What Grass Is This? vs My Lawn by Scotts: Which Lawn App Should You Use?
Updated August 18, 2026
What Grass Is This? identifies your grass first and then calculates rates that work with whatever bag you already own. My Lawn is free because it is a Scotts storefront: the plan it builds recommends Scotts products to buy. Pick on whether you want the math done for you or the products chosen for you.
My Lawn is the official Scotts Miracle-Gro app, and it is genuinely free. Its US App Store listing carries no in-app purchases, and there is no subscription or paywall machinery in the app either. Understanding why is the whole comparison. When we pulled version 10.3.0 apart in May 2026, there was no payment SDK anywhere in the bundle, but there was a product listing feature, a buy-online feature, a store locator that finds nearby Scotts retail partners, and an auto-ship subscription for getting Scotts products delivered by season. The app is free because the products are the business.
That is not a scandal, it is a business model, and it comes with a real advantage. If you are happy to run a Scotts program, My Lawn removes almost every decision. It tells you what to put down and when, and the thing it tells you to put down is available at the store down the road. For a homeowner who wants a lawn plan and does not want to think about it, that is a completely reasonable trade.
The cost of the trade is that the plan is only ever as brand-neutral as the company paying for it. If the bag in your garage is a Lesco, a Milorganite, or a store brand, a product-led plan has nothing useful to say about it. Our approach starts one step earlier: identify what grass you actually have, then calculate the rate for the bag you own, whoever made it.
Every claim on this page about My Lawn comes from its US App Store listing, read on 19 August 2026, or from our May 2026 teardown of version 10.3.0, and each one says which.
Quick verdict
What Grass Is This? wins if you want to know your grass type first and then run the numbers on any brand of product, including one you already bought. My Lawn wins if you want a done-for-you seasonal plan and you are happy buying Scotts, because it will hand you a schedule and a shopping list for free.
What Grass Is This? vs My Lawn by Scotts: at a glance
What it costs
How it makes money
Does it identify your grass
Product recommendations
What you do with the answer
Where it runs
Best for
Verdict
APick What Grass Is This? if...
- You do not know what grass you have yet, and every recommendation downstream depends on that answer being right.
- The fertilizer in your garage is not a Scotts bag, and you want the rate worked out for the analysis printed on it.
- You want to compare products on their numbers rather than take a recommendation from the company that sells them.
- You want the calculators without a plan wrapped around them: square footage, rate, mowing height, seeding window, cost.
- You would rather read a guide that names the trade-offs than follow a schedule that does not explain itself.
BPick My Lawn by Scotts if...
- You want a seasonal schedule handed to you and you are genuinely fine buying Scotts products to follow it.
- You already know what grass you have, so identification is not the problem you are trying to solve.
- You value a shopping list you can walk into a store and fill, over a rate calculation you have to do yourself.
- You want push reminders for the next application without paying anything, and you accept that the reminder is also a purchase prompt.
- You are starting from zero on a lawn and want any coherent plan rather than the perfectly optimized one.
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Frequently asked questions
Is the My Lawn app by Scotts really free?
Yes, and there is no catch hidden in a paywall. When we deconstructed version 10.3.0 in May 2026, the app contained no payment SDK, no subscription framework, and no in-app purchase products of any kind, and the live listing still carries none (checked 19 August 2026, where the current build is 10.3.1 from 1 July 2026). What the bundle did contain was a product listing feature, a buy-online flow, a store locator that points at nearby Scotts retail partners, and a seasonal auto-ship program. The app is free because it exists to sell Scotts products. That is a perfectly normal arrangement, and it is worth knowing about before you read the plan it builds for you.
Does the My Lawn app identify your grass type?
No. My Lawn builds a plan from information you provide about your lawn rather than from a photo of it. That means the plan inherits whatever you told it, so if you guessed your grass type wrong, the schedule that follows is wrong in the same direction. If you are not certain what you are growing, identify the grass first and then feed that answer into whichever planner you prefer, including this one.
Will a lawn app recommend products it does not sell?
A manufacturer app has no reason to. Our teardown of My Lawn found the product recommendation mix is driven remotely, meaning the suggested products can be changed on the company side without shipping an app update, and the recommendations are drawn from the Scotts range. That is not deceptive, it is what a brand app is for. The practical consequence is simple: if you want to compare a Scotts product against a Lesco, a Milorganite, or a store brand, you need a source that does not have a stake in the answer. Our calculators work from whatever analysis is printed on your bag.
Can I use both apps together?
Yes, and it is a sensible combination. Use a grass identifier to find out what you are actually growing and to work out the rate for the product you have, and use a seasonal planner to keep the calendar. The two do different jobs. The one thing worth avoiding is letting a plan built around a guessed grass type run for a full season, because mowing height and fertilizer timing both change meaningfully between cool season and warm season grasses.
How do I know how much fertilizer to apply?
Start with the label. Every fertilizer bag sold to homeowners prints its application rate, the grass types it is safe on, and the spreader guidance for common spreaders, and that label is the authority for that specific product. What a calculator adds is the arithmetic around it: your actual square footage, how that maps onto the bag rate, and how many bags you need to buy. Our fertilizer calculator does that part for any brand. It does not invent a rate, and neither should any app.