Plant identification apps for phones and tablets have become very popular, but they are not all created equally. In this article, I will compare 7 popular apps to see which ones perform best.
I’ll also provide pros and cons for each app.
Key Takeaways
- Plant ID Apps are getting better.
- Two sets of images produced different winners.
Source of the Testing
The material presented in this post is not my own, but I felt that the testing was done very well and that the results should be more widely available.
The author of the work is Shane Hanofee, aka Shmace Shmandages.
From his Patreon page:
I am a self-taught botanist based in Grass Valley, CA. Traditionally, botanical work is funded through academic institutions or through grants or self-funded by passionate individuals. But this represents an experiment into new sources of funding for independent research and publications.
The general purpose of this Patreon is to help fund the ongoing costs involved with producing and hosting A Nevada County Flora. I’ve funded out of pocket until now but I need your help taking it across the finish line, and keeping it as a free resource for everyone! The first comprehensive flora for Nevada County, CA is here! Want to make a one-time donation? You can send via venmo @giantshanefern
He has a Facebook page as well as a Patreon account. He is a professional botanist with a focus on California plants and mushrooms. He is also an admin for the Facebook Group called California Native Plants.
Testing Results for Plant ID Apps
Shane has been testing available plant apps for 5 years and now has some interesting data that not only shows which apps perform best, but also how they have evolved over the years. Here are his results.
The comments in the quotes below are from Shane.
iNaturalist
A rating of 3.7 (4.1) stars. Points: 71/80 (3 partial, 3 incorrect).
Free to use, no ads.
“iNaturalist continues to impress. It got all the grasses correct (they were distinctive grasses, mind you). It was the only one to get any sedge correct. It got the moss. All impressive. It did slightly worse than last time. It remains the only app that allows experts to correct your IDs, which elevates it significantly in my mind. Not to mention the usage beyond just plants and the data collection implications. I’m still team iNat.”
Flora Incognita
A rating of 4.7 (4.5) stars. Points: 73/80 (5 partial, 1 incorrect).
Free to use, no ads.
“Flora incognita was peculiar this time. It still performs very well, though slightly worse than last time, by getting one plant completely wrong. It also changed its ID on many pictures compared to last time, and some it missed were some plants that even the worst performing apps got right. It got all the grasses and the moss. One thing I like is that it automatically prompts for more info and more photos if it seems unsure. I couldn’t offer it more information when it was requested, and it still did decent on those plants. I’d rank it second if only because it lacks the additional features and biological completeness that iNat offers.”
Plantnet
A rating of 4.6 (4.4) stars. Points: 65/80 (9 partial, 3 incorrect).
Free to use, no ads.
“Plantnet continues to be just okay. It mostly struggled in hard mode. I find the user interface clunky and not attractive, and it has some additional features for houseplant keepers and gardeners that I didn’t test. It’s fine, but I’d be surprised if it were anyone’s favorite.”
Google Lens
A rating of 4.7 (4.6) stars. Points: 59/80 (13 partial, 4 incorrect).
Free to use, no ads.
“Google Lens is ugh. I mean, it’s good for more than just plants and good for more than just bio purposes. It’s probably worth having for that reason alone. But one major change since last time: Instead of search results, you get an AI summary from Gemini. This, to put it frankly, sucks. It hides actually useful info, it’s bad at IDing, the AI tries to sound chummy while it gives you an attempt at an ID, but it’s just off-putting. I also learned that my photos are being skimmed off of Facebook and used in shitty AI listicles across the web, where they are misidentifying the plants in my images, despite the ID being in the caption for literally every single one. So that’s a thing that’s happening. In the end, I closed Google Lens angrily and moved on.”
PictureThis
A rating of 4.6 (4.6) stars. Points: 53/80 (11 partial, 8 incorrect).
Free to use, no ads.
“PictureThis continues to be a coin flip of a plant ID app. It’s just not very useful and has fallen behind just about every other app on the market. I don’t have more to say about it. Just unremarkable.”
