Are you looking for a mobile app to help you identify plants by photo? Here are 9 of the best free apps for Android and iOS that can help you recognizing plants easier.

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When you are a gardener, passionate about plants, or a wildlife explorer, having a plant identification app installed on your phone can be very handy.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out how many apps related to plants are available for download on Google Play when I was doing my research before writing this article.

In addition to the general plant recognition apps, there are many others that focus mainly on identifying trees, flowers, vegetables, edible and medicinal plants, aquarium & pond plants, mushrooms, weeds, wildflowers, indoor plants, and more. There are also countless apps related to plant care, water reminders, plant journals, garden management, and so on.

As a gardener or someone who loves plants, there will be many situations when you need to find out the name of a particular herb, weed, tree, or flower. If you don’t know a plant’s name, you don’t know how to care for it.

You can always try to Google it, but if that plant doesn’t have enough distinctive features to type in the search box, finding out the name of an unknown plant by description can be quite challenging.

Plant identification apps are not only useful tools for gardeners but are also very helpful for students, professors, researchers, biologists, explorers, and even for people who frequently go into the wild and need to differentiate the edible plants from the toxic ones.

Contents

• 1. PlantNet Plant Identification
• 2. LeafSnap – Plant Identification
• 3. PlantSnap – Identify Plants, Flowers, Trees & More
• 4. Google Lens
• 5. Seek
• 6. iNaturalist
• 7. PictureThis: Identify Plant, Flower, Weed and More
• 8. Flora Incognita – Automated Plant Identification
• 9. Pinterest

App Selection Criteria

I want to mention that I did not try every app out there. I installed and tested only:

• Mobile apps that can identify a plant from a photo.
• Apps that can be downloaded from Google Play Store or Apple App Store.
• Free apps or which have at least a free version.
• Apps that can recognize any variety of plants.

All the apps presented have both a version for Android and one for iOS (iPhone). You can find the download links under the description of each app reviewed.

I have also only tested apps that can identify a general category of plants from a photo that depicts a full plant, or a part of the plant (leaves, flowers, or fruit).

Even though a particular plant might be in the app’s database, sometimes, it might still not be recognized by the image detection software due to factors like the quality of the photo, angle, background, plant part, and more. Hence, I advise you to take multiple pictures of the plant you want to identify for more reliable results.

Below is a list of the apps I liked and which I consider being most helpful for me or any plant passionate.

Best Plant Identification Apps

I have ranked these apps based on my personal preferences, ease of use, plant detection capabilities, and other features that I found helpful. The scores I gave to apps reflect only my own experience for the sole purpose of finding out a plant’s name from a photo.

Because I value your time and know that not everyone is interested in reading the review of every app, I have also included the table below for quick navigation.

#	Name	Download
1	PlantNet Plant Identification	Android/iOS
2	LeafSnap – Plant Identification	Android/iOS
3	PlantSnap – Identify Plants, Flowers, Trees & More	Android/iOS
4	Google Lens	Android/iOS
5	Seek	Android/iOS
6	iNaturalist	Android/iOS
7	PictureThis: Identify Plant, Flower, Weed and More	Android/iOS
8	Flora Incognita – Automated Plant Identification	Android/iOS
9	Pinterest	Android/iOS

Below you can read more about every app and the things I liked and didn’t like about each of them.

1. PlantNet Plant Identification

If you are looking for a free app that enables you to identify plants simply by photographing them with your mobile phone, you should definitely try Pl@ntNet.

It’s that simple! You take a photo with your phone or you upload an existing image from your gallery and you quickly find out the name of that particular plant.

This app can identify a plant from a photo of its leaves, flowers, fruits, bark, habit, or another part.

You can then choose from the list of results the plant that resembles the most with the one in your photo.

According to the information displayed on the app’s page, currently, Pl@ntNet can recognize more than 20,000 different species of plants. This plant database is, however, growing continuously thanks to the contributions of people all around the world.

Even though the app is focusing more on listing the wild plants that fewer things are known about, it’s also great for recognizing the common houseplants, trees, herbs, and vegetables.

Pl@ntNet is more than an app that enables you to find out the name of a plant by photo. It also helps you to discover and learn about the flora in your location or in different regions of the world.

App features:

• Flora recognition that enables you to seek for the photographed plant in all the flora of the app.
• Explore the identified species by family or genus.
• Links to numerous factsheets.
• The re-identification of shared observations, whether yours or those of other users.
• Mapping of your observations.
• The choice of your favorite floras to access them more easily.
• Navigation at different category levels in picture galleries.
• Differentiated data revision that gives more authority to users who have proved more experience.

