Alternatives
Both apps promise to tell you what to forage near you. One is a written guide for the United States and Canada; the other is a full toolset that works anywhere. Checked 4 September 2026.
Gather is a regional field guide written by the people behind Feral Foraging. For a location in the United States or Canada it lists the species that grow there, lays out their seasons month by month, shows lookalike photos side by side, includes a range map per species, and lets you download the images for offline use. The journal tier is free; the guide costs about $60 a year after a trial of 14 days.
By its own website it is currently available in the United States and Canada only. If you forage there and want a guide to read, it is a well made one.
It works anywhere. Forage resolves seasons per grid cell for any place in the world, in 18 languages, from over three billion occurrence records via GBIF. Gather covers two countries.
It identifies. Point the camera at a plant or mushroom and Forage names the species with a confidence figure, then shows the characteristics to check, the edible parts, the warnings and the lookalikes, with a compare view that puts the species and its dangerous double side by side, character by character. Deadly lookalikes are flagged. Gather has no photo identification.
It has a map and a community. Spots stay private or get shared, decided per find, with a heatmap of where a watched species is actually reported, and a harvest log that records what you picked, how much and when, building statistics across years. In the community you post the photos when a scan stays uncertain, other foragers weigh in, and you mark the answer that helped; standing there comes from answers other people confirm. Gather has neither a map of spots nor a community.
It gives you a reason to come back. The Foragedex collects the species of your region as you log them, a daily riddle asks which species is in the picture and unlocks a further clue on every wrong guess, and weekly challenges earn free identifications. Gather has none of that.
Its season moves with the year. Gather's calendar is fixed. Forage takes the same kind of regional base and corrects it for the year you are in: the last three weeks of temperature against the climate normal of that cell over the past ten years, at about three and a half days per degree, capped at two weeks, plus elevation, plus a soil moisture model for mushrooms that looks for the trigger rain whose fruiting window is eight to fourteen days out. A fixed calendar says the same thing every year. Forage says "about nine days early this year", or says nothing when there is nothing to say.
Both have a harvest journal, both work offline, both show lookalikes side by side. Forage's offline regions are part of Pro.
Gather's guide runs about $60 a year with a trial of 14 days; the journal is free. Forage installs free with the map, the seasonal view, the community and a limited number of identifications; Pro is $39.99 a year or $7.99 a month and adds offline regions, an unlimited watchlist, 50 identifications a month and journal insights across years. Both are US store prices in US dollars, checked 4 September 2026; regional prices differ.
The Season Finder is the same seasonal data as the app, free in the browser: pick a place and see what is in season there this month.
Open the Season FinderForage helps you discover and identify wild plants, but identification is never 100% certain. Many edible plants have toxic lookalikes. Never eat anything you find based only on what this app tells you. Always confirm with a field guide, an experienced forager or a local expert. The season score tells you where to look, too: it’s not a guarantee. Mind conservation law and property rights as well.
