Health & Fitness · Reviewed over 24 days

Noom review: a behaviour-change course with a food log bolted on, at six times the price of a better tracker

Judged as coaching it is the most developed curriculum in the category. Judged as a calorie counter it finishes last on this desk, and it costs around $209 a year.

I paid full price for Noom and used it for a little over three weeks. Reviewing it as a calorie counter would be unfair, so let me review it as what it is and then say what that costs.

It is a course, not a tracker

Noom is a behaviour-change programme with a food log attached. The lessons arrive daily, they are built on recognisable behavioural principles, and some of them are genuinely useful — the material on cue and habