The Best Plant Identification Apps of 2027

The short version: For most people, Seek by iNaturalist is the best free plant identification app because it’s simple, private, works offline, and identifies plants, insects, fungi and other wildlife. If plant-identification accuracy is your top priority, Pl@ntNet performed best or near-best in the independent studies I found. If you’re a gardener, Percy, the garden journal that remembers, tells you what an identification means for your own garden, then keeps it with the rest of your garden’s story so the discovery isn’t forgotten by dinner.

Quick disclosure: I make Percy, so I'm not the most objective source. That said, for pure identification, Percy isn't the best app on this list, and I'll tell you which ones are.

Plant identification apps feel like a magic trick. You take the dog for a walk down the street, point your phone at a leaf, flower or bug and in a matter of seconds, you have both the name and a level of detail about it that could make you insufferable at dinner parties. I love it.

Several of the best are free, and some are run by scientists and nonprofits.

But "what is this?" is only the first question. A good ID app should also tell you how sure it is, give you a way to check, and help you work out what to do next. I judged these on how accurate they are (using independent studies where they exist, not marketing claims), how honest they are about uncertainty, how easy they are to use outdoors, and what they tell you beyond the name. I’m ranking these by the job they do best, not pretending one app wins every use case.

For the wider field, including garden journals and planners, see the best gardening apps of 2027.

Last checked: October 11, 2026. Apps change quickly, so if something here is out of date, let me know.

The best plant identification apps, at a glance

If you want…	Best plant ID app
The best free ID app for most people	Seek by iNaturalist
Top accuracy from a research project	Pl@ntNet
IDs confirmed by real naturalists	iNaturalist
To know what an ID means for your garden, and remember it	Percy
To garden in a way that supports wildlife	Wildr Places
A free, ad-free research app (especially in Europe)	Flora Incognita
A quick answer from an app you already have	Google Lens

1. Seek by iNaturalist: the best plant identification app for most people

Open Seek, point your camera at a plant, and it starts identifying in real time, narrowing from family to genus to species as you hold steady. It works on plants, insects, birds, mushrooms, and most other living things. Which is handy when the thing you're curious about is the beetle on the plant. And if you accidentally open your camera in selfie mode it will reassuringly identify you as a human.

It's completely free. You don't need an account, and your records stay on your phone unless you choose otherwise, which makes it one of the best options for kids. (It's my top pick for Photo ID in the best gardening apps for kids.) The camera ID even works offline, so it's useful if you’re out hiking on a trail with no signal. The badges and challenges are a nice nudge to keep looking and a nice ego boost if you have both a competitive streak and a keen interest in ferns. (Not to flex, but I’ve identified 248 plants, 106 insects, 27 birds, 8 arachnids, 6 reptiles, 3 fungi, 2 amphibians, a fish and multiple awkward identifications of the same somewhat surprised human.)

Seek is careful: if it isn't confident about the species, it stops at the genus or family instead of guessing and lets you browse relevant species. That honesty means you'll sometimes get "a sedge" rather than a name. It can be slightly frustrating when you share a photo and the ID hands you “dicots,” which means it's narrowed your particular plant down to about 175,000 options. But I’d much rather an app say when it’s not sure than give an answer that’s confidently wrong.

Seek lets you optionally connect to iNaturalist to post observations there and help advance scientific research (more on that below).

This is the first one I'd put on most phones.

Seek is free on iPhone and Android.

2. Pl@ntNet: top accuracy from a research project

Pl@ntNet is a free plant identification app from French scientific research institutes (CIRAD, INRAE, INRIA, and IRD), funded partly by donations. It does one thing, plants, and it does it very well. Its observations are shared with GBIF, the open biodiversity database researchers use.

In the two independent 2023 studies I found, Pl@ntNet was consistently among the most accurate plant ID apps tested. In a UK study of 857 photos, Pl@ntNet's first suggestion was right 86.6% of the time, and the correct species was in its top five 95% of the time. A separate study of Irish wildflowers found the same, with Pl@ntNet ranking as the most accurate of the apps tested on both flowers and leaves. That said, the underlying models and datasets have changed a lot since 2023, (which is practically the paleolithic age in technology-years), so those percentages shouldn’t be treated as a current leaderboard.

