Ask any price-comparison app to include Aldi and you'll usually get one of two things: silence, or numbers that don't survive contact with an actual Aldi aisle. That's not laziness — Aldi is genuinely hard to compare. Here's why, and how BudgetPlate approaches it.

Problem 1: there's no price feed

Woolworths and Coles both run full online stores. Every product has a listed price that updates weekly, which is why comparison tools handle them well — the data is just there.

Aldi Australia doesn't do online grocery shopping. There's no searchable catalogue of shelf prices, no API, nothing to scrape. Its weekly specials page is essentially a set of images. Most tools respond by quietly leaving Aldi out — which is a strange omission, because Aldi's whole pitch is price.

Problem 2: the products don't match

Even with perfect data, comparing Aldi is slippery because Aldi barely sells the brands the other two sell. You're not comparing Weet-Bix with Weet-Bix; you're comparing Weet-Bix with Goldenvale Wheat Biscuits, in a different pack size, with a different recipe. Is that a fair comparison? For most families cooking dinner — yes, near enough. For a naive product-matching algorithm — no match found, item skipped.

Pack sizes make it worse. Aldi loves odd sizes (900ml where others sell a litre, 750g where others sell a kilo), which makes shelf-price comparisons misleading unless you normalise everything to unit prices.

Problem 3: Aldi isn't everywhere

There are no Aldi stores in the Northern Territory and none in Tasmania. A comparison tool that assumes three stores nationwide is giving NT and Tassie families advice they literally cannot act on.

How BudgetPlate handles it

We wanted Aldi in the comparison — leaving out the cheapest baseline store defeats the purpose. So:

  • We read the images. Every Wednesday we capture Aldi's weekly specials page and have our AI read the actual prices out of it, the same way a person reads the catalogue — just faster and without losing the trolley token.
  • We compare ingredients, not barcodes. Recipes need "tasty cheese, 500g", not one specific brand. Working at the ingredient level with unit prices means Aldi's house brands compare fairly against the big two's specials.
  • We respect geography. Tell BudgetPlate you're in NT or Tasmania and it plans around Woolworths and Coles only. No phantom Aldi bargains.

The honest picture

What the data shows week after week: Aldi usually wins on everyday baseline prices, but a genuine half-price special at Woolies or Coles frequently beats the Aldi equivalent that week. The cheapest trolley is almost never a single-store trolley — it's Aldi staples plus the other two's best specials. That's exactly the split BudgetPlate's shopping list works out for you each Wednesday.

Aldi being hard to compare is precisely why it's worth comparing. If a tool finds it too awkward to include, it's answering an easier question than the one your grocery budget is actually asking.