NatureID: Identify Plant, Care reviews
What users love and hate, from real reviews
An AI plant identifier with care and a journal that wins plant-curious beginners on fast recognition, yet sabotages itself by cutting off its core job — diagnosing a sick plant — exactly where value begins, routing the actual cure to a paid expert.
What users love
Identification is the one feature that earns loyalists
Users who just need a fast 'what plant is this' get an instant answer and stay: for a beginner it's magic — snap a stranger in the yard and you know its name, watering and spot. This segment forgives everything else precisely because the core fires fast.
Very good plant recognition and remedies
no payment needed at all and easy to identify my plants
Does a good job identifying what I wanted to know
Watering and care reminders are the quiet hook that actually changes behavior
Beneath the noise sits the real working mechanism: per-plant schedules for watering, feeding and placement. The users who stay praise the rhythm — the app turns 'forgot to water' into a system, and their plants visibly recover. What retains isn't the identifier but turning care into a notification-driven habit.
i love this app. it really helps me with watering and keeping my houseplants and indoor veggie plants healthy.
it also reminds me how often they need water, how much and when to fertilize.
Very reliable, helps identify plants and when to water & turn around for even growth. my violets have never looked better.
Expanding to rocks, insects and mushrooms turns the identifier into a 'nature encyclopedia'
The most underrated strategic move: the app identifies not just plants but rocks, insects, mushrooms. This changes the reason to open it — from a one-off 'name this flower' into a steady companion on a walk. The curious-naturalist segment falls for the breadth specifically: one tool for everything alive and not around you, giving a reason to keep it installed even when no care is needed.
it not only identifies plants and potential problems but it identifies rocks and insects!
I love rocks, plants and mushrooms. the info on bugs is also beneficial to better understand what ones to welcome and what ones to not.
Great guide for plant ID and care. Also good for rock ID.
What users hate
Diagnosis stops at 'your plant is sick' — the cure hides behind a second payment
The ads promise a full loop — snap it, learn the disease, get the remedy. In reality the app gets you to 'your plant is unwell' and immediately walls off a paid expert consult. Users pay the subscription, wait for an answer, and get emptiness at the exact moment they downloaded for: this isn't a bug, it's an engineered cutoff of value, and it breaks trust harder than any ID miss.
Took a picture of the plant, didn't get a diagnosis like all of the ads showed I was directed to a counselor for diagnosis for 19.99, such a waste.
it tells you what the problem could be but then you have to pay to talk to someone to learn how to correct it.
This app does not say how to care for sick pla ts. It just says your plant is sick.
Diagnostics return the same template for every plant
Where the app does 'diagnose', it returns a one-size-fits-all stub — overwater, underwater, sun-scorch — identically for healthy and sick. This exposes that the 'AI diagnosis' isn't reading the actual plant's symptoms: users notice sick and healthy plants get the same output and realize they're paying for a generic-phrase generator.
the diagnostics are all the same, no real suggestions, for better plant health
continually gave the same generic list of what could be wrong- over water, or under water, or sun scorched, the same list for every single plant!! healthy and sick alike!
miss identified, it is always root rot and never provided treatment
The plant journal loses data — killing the one reason to stay long-term
A journal with photos and notes per plant is the anchor that keeps people with an account for months. But the app periodically wipes it all: users lose entries for 15-50 plants, accumulated over years, with no recovery and no support reply. The accumulated journal is the core retention mechanism, and wiping it is exactly what turns a loyalist into a deleter: the longer you've stayed, the worse the loss.
It suddenly deleted my journals. I kept entries for all my 15 plants, with pictures and notes.
it deleted all of my entries, I thought it might have been a glitch.... so I waited... months.... nope.
loved it until it deleted everything iv worked on three times, terrible app
Watering advice gives absurd volumes — harming the very plants it serves
The watering schedule that retains loyalists works against others: the app recommends giant doses — a gallon for a snake plant, a 'ridiculous' amount for bell peppers. A trusting beginner follows it and kills the plant. This is the most dangerous failure: the product promises to save plants but, through uncalibrated recommendations, actively harms them for the most vulnerable segment — those who can't yet sanity-check advice.