Leafsnap
A rating of 4.2 (3.7) stars. Points: 67/80 (7 partial, 3 incorrect).
Free to use, with ads.
“I hate this app because it makes you watch an ad for every plant ID, and they constantly try to sell you features like “improved accuracy” and “advanced ID” (yes, separate features you pay for separately) for even more money. What do those even mean? Though I have to hand it to them, it did show the greatest improvement of any app over the last time the test was run. So maybe they’re at least investing in themselves. Though a bit fishy, they returned nearly the same results as PlantNet. As in, when they got the plant wrong, they suggested the same wrong species. Usually way off. Makes me wonder if they are running the same or similar algorithms.”
Seek
A rating of 3.3 (3.3) stars. Points: 39/80 (9 partial, 16 incorrect).
Free to use, no ads. Seek is an app provided by iNaturalist. Scanned images are not shared publicly.
“Seek is just depressing, man. It continues to underperform when working from photos. Perhaps the live ID feature is fine. We’re not testing that here. And ID from photos is not its main focus, so perhaps the criticism is unfair. But it returns an ID less than half the time. It did surprisingly badly on the invasive plant portion and frequently missed plants that literally every other app got correct. But it did get the moss. And that’s saying something. Honestly, I think the iNat team just needs to hang things up and re-invest that time, energy, and money into the flagship.”
Experimental Conditions
The testing, since 2021, was done with the same 40 photos and has focused on apps with greater than 4-star ratings in the Google Play Store and more than 5 million downloads.
The photos fall into three categories: 15 native plant photos, 15 invasive plant photos, and 10 in hard mode (4 grasses, 2 sedges, 2 rushes, 1 morphologically atypical plant, 1 moss). These are relatively common plants, with diagnostics present, that Shane could identify from the photo alone.
The scoring went like this: 2 points for a correct ID, 1 point for a partial ID, and 0 points for a wrong ID. A partial ID was awarded when the genus was correct or if only the genus was offered and it was correct. The exception to this is iNaturalist, which works differently from the others; in every case, only a genus is offered, so if the first species suggested was correct, it was considered to be a correct ID.
In the app store rating given with each app below, the number of stars in parentheses is what it was the last time the test was run, to see how the user base has changed their rating over time.
The native pictures used for the testing were of California native plants.
A Second Opinion
How do other tests of plant ID apps compare to the above?
GrowIt BuildIt performed a similar set of tests using 234 pictures of 80 species, including trees and vines.
A correct result was one where the species was identified correctly. A partially correct result was one where the genus was correct, or the app gave several answers, with one being correct.
The two apps with the most correct results were PictureThis (78%) and PlantNet (68%).
The three apps with the most accurate or partially correct answers were iNaturalist (80%), PlantNet (81%), and PictureThis (78%).
Identification of Houseplants
I was interested to know which app would do the best job on houseplants, but I could not find anyone who has reported on such a test. If you know of such a test, please let me know.
Great advise towards the end of the video. The best part of this post in my opinion. Going to share this with my garden group and advise listening to entire video. Nice work. Thanks
Thanks for this. I have been using PictureThis (free version) for the past number of years because it was the best at IDing plants compared to PlantSnap which was the only other app I could find and it was terrible and the testing reported above confirms this. I don’t mind paying a one time fee for an app but PictureThis wants, I think, $30+/yr for a subscription. I would like to be able to save my searches but the free version does no allow it. I have been using INaturalist for insect identification and have found it great because you do get human interaction for an ID, if you would like. I don’t know of any apps for houseplants, they all seem to search through databases based on your geolocation? I haven’t tried them but I found several apps on the AppStore that seemed geared for houseplant owners: Flora; Plant Parent; and Greg.
Thank you for the plant app review. I have used plant net for the past 5 years and it is not reliable at all. I am definitely trying out I naturalist.
Mark