Best Food Tracking App and Who Charges for the Scanner

A food tracking app is a diary with a food database behind it. You search for what you ate, or scan the packet, and it adds up the calories and nutrients for the day. Nearly every app gives the diary away. Where they differ is the barcode scanner, the ads, and the price of the subscription that lifts the limits. MyNetDiary is the free diary to install, because its free tier has a scanner, no ads and no cap on reports.

A food diary is a record and not advice: if a health condition affects what you should eat, your doctor or dietitian comes first. For a plan or coaching on top of the record, there are separate diet apps, keto and fasting ones included.

Free scanners: MyNetDiary and Cronometer

MyNetDiary’s free tier is the most generous here. Its website lists the barcode scanner, voice logging, up to 108 nutrients and reports across your whole history, with no ads and no account needed to start. Google Play bears that out with no ads label on the listing.

Premium is $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year and adds photo logging, diet plans, intermittent fasting and sync with Fitbit, Garmin and Withings. Premium Plus, at $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, adds AI features such as a coach and menu scanning. There is also a $179.99 lifetime option. The site does not say which tier it buys, and three years of Premium costs about the same. The iPhone version is on the App Store.

Cronometer is the alternative if you can live with ads and a seven-day view. Its website says a Basic account is free for as long as you need it, and that unlimited use of the barcode scanner is included. So is the whole food database, custom meals and recipes, and tracking of up to 95 nutrients. The free version carries ads and limits reports and charts to a seven-day window.

Gold removes the ads and adds logging by photo or voice, a fasting timer and a recipe importer. It costs $10.99 billed monthly or $59.99 billed yearly. Twelve monthly payments come to $131.88, so the yearly plan is the cheaper one from the sixth month on. It is also on the App Store.

FatSecret, Lifesum and Yazio also scan free

FatSecret’s website sits behind a prove-you-are-human check, but the Internet Archive’s copy of its Premium page puts the barcode scanner, macro tracking, reports and the community in the free column. Premium adds logging by photo or by dictating a meal, a meal planner, dietitian-designed meal plans and a water tracker.

The website names monthly, quarterly and annual plans without a figure. The US App Store listing shows monthly subscriptions at $10.49 and $14.99 and annual ones at $38.99 and $59.99, so the offer you see may vary.

Lifesum’s website advertises a free barcode scanner, a free calorie counter and a fasting timer. Its help centre says logging by photo, voice or text is a Premium feature, and marks saved favourites as Premium too. Lifesum prints no price on its site. The US App Store listing shows three months at $29.99 to $39.99 and a year at $99.99 to $119.99.

Yazio’s listing puts the barcode scanner in its free calorie counter and leaves it off the Pro list. An archived copy of its help centre says Pro adds photo logging, the full recipe database, automatic sync with Fitbit and Garmin, more fasting plans and an ad-free app. The price is not on its website either. The US App Store listing shows twelve months at $23.90 to $47.90.

MyFitnessPal and Lose It! charge for the scanner

MyFitnessPal’s free version still exists. The comparison on its Premium page lists nutrition, weight and exercise tracking as free. Barcode scan, meal scan, voice logging, custom macro goals, intermittent fasting and ad-free logging are all Premium. Getting the scanner back costs up to $79.99 a year, when Cronometer, MyNetDiary and FatSecret include it for nothing.

The price depends on where you look. MyFitnessPal’s own guide to its plans, in an archived copy, gives Premium as $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year, and Premium+, which adds a meal planner, as $24.99 or $99.99. Its Premium sign-up page showed $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year. The US App Store listing carries in-app purchases at both levels. Go by the figure on the payment screen.

Lose It! lists its free features in its store listings as calorie tracking, a personal weight plan and community support. The barcode scanner is under Premium there, with photo and voice logging, macro and nutrient tracking, fasting and fitness tracker sync. An archived copy of its help centre says the scanner was being moved to Premium and that some free members would keep it during the change, so yours may still work.

There is no fixed price. The same help centre says Lose It! adjusts prices by promotion and by how often you use the app. The US App Store listing shows Premium purchases from $9.99 to $79.99.

MacroFactor, with no free tier at all

MacroFactor is the only app here with no free tier. Its website says there is not one and never will be, and that the app carries no ads as a result. You get a 7-day trial, then pay $11.99 a month, $47.99 for half a year or $71.99 a year. The maker says barcode support is strongest in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Japan, France and Spain. The iPhone version is on the App Store.

Free and paid tiers side by side

Prices are the US ones, and they change from country to country. Every app in the table is on both stores, and each name links to its Google Play page.

Tracking food by taking a picture

Expect to pay. Cronometer, MyNetDiary, FatSecret, Lifesum, Yazio, MyFitnessPal and Lose It! all place photo logging in their paid plans. Cronometer Gold and MyNetDiary Premium are both $59.99 a year.

A calorie counter with no subscription

The free tiers of Cronometer, MyNetDiary and FatSecret need none. Past those, the one thing that is not a subscription is MyNetDiary’s one-off $179.99.

A tracker for Indian food

Healthify, from HealthifyMe in Bengaluru, is the home-grown option on both stores for anyone in India after a calorie counter that knows Indian food. Its listing describes logging a meal by photo, an AI coach called Ria and a food database covering a wide range of cuisines.

Neither the listing nor the company’s website says which of those tools need a paid plan. The Indian App Store shows in-app purchases called Smart Plan from ₹499 to ₹4,199, and the listing describes one-on-one coaching as a premium service. Install it, see what the free version lets you log, and read the plan price before you agree to anything.

Samsung Health and Apple Health

On a Samsung phone with simple needs, Samsung Health is free and its listing says it records daily meals and snacks.

Apple’s guide says the Health app stores data from compatible third-party apps. FatSecret’s App Store listing, for one, says it adds your foods and their nutritional information to Health.

Several of these apps also pull in exercise from a watch or strap. If you want your pulse on the phone as well, try heart rate apps for Android or heart rate apps for iPhone.

Noom, WeightWatchers and other names that come up

Noom and WeightWatchers are on both stores as paid programmes. Noom’s listing prices its weight plan at $209 a year, which it presents as $17 a month. WeightWatchers sells memberships built around its Points system in place of calorie counting.

Tasty is BuzzFeed’s recipe app. HealthyOut, OptUp, Rise and Yummly no longer turn up when you search Google Play or the App Store.