The Best Gardening and Plant Identification Apps for Your Smartphone

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.

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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.

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.

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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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.

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.