One of the best things about Pl@ntNet is its transparency. When you share a photo, Pl@ntNet shows a confidence score for each possible match, so you can see how certain it is about your plant, or when it's a tough call between lookalikes. The thing I appreciate most about Pl@ntNet (besides their cavalier use of typographical symbols) is that within each ID, it lets you browse images of the species by category (flower, leaf, fruit, bark, habit, or branch) to make sure the ID really does look like the plant you’re standing in front of. Many have thousands of user photos from every imaginable angle, so you can go down a shockingly specific rabbit hole if browsing 10,725 images of tomato leaves is your thing.

You can also enable your location and pick a regional flora to help narrow the results to where you are. Similar to iNaturalist, the photos people share with the project help build a scientific dataset.

Pl@ntNet’s interface is a bit more functional than friendly, and it’s still strongest at species-level plant identification rather than reliably naming garden cultivars. But if accuracy is your priority, Pl@ntNet is worth a good l@@k. Free on iPhone, Android, and the web.

3. iNaturalist: the best for IDs confirmed by real people

iNaturalist is Seek's sibling app. It connects your observations to a global community of naturalists and scientists, run by an independent nonprofit. iNaturalist and Seek have a lot of similarities in how you use them. You post a photo, the app suggests an identification, and then real humans weigh in.

When an observation has all the required info (date, location, media information and is of a wild organism), and the community reaches sufficient agreement on the ID, your observation can become “Research Grade” and be shared into biodiversity datasets used by researchers. Which, I’d like to imagine for plants, is like being inducted into the Who’s Who of shrubberies.

That human layer is iNaturalist’s super power. For a tricky plant or fungus where you want a human second opinion, input from someone with real expertise can be more useful than another automated guess. iNaturalist can also show whether a species is native or introduced in a particular place, based on community checklists.

iNaturalist also lets you participate in ongoing projects to help track biodiversity. You can browse featured projects (including a current option if you’d like to join “Freshwater Gastropods of the World” which, who wouldn’t) and nearby ones to help ecology groups in your region.

iNaturalist will give you a suggestion for your ID right away and includes confidence level and information about your observation drawn from Wikipedia. A confirmed ID from the community can take hours or days. Because it often answers at the genus level when it isn't certain, it scored lower on instant species-level answers in one of the studies below. That's by design for accuracy and transparency, not a flaw.

iNaturalist is free on iPhone, Android, and the web.

4. Percy: the best plant ID app for gardeners

Percy approaches plant ID differently from the others on this list. An ID app gives you a name, which is a lovely thing to have right up until dinner, when it quietly leaves your head. Percy is the plant identification app for gardeners who care about what happens after the name. It uses an ID to help things go well in your garden, and then it remembers it, so the discovery becomes part of your garden’s story. Everything it identifies, whether it’s an unknown plant, an insect or a yellowing leaf, is framed around one thing: what does this mean for my garden?

If you’re after identification alone, Pl@ntNet and Seek are the ones to beat. Percy doesn't show percentage scores, and it works at the species level, so it won't reliably tell you which variety of coneflower you're looking at. (Cultivar-level ID from a photo is much less reliable than species-level ID, especially for ornamental varieties that look nearly identical. If you need the exact cultivar, the nursery tag is still your best evidence.)

Many plant ID apps are centered on the identification itself. Percy is built around the questions that come next.

What is it? Percy identifies plants and insects, and it can also help you diagnose plant problems from a photo. But it approaches the answers differently. Percy answers the question in a few sentences, like you’ve just asked a friend. If you want to know more about it, you can ask for a follow up. But for most gardeners, the point isn’t gaining deep horticultural knowledge. It’s finding out “what is this, and what does it mean for my garden?”

Does it belong here? Take a photo and Percy identifies the plant or bug, then tells you what it means for your garden. If it’s an insect, it tells you whether it’s a friend or a foe. And if it’s one you don’t want on your garden invite list, it shares organic methods to encourage it to dine elsewhere.

For plants, Percy can tell you if a plant is native or invasive where you garden. Percy’s ecology guidance draws on federal and state regulatory and invasive-species sources in the US, and national sources in the UK, Canada and Australia, the four regions where Percy currently has confident data. It stays quiet elsewhere if it can’t be confident about your regional ecosystem.

That's the difference between an ID that tells you "that's English ivy" and one that tells you "that's English ivy, it's invasive where you live, and here's how to get it out of your garden." I wrote about how plant ID is only the beginning, after spending two summers lovingly and naively encouraging that very ivy to grow up a stump in my backyard.

