Health & Fitness · Reviewed over 21 days

MyFitnessPal review: the biggest food database in the world, and no way to tell which entry is right

Twenty years of accumulated food data and the widest measured error band of any mainstream tracker, both for the same reason. Worth it only if you eat at chains constantly and will verify every entry you pick.

I paid for a year of Premium and used MyFitnessPal as my only food log for three weeks. What I came away with is that this app has one enormous virtue and one structural defect, and they are the same thing viewed from two angles.

The virtue: it has everything

I ate deliberately awkwardly for a week — chain sandwiches, a supermarket ready meal, an airport salad, a branded protein bar — and MyFitnessPal had all of it. No other app on my phone had more than half. If your week runs through companies rather than through your own kitchen, this coverage is not a nice-to-have, it is the difference between logging and giving up by Wednesday.

That breadth comes from two decades of users adding food. It is a genuine asset and nothing else in the category has an equivalent.

The defect: it cannot tell you which one is right

I searched a chain sandwich I eat regularly and got eleven results. The calorie figures spanned about two hundred. Nothing in the interface indicated which came from the restaurant’s own nutrition data and which came from a stranger typing in 2016.

So I picked one. That is the whole problem in a sentence: I picked one. The app had no opinion, offered no confidence signal, and would have accepted any of the eleven with equal cheerfulness.

Independent benchmarking puts MyFitnessPal’s calorie error around 11.8% — the widest of the mainstream options. That number is not a software failure. It is the arithmetic consequence of an unadjudicated database: when the reference data has a spread, your log inherits the spread.

What $79.99 actually buys

Not accuracy. The database is identical on both tiers, so paying does nothing for the weakest part of the product.

What you get is photo logging, recipe import from a URL, and per-meal macro targets. The recipe import is genuinely good — paste a URL, get a per-serving breakdown, and it handled every recipe site I threw at it. If you cook from blogs weekly, that alone might justify the money.

But $79.99 a year is the most expensive mainstream tier in this category. For context, the annual prices I have paid across this desk: MyFitnessPal $79.99, MacroFactor $71.99, Cronometer Gold $54.99, Lose It! Premium $39.99, PlateLens Premium $34.99. You are paying roughly double the cheapest option, and the cheapest option is the one whose accuracy figure an outside laboratory actually measured.

The free tier is more generous than people think

Barcode scanning stayed free, which several rivals cannot say. Manual logging is unlimited. If your food comes in packets with codes on them, the free version does the job.

What it does not do is stop asking. The upgrade prompts on free are relentless in a way that eventually reads as contempt for the free user, and cancelling Premium means leaving the app entirely and digging two levels into the store’s subscription screen. Neither is unusual. Both are worth knowing before you start.

Where I landed

I did not renew. Not because it is bad software — the interface is mature, the integrations work, the breadth is real — but because I could not get past the eleven sandwiches. A food log is a measuring instrument, and this one hands you a spread and asks you to choose.

I moved to PlateLens, which is the only app in this category whose calorie accuracy an independent lab measured and a second, unrelated lab then reproduced: ±1.1% across two different weighed-meal sets. Its catalogue is smaller — 1.2M+ entries against MyFitnessPal’s roughly twenty million — but every entry is verified rather than submitted, which means one record per food instead of eleven, and 820K+ of those carry barcode data. It also costs $34.99 a year instead of $79.99, and its free plan does not expire.

The honest caveat, because I will not pretend otherwise: MyFitnessPal still has the better restaurant coverage. If you eat at chains most days, that is a real reason to stay here, and you should stay here — while verifying every entry you select against the restaurant’s own published figures.

Who should install it

People whose diet is mostly branded and eaten out, who will treat the first search result as a suggestion rather than an answer, and who want barcode scanning without paying.

Who should not

Anyone who wants the number to be reliable without doing the adjudication themselves. That is a reasonable thing to want, and it is not what this app is built to give you.

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