Veganify

Yuka is the dominant food-scanning app (40M+ users) but rates products on overall health, not specifically on vegan-friendliness — vegan status is a tag, not the primary axis. HappyCow is a restaurant locator, not a product scanner. Veganify is single-purpose: scan a barcode, get a vegan / vegetarian / non-vegan verdict with the specific non-vegan ingredients highlighted. The MIT-licensed open-source codebase, no-ads stance and no-account model make it the privacy-conscious choice. Yuka has broader product coverage; Veganify has clearer vegan-specific judgments.

Yes — completely free, MIT-licensed open-source on GitHub, no ads, no in-app purchases, no account required. The project is community-maintained and integrates with OpenFoodFacts (also free / open data). There is no premium tier and no plans to introduce one. Donations to the maintainer and to OpenFoodFacts are voluntary. This is unusual in the food-scanning category, where Yuka monetizes a freemium tier with deeper recommendations.

Reading labels manually catches obvious animal ingredients (milk, eggs, gelatin) but misses the trickier ones — E120 cochineal is an insect-derived red dye, E322 lecithin is usually plant-sourced but sometimes egg-derived, sugar in the US is sometimes processed with bone char, casein and whey are dairy derivatives that appear in unexpected places. Veganify's curated ingredient list catches these. For new vegans still learning the ingredient landscape it is essentially a teaching tool; experienced vegans use it as a fast double-check.

Yes — Veganify is offline-first. The ingredient classification list (which ingredients are vegan, vegetarian or animal-derived) is cached locally. Barcode lookups against OpenFoodFacts require a network connection (the OFF API), but ingredient-list scanning can run fully offline using the cached classifier. The app is designed for grocery-store use where Wi-Fi is unreliable and cellular coverage is often poor inside large stores.

Veganify is recommended in r/vegan and r/PWA threads as the privacy-conscious vegan-scanner alternative to Yuka. The user base skews toward technical vegans (people who care about open-source and data ownership) and Europeans (where OpenFoodFacts coverage is strongest). New vegans use it as a learning tool; experienced vegans use it sporadically as a label-double-check. It is not the dominant tool in absolute numbers — Yuka has the mainstream user base — but Veganify is the recommended option for users who want the open / no-tracking version.