If you just rarely need to identify a plant, or if you are someone who prefers to use a laptop or a PC instead of a phone, the Pl@ntNet app has also a web version that can be found at identify.plantnet.org.

• PROS
• Free & ad-free application
  
• Clean & easy-to-use app
  
• Has a web version

• CONS
• Plant database is not very large

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

2. LeafSnap – Plant Identification

LeafSnap is another great app for plant recognition.

This app has a very nice user-friendly interface and makes it simple to find out the name of every app-known plant.

According to the app description, LeafSnap can identify about 90% of all known species of plants and trees.

I consider LeafSnap like a combination of Pl@ntNet and PlantSnap since it includes some similarities with these two apps.

This app is free but contains ads. It also has a premium version that removes these ads. I think that’s actually the single difference between the free and the paid version. I don’t think there are any other limitations in the free version.

LeafSnap can identify a plant from any photo containing various parts of the plant such as leaf, flower, fruit, or tree bark.

The app doesn’t seem to have any problem in recognizing the common plants, so it’s great for gardeners and florists.

After the app scans the photo, it gives you a list of the plants that are possible matches. You can then choose the plant which you think looks most like the plant in your image.

App features:

• Quickly recognize a plant from a photo you take with the camera of your phone or a provided image.
• User-friendly interface.
• Large plant database, with advanced artificial intelligence plant recognition capabilities.
• Can identify various plants, flowers, trees and more.

• PROS
• Large plant database
  
• User-friendly interface
  

• CONS
• You have to see an ad after each photo
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

3. PlantSnap – Identify Plants, Flowers, Trees & More

Quickly identify plants of any type, everywhere in the world with PlantSnap!

With the help of a huge plant database and artificial intelligence, PlantSnap is able to identify a large variety of plants in the blink of an eye.

The PlantSnap creators claim that at this time, their app can identify over 625,000 plants, trees & mushrooms, which I think is pretty impressive.

Just install the app on your mobile phone, take a photo of a plant or use an existing picture from your image gallery, and quickly find out the name of various flowers, trees, houseplants, herbs, succulents, mushrooms, and more.

As an additional reason to use this app, in partnership with trees.org, PlantSnap plants new trees when the app users share their photos.

PlantSnap has planted already over 10,000 new trees throughout the world, according to the Google Play app description.

Unfortunately, this app is not completely free. It has a free and a premium version.

The free version enables you to take 25 daily snaps at this time and contains ads (I think you can view ads to keep snapping if you reach that limit). That should be more than enough if you just use the app from time to time to find out the name of new plants.

If you are someone who likes to regularly go in nature and explore new plants, you should probably consider getting the premium version since it’s very affordable (even the lifetime version).

The premium version removes the daily snap restriction, the in-app ads, gives you access to premium support, along with a few other advantages.

App features:

• Identify plants by picture.
• At least 2000 new plant species are per month are added.
• Identify plants on your phone, and your collections will be also available on the web (laptop or computer).
• Evaluate plant health through PlantSnap’s partnerships.
• You can explore the plants nearby or worldwide.
• Build a library of all the plants you’ve photographed

It’s also worth mentioning that you need to register a free account to use the app. That’s not such a big deal for me, but I’m sure there are people who will see this extra step as an inconvenience.

• PROS
• Huge plant database
  
• Clean user interface and easy-to-use
  
• Use the app and plant trees
  

• CONS
• Not completely free
  
• Need to register a user account

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

4. Google Lens

You might be wondering what is Google Lens doing in a top of the apps to identify plants.

There are actually multiple reasons why I’ve decided to include Google Lens to this top and in the list of my favorite mobile apps for identifying plants.

If you have a phone which functions on Android OS, chances are that you already have Google Lens installed. If not, you can effortlessly install it from the Google Play Store.

Google Lens is a mobile phone application developed by Google. This app has several very useful features when it comes to photos, but what interests us more is the plant recognition function.

This app uses the power of Google Images to enable you to identify objects, plants, text, and more, from a photo.

While some other plant recognition apps included in this list might have a large library of plants available, I think they still cannot compete with the huge database of Google images.

Basically, with Google Lens, you can search and identify anything you see, regardless if it’s an animal, an object, or a plant.

If you are someone like me who only uses the plant identification apps only to find the name of specific flowers, trees, or weeds, Google Lens is all you need.

This application is completely free and extremely powerful. However, since it’s not solely an app for identifying plant names, do not expect to give you too many details about the plants you are looking for upfront. Therefore, you might have to click the results to find out the plant name or more details about it.

App features:

• Identify any plant, animal, object, etc.
• Scan and translate the text from an image.
• Quickly scan product QR codes and barcodes.
• Explore nearby places.
• Find similar clothes, furniture, or home decor items to the ones you like.
• Find popular dishes on a restaurant menu based on user reviews from Google Maps.

If you own an iPhone, the Google apps might not be already installed in your phone’s operating system. Therefore, to get access to this app, you have to install the Google app from Apple’s App Store, which includes Google Lens.

The web alternative to Google Lens is Google Image Search.

Therefore, if you’d like to discover the name of a plant when using your computer, you can use the “search by image” feature of Google Images (click the camera icon in the search bar of Google Images).

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• PROS
• Free app
  
• Good plant identification capabilities
  
• Constantly updated and improved
  
• Huge database
  

• CONS
• Doesn’t provide details about plants directly
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

5. Seek

Seek is more than a mobile app for identifying plants. This app from iNaturalist utilizes the power of image recognition technology to recognize various plants and animals from photos.

It is an excellent mobile app for adventurers who like to spend their time exploring nature and for the people who want to learn more about the life forms around them.

Seek is obtaining its data from millions of public wildlife observations collected by iNaturalist, which is another cool app from the same company.

I like the simplicity of this app, but the lack of an option for the user to choose whether the recognition was successful or not might be a drawback.

Even though the app is pulling its data from a large database, there are still too many times when it’s not able to identify the right plant (at least from the photos I used).

Fortunately, the app is relatively young and seems to be constantly updated and improved with every new version. If the plant recognition algorithms will be improved and several other features will be implemented, this app has a huge potential.

App features:

• Identify wildlife and plants from picture
• Learn interesting facts about the environment and life forms around you
• Pulls data from a large database of animals and plants

• PROS
• 100% free app
  
• Constantly updated and improved
  
• Huge database from iNaturalist
  

• CONS
• The app seems a bit slow
  
• There is room to improve the image recognition algorithm
  
• Doesn’t allow user to confirm the result
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

6. iNaturalist

iNaturalist app empowers you to easily explore and identify the plants and animals from various parts of the world or close to your location.

The foremost intention of iNaturalist is to provide scientists and naturalists a community where they can share their findings (observations) and a way to provide quality information for scientists working to better understand and preserve the nature.

This app is the result of a collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.

This is more than an app designed to help you find the name of a plant from a photo but can be also used for that purpose.

If you don’t need the extra features of this application, you can take a look at the simplified app originated from iNaturalist, which is called Seek.

To find out the name of a plant with iNaturalist, you have to go to “New Observation” from the app’s menu.

Then you can select whether you want to take a photo or choose an existing image from the image gallery of your phone.

Once you choose the desired photo, you have to click on the question mark before “What did you see?” to let the app to automatically discover the name of the plant in your photo.

App features:

• Explore new species of plants and animals in your area or across the world
• Write your own observations and share them with the community of passionate naturalists and scientists
• Permit other members to help you identify what you’ve observed
• Review and assist others to identify what they found
• Follow public projects of smaller communities and scientists passionate about particular species

Even though this app can identify many houseplants and common garden plants, its primary role is to identify the wildlife.

• PROS
• 100% free app
  
• Huge database of plants and animals
  
• Good photo recognition capabilities
  
• Allows user feedback for each result
  

• CONS
• You have to create a new observation to identify each new plant
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

7. PictureThis: Identify Plant, Flower, Weed and More

PictureThis is one of the most popular mobile apps for identifying plants from a photo on Google Play.

According to the information displayed on the apps description page, PictureThis is able of distinguishing 10,000+ species of plants with an accuracy of 98%.

The goal of the team behind the app is to build a lively community of plant lovers and help more people learn new things about plants.

PuctureThis is great for gardeners, photographers, outdoor enthusiasts, plant passionates, students, teachers, and for anyone who needs a mobile plant identifier app.

Unfortunately, this app is not entirely free. The free subscription contains ads and only a limited number of free shots (IDs).

You can, however, earn more free IDs by watching an ad, by sharing the app with your friends, by accessing the app daily to claim your free IDs, or by playing “feeling lucky,” which is like a spin-to-win game.

If you only rarely use this app, watching a few ads per day might not be too disturbing. Yet, if you like the app and you use it frequently, you should probably consider paying for a premium subscription. There is also a 7-day free trial you can activate to test the premium features.

The premium membership allows you to identify an unlimited number of plants, receive additional plant care tips and reminders, you get HD plant wallpapers, and all the ads and watermarks will be removed.

App features:

• Instantly recognize thousands of plants, trees, or flowers.
• Learn new things about plants around the world.
• Receive suggestions and tips from a community of friendly horticulture professionals and gardeners.
• Get tips about plant care, fertilization, and water reminders.
• Weeds identification and tips for eradication
• User-friendly and clean interface with helpful guides.
• Quickly and effortlessly share your pictures with a growing community of plant enthusiasts.
• Keep track of all the plants you identify in your individual collection.

If you want an app to identify the wild plants, PictureThis might not be the best option since it has a relatively small database of plants compared to other apps.

However, if you are a gardener or someone who just needs a mobile app that can help you recognize the common plants around your house, this app would definitely be a good option to consider.

• PROS
• User-friendly interface
  
• Many helpful features
  
• Gives you access to a community of like-minded people
  

• CONS
• Not entirely free
  
• Relatively small plant database
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

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8. Flora Incognita – Automated Plant Identification

Flora Incognita lets you identify the plants in Central Europe fast and accurately using just images taken with your mobile phone.

This might not be the most suitable app for you if you are looking to identify the plants in your garden or around the house.

In the app description, it is clearly stated that Flora Incognita was designed for the identification of wild plants, and not for the many breeding and crossing of the garden and indoor plants.

TheFlora Incognita was developed by scientists from the Technical University of Ilmenau and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. The app has an educational purpose, it’s completely free and contains no ads.

First, select what type of plant you are trying to identify.

The next step is to take a photo of the flower top and a leaf of the plant you want to find out its name.

Almost instantly, the app will offer you the result which resembles most of the characteristics of the one in your photo.

I really like the design of this app.

App features:

• Can identify 4800+ plant species of the Central European wild flora.
• App provides various information about plant toxicity, protection status, and distribution.
• More than 10.000 photographs of Central European plants.
• Advanced search and filters for fast finding of particular species.
• Can create observation lists.
• Observations can be exported.

• PROS
• Ads-free clean interface
  
• Developed by leading German research institutes
  

• CONS
• Not recommended for gardeners
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

9. Pinterest

Even though many people see Pinterest as a social network, I consider it more like a search engine.

Pinterest enables users to save their favorite content on the web as pins (which is something pretty similar to a bookmark).

Other people can then find your pins if they follow you, if someone they follow repins them, or in the search results.

I love Pinterest and I’m using it daily to discover new awesome content.

But how can you identify a plant with Pinterest if you don’t know what to search for, right? Should you browse through millions of results and hope to find a plant that looks like the one you are searching for?

The answer is no. And even though that might be an option, there is one way easier.

Just like Google Images, the Pinterest mobile app has a function that enables the users to search by image. You can do that by clicking the camera icon next to the search bar.

The next step is to select from your phone the picture of the plant you want to identify.

If other similar photos were already pinned by other Pinterest users, Pinterest will display these pins under the “More like this” section.

Look through the results and find pins of the plant you are seeking. Click on any of the images to see more details about that pin.

Hopefully, you’ll find one that mentions the name of the plant you are looking to identify.

Chances are that some of the pins contain the name of the plant in the title, description or tags.

Pinterest has a huge database and unless your plant is extremely rare, there are great odds that someone else has already pinned it and mentioned its name.

App features:

• Social network
• Save your favorite content on the internet
• Discover cool articles on trending and recommended topics
• Find ideas and inspiration

• PROS
• 100% free app
  
• Huge database
  

• CONS
• Not all pins specify the plant name
  

Download / Install App

Android / iPhone

Conclusion

Whether you are a gardener, biologist, student, professor, wildlife explorer, or just someone who loves plants, a phone app that can identify plants from a photo could be a priceless asset.

While there are many such apps available for mobile phones running on Android and iOS, not all of them are good. Some have limited image recognition capabilities, others are not updated anymore, and so on.

I’ve done my best to find the best plant identification apps out there. I hope you’ll find helpful the apps I listed and reviewed in this article.

Keep in mind that there are many factors that might influence the ability of an app to correctly recognize a plant from an image, such as photo clarity, angle, background, etc.

To increase the chances for these apps to correctly identify a plant you should always take multiple photos from several angles, as well as shots of multiple parts of the plant you want to identify (leaves, flowers, bark).

Before choosing an app, please note that some of these focus more on identifying the common plants around the house, while others were built for exploring the wild plants and fauna.

If you frequently need to identify arbors, make sure you also check my selection of apps for identifying trees.