What should I do about it? Show Percy a spotty leaf and ask what's going on, and it helps you work out the likely problem and suggests organic-first fixes. If it isn't sure, it says so and gives you a short list of possibilities rather than a confident guess, with suggestions on what to look for to help narrow down the diagnosis.

Have I seen this before? Everything Percy IDs can be saved as part of your garden's memory. So next spring, when something sprouts in your flower bed and you wonder if you've been tending a weed, Percy remembers that's where you planted the asters. If it’s a leaf issue, it will remind you that you dealt with this in the past, and it remembers what worked last time. "That's powdery mildew. You had it on the squash last year, and the milk spray helped."

And it isn’t only the problems. The first swallowtail caterpillar on your parsley, or finally learning the name of the volunteer that’s been charming you for three summers, goes into that plant’s chapter in the Nest along with your photos, so you get to keep the good discoveries too. Percy does the remembering, so you can enjoy your garden.

Percy has a native iPhone app and works in any browser on Android or desktop. Your first full growing season is free, then it’s $39 a year.

5. Wildr Places: the best for gardening to support wildlife

Wildr Places is the app I recommend for planning a yard that supports birds and pollinators, and it now does plant ID too. Point your camera at a plant or an animal and it tells you what it is, with identification powered by iNaturalist. For plants, it tells you whether they're native or invasive, and lets you add them to your place if you're growing them. You can also connect your iNaturalist account and bring in sightings you've already logged.

The ID is the doorway to what Wildr does best. Add the native plants you're growing and it shows how many species each one supports, which ones they are, with photos, and which are rare or imperiled. You can log sightings to keep track of the ones you've seen firsthand. I've added 17 native species from my own garden so far, and Wildr tells me they support 723 different species.

Wildr's ID feature is brand new, so it wasn't part of the 2023 accuracy studies below, and Wildr asks you to tell them when a result looks wrong. Its plant data covers the US. I wrote more about it in the best native plant and pollinator apps.

Wildr Places is free on iPhone and Android. Search for Wildr Places, because an unrelated social app is also called Wildr.

6. Flora Incognita: the best free, ad-free research app

Flora Incognita is a research project from the Technische Universität Ilmenau and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany. It's free with no ads, no premium tier, and no subscription, and you don't need to create a profile.

It identifies more than 30,000 plant species, plus mosses, lichens, and fungi, and shows a ranked list of possible matches when it isn't sure. Its fact sheets are tailored to your location and include things like protection status and toxicity. When the Flora Incognita team re-ran the photos from the UK study below (after re-evaluating disputed cases and correcting ground-truth/taxonomic issues in the original dataset), they reported 98.8% accuracy. (That figure used corrected labels, so it isn’t directly comparable with the numbers above. It’s also their own team's result, not an independent study, but, still, that’s wildly impressive.)

Flora Incognita is strongest in Europe, where it was built. If you garden or hike there, it's a strong choice. Free on iPhone and Android.

7. Google Lens: the quickest answer from an app you already have

You probably already have Google Lens. It's built into the Google app on iPhone and is on most Android phones. Point it at a plant and you'll get visual search results that usually include the name.

For a quick visual-search answer, it’s extremely convenient. But it's a general visual search tool, not a plant specialist. In the studies below it trailed the dedicated apps, and it shows web results, not a ranked list of species, so it’s harder to judge how sure it is. You can use it for a quick answer, but it’s worth getting a second opinion from Pl@ntNet, Seek or iNaturalist.

What about LeafSnap, PictureThis, and other plant ID apps?

Search the app store and you’ll find plenty more. LeafSnap deserves a mention, because it kept pace with Pl@ntNet in both studies below. It’s free to download, with a premium tier on top. When two apps are that close on accuracy, I pick the one built for science. Pl@ntNet is run by public research institutes, and its observations are shared with GBIF, the open biodiversity database researchers draw on. PictureThis is one of the best-known commercial options.

What the research says about plant ID accuracy

Most "we tested the apps" articles don't share their methods. These two peer-reviewed studies did:

Hart et al., 2023 (People and Nature). 857 photos of 277 species in the UK. First suggestion correct: LeafSnap 86.9%, Pl@ntNet 86.6%, Seek 66%, Google Lens 57%. Correct answer somewhere in the top five: Pl@ntNet 95%, Seek 93%, LeafSnap 92%, Google Lens 74%. Using more than one app raised the odds of getting a correct answer.
Campbell, Peacock & Bacon, 2023 (PLOS ONE). 38 Irish wild plant species. First suggestion correct, from flowers and from leaves: Pl@ntNet 88% and 80%, LeafSnap 84% and 77%, Google Lens 68% and 55%, Seek 52% and 23%. iNaturalist scored low on this measure mostly because it usually suggests a genus first rather than guessing a species, which is by design. (Seek also stops at the genus when it isn't sure.)

