Are you looking for a free plant id app that can accurately identify plants by taking a photo of them? You are in the right place!
Often, we are driven by many reasons to identify plants – sometimes, just out of curiosity to know more about the world around us, other times, out of the need or desire to manage our vegetable gardens effectively.
In this post, we will discuss some of the best and free plant identification apps for both Android and Apple smartphones. Let’s get started on exploring the world of plant biodiversity.
Benefits of Using Free Plant Identification Apps
Here are some of the benefits associated with using the best plant identification apps for identifying flora and enhancing your gardening experience:
Easy and quick identification of plants
With any of these apps, you don’t need any botanical expertise to identify plants.
Simply take a snapshot of any plant you want to identify through the app, and the app, using its advanced image recognition technology, will quickly and accurately identify the plant id and give you all its details.
Guess what? These apps come with intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, which make them easy to use for everybody.
Comprehensive plant information
These apps contain comprehensive plant information, which includes disease and pest information, essential plant care tips, and detailed plant descriptions.
They will help you learn about plants’ common names, botanical names, their key characteristics, and potential threats. You will also get personalized recommendations for soil, sunlight, and water requirements.
Learning community
Most plant identification apps have online communities that connect gardeners (beginners and experienced), as well as plant enthusiasts, contributing to citizen science. You can join these online communities to gain and share experiences and knowledge.
Aside from the community, these apps offer additional educational resources, such as quizzes, videos, articles, and so on, to expand your gardening knowledge.
Cost-effectiveness
Finally, these apps are free to use and offer all these amazing benefits for free. So you don’t need to subscribe.
The Best Free Plant Identification Apps
There are several apps available to assist with plant identification. Here are some tested and trusted free apps to help you identify the best plants:
PlantNet
The plant identification app that tops our list is none else but PlantNet, an incredibly simple and easy-to-use plant id app. This collaborative app comes entirely free and is available for both Android and iPhone users.
It helps you to identify plants and also allows users to contribute to their plants’ database. All you need to do is to photograph the plant you want to identify clearly, then choose which feature you want to use to identify the plant.
After identification, PlantNet will also give you a link to its plant database for more information about the plant, and more links for follow-up information.
Please note that PlantNet focuses more on identifying vegetative plants than offering health care tips through its plant identifier features.
iNaturalist
iNaturalist is another great app that helps identify plants and animals. Aside from identifying plants, iNaturalist has a large community of members with which users can share and confirm their findings.
This free app is not so simple to use, and users need to read the instructions and get to know the plantnet plant identification app better before they use it.
If you need a plant identification app that also helps you connect with other plant enthusiasts, iNaturalist is your best choice for fostering plant biodiversity. You can get it on the Play Store or App Store.
Please note that iNaturalist identifies plants and animals using visually similar suggestions and verification by dedicated contributors. Hence, it may not always be accurate.
Gardenize
Gardenize is a garden app with a photographic memory that helps you understand and develop your garden’s flora. It is more like an online garden journal and garden planner app.
It has a plant database with more than 45,000 plants, which is an improvement on the app’s accuracy. Beyond identifying plants, it can also add them to your personal plant library.
Gardenize is free but has optional premium features that further help you to plan and document your gardening.
With this plant id app, you can also easily track your plants’ care and health over time, enabling you to log your garden activities like fertilizing, watering, and so on.
All these amazing features make Gardenize a useful and helpful app for gardening and planting.
PlantSnap
PlantSnap is an easy-to-use app for identifying and sharing plants. With its powerful image recognition system, you can easily use this plant identifier to instantly and correctly identify flowers, trees, and other plants.
It has more than 500,000 types of plants, flowers, trees, succulents, mushrooms, and cacti in its database, which aid instant identification of plants.
PlantSnap comes free but with in-app purchases to unleash its full features.
This app also provides helpful care tips for your raised bed gardening, like watering and sunlight needs; in addition to plant disease diagnosis.
What more?
PlantSnap has an amazing community of garden enthusiasts from around the world where you can gain and share experiences and knowledge.
PictureThis
Another helpful app on our list is PictureThis, which comes with a free trial and limited features. Full features come with subscriptions.
This app helps in identifying plants, flowers, leaves, trees, herbs, etc. via snapshots in seconds, offers helpful plant care tips, and provides plant disease diagnosis.
With over 1,000,000 plants in its database, this app can identify plants with over 98% accuracy.
Whether you are a novice or an expert gardener, consider PictureThis as your personal plant identifier and plant expert.
Please note that each of the apps discussed above has its strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, the best app for you may depend on your specific needs, which may include whether you want to prioritize plant identification, plant care tips, or gardening planning.
Other free plant identification apps include NatureGate, Google Lens, LikeThatGarden, and Leafsnap.
Conclusion
As seen in the post, free plant identification apps help gardeners to learn more about the plants around them. They offer a lot of benefits that make them helpful tools for anyone interested in gardening.
If you need quick and accurate plant identifications, try any of the five apps discussed above.
These apps are simple to use and work as identifier to become a more knowledgeable and responsible gardener or nature enthusiast.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
These apps have varying levels of accuracy depending on a number of factors, which include the app’s database, the plant’s image quality, lighting conditions, etc. However, the apps listed above have a high degree of accuracy, especially for common plants, making them the best plant identification tools available.
While these apps are incredibly useful and identify plants with high accuracy, they do have some limitations. For instance, these apps may find it difficult to identify plants that are poorly photographed or not in their database. They may also face limitations in accurately identifying rare plant species using the apps we tested.
Yes, free plant identification apps can identify plants from pictures of their leaves or any other part of the plants. Some of these identifying apps can also identify plants from pictures of their seeds or fruits.
Although some apps offer offline capabilities and may work without an internet connection, we recommend that you connect to the internet while using any of these apps for the best result.
Some of the apps discussed above can only identify and diagnose common plant diseases through visual symptoms and may not be able to diagnose severe plant disease.