It told me to give a ridiculous amount of water, and I trusted it. Big mistake. That one time set my plants back, and now they are struggling!
for a snake plant in a 10-inch pot it just recommended over a gallon of water every 2 weeks. that would kill it for sure!
it's telling me to water my heartleaf philodendron 250 ml every 2 days.
'Image too small' — photo capture fails and blocks entry to the product
A whole segment can't even start: the in-app camera stubbornly returns 'image too small, retake', regardless of distance or resolution. Since the entire core hinges on a photo, capture failure zeroes out the product — the person paid but never identified a single plant. This isn't cosmetic; it's an entry-point failure that turns payment into pure user loss.
keeps telling me the picture is to small when I want to identify a plant, I don't have problems with any other apps.
Every time I try to take a photo, I receive an error message stating the image is too small and to adjust my resolution.
I have yet had even one plant identified. Keeps saying that my picture Is too small.
Recognition misses on the most common plants — losing exactly the beginners
The core everything rests on routinely confuses the obvious: a rose for mountain ash, mint, green onions for garlic, a tomato for a weed. It hits the most valuable segment — beginners who can't double-check and came for a confident answer. When the identifier fails on what the user almost recognizes themselves, the one reason to trust the app collapses.
Told me my rose was mountain ash. Said my wilting basil was healthy.
Couldn't even recognize green onions. This is useless. Kept calling it unhealthy garlic bulbs.
It thought that dandelion was a lettuce and similar nonsense.
The same shot yields contradictory answers — undermining faith in the AI
Worse than a single miss is that the app contradicts itself: two orchid shots from different angles give two diagnoses, one plant is identified differently each time. Users cross-check with a second app and see the disagreement. This inconsistency kills trust deeper than an error: a product promising accuracy reveals it doesn't 'know' the answer but re-guesses every time.
I took two pictures of my orchid and it misidentified it both times.
opposite diagnosis of the same plant from different angles
it gives a lot of info, but sometimes it tells me a different name from a same plant ? what's up with that.
Data depth crumbles beyond popular species
For a gardener rather than a houseplant beginner, the app quickly hits a ceiling: there's info on cherry tomato but not other varieties, no data for plant variants. The serious segment — people actually running a garden — finds the database is tuned to a showcase of a dozen popular species, and leaves for deeper sources. This caps the product's ceiling at the casual user.
this app does not have information for variants of most plants, they only have information on cherry tomatoes and no information on any other tomatoe
not much more here than what you can readily find online, with even better source than Wikapedia.
does not identify correctly. Lacks data information
Imperial units and a northern calendar cut off the entire non-US market
A quiet but systemic localization failure: imperial units only, seasonal advice in northern-hemisphere logic ('spring tips in winter'), American terminology. For a user in the Southern Hemisphere or a metric country, care advice becomes not just useless but harmful — delivered out of phase with their real season. The product silently loses whole geographies not for AI quality but for one country's worldview baked into the code.
Its right about the weather but e.g. Spring tips going into Winter won't help my Southern Hemisphere garden.
You can only use imperial units, which is pretty much useless in most of the world, please add the option to change this!
there are some American terminology in there, for instance "Summer, fall, winter, spring" "fall should be autumn"
A daily cap on photos breaks the very moment of use
Identification is valuable exactly when it's at hand: see a plant, snap it, know it. But in free mode the number of shots is capped, and the user must 'wait hours' to take the next photo. This destroys the natural impulse-curiosity scenario and trains a 'better not open it' behavior: the cap hits the very spontaneity that makes an identifier a habit.
you have to wait hours to take a picture of a plant because you get a limited amount of picture in the free version
only allowed so many pics even though I bought yearly package
have to pay the subscription for unlimited pictures.
The paywall lands before the first result — churn happens before activation
The strategically defining trait: to even see the core work, you must enter a card and subscribe — no demo, not one free identification. The user makes the trust decision at a moment of zero proven value, and the cautious segment leaves without ever trying. This isn't a price gripe but a mechanism: the product demands commitment before proof, and loses exactly those who'd pay for something working but not for a blind buy.
You cannot use this AT ALL unless you subscribe, which I cannot afford to do. There is no trial offer or a limited feature free option
I wanted to see how this is better than Google lens for plant identification and suggestions for plant care.
you cannot even try the app at all without a paid and auto renewing subscription.