syncs itself when you come back into range.
And it tells you which of those it hasn't shared yet, rather than leaving you to guess whether your partner can see it. Everything else — logging the finished shop to the ledger, the AI — still needs a connection, and we'd rather say so than let you find out at the till.
Where a list app is the better pick
If you live alone, or you and your household never need to settle up, the extra machinery in OurTab is weight you don't need. Use the list app.
They're also still ahead on the list itself: AnyList sorts by aisle in your store's order and syncs in a second or two, and OurTab doesn't do aisle ordering at all. If the shop itself is the whole job, that matters more than anything on this page.