One caveat: the Campbell study scored species-level answers, so it understates apps like iNaturalist that deliberately start with the genus. That’s another reason not to read these percentages as a simple universal ranking.

One other caveat: as I mentioned above, the underlying technology and datasets that power ID apps have changed massively since 2023, so take these studies as a time capsule, not a current or accurate leaderboard.

One other, other caveat: Percy launched in spring 2026, so it wasn't included in the 2023 accuracy research because that is not possible without time travel.

Three takeaways:

Photograph the flower if you can. In the Irish study, the apps that gave species-level answers did better with flowers than with leaves alone.
Look at more than the first answer. The right species was usually in the top few suggestions even when the first one was wrong.
Never eat a plant (or let a pet or child near one) based on an app's ID alone. The researchers were explicit about this, especially for toxic plants.

Which plant ID app should you use?

Curious about everything on a walk, or identifying with kids? Seek.
Need the most accurate plant ID? Pl@ntNet.
Need to be sure, or want your sighting to help science? iNaturalist.
Want to know if it belongs in your garden, what's wrong with it, and remember it next year? Percy.
Gardening to support wildlife in the US? Wildr Places. (More in the best native plant and pollinator apps.)
In Europe, or want a research app with no ads at all? Flora Incognita.
Just want a quick name? Google Lens.

Plenty of gardeners use two. I keep Seek on my phone for walks and use Percy in the garden. Sometimes I’ll ask one for a second opinion on the other’s ID. They usually agree, but not always. I just wish I could get them to argue.

What makes a good plant identification app?

A good plant ID app should do more than return a plausible name. Look for transparent uncertainty, multiple possible matches, reference photos you can compare yourself, location-aware results, and a clear way to verify anything important. For gardeners, useful follow-up context: whether a plant is native or invasive, whether an insect is beneficial, or what a symptom might mean, matters as much as the initial ID.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most accurate plant identification app? In the independent studies I found, Pl@ntNet was consistently among the most accurate plant-specific apps tested. Flora Incognita has also reported very high accuracy in a later reanalysis of an independent image dataset, though that analysis was conducted by its own research team.

What is the best free plant identification app? Seek by iNaturalist, Pl@ntNet, iNaturalist, and Flora Incognita are all completely free, and none of them push a subscription. Seek is the easiest to use; Pl@ntNet has been among the most accurate plant-specific apps in independent testing.

Is there a plant ID app that tells you if a plant is native or invasive? Percy does this in the context of where you garden, using regional regulatory and ecological sources where reliable data exists. iNaturalist can also show whether a species is native, introduced or otherwise established in a place based on its taxon and place data. Wildr Places, whose ID is powered by iNaturalist, tells you whether a plant is native or invasive and is built for choosing natives to plant. For more, see the best native plant and pollinator apps.

Can a plant identification app tell you the exact variety? Not reliably. Many garden varieties look almost identical to each other, so apps identify plants at the species level, and any app naming a specific cultivar from a photo is often guessing. The most reliable source for a variety name is the nursery tag.

Is Google Lens good for identifying plants? It's handy and often right for common plants, but in independent studies it was less accurate than dedicated apps like Pl@ntNet and Seek. Use it for a quick answer and double-check anything that matters.

Are plant identification apps safe for checking whether a plant is edible? No. Even the most accurate apps get some identifications wrong, and researchers specifically warn against relying on an app for toxic or edible plants. Check with an expert.

What is the best plant identification app for gardeners?

Percy is my pick for gardeners because it goes beyond naming the plant: it explains what the ID means for your particular garden, including native/invasive context, plant or pest advice, and it remembers the identification as part of your garden history. If you only want the strongest pure plant ID, Pl@ntNet is the better choice.

Can plant identification apps be wrong?

Yes. Even the strongest apps misidentify some plants, especially from leaves alone, poor photos, immature plants or visually similar species. Treat the result as a hypothesis to verify rather than proof, particularly when toxicity, edibility or invasive status matters. Even the top app in the UK study missed about one in eight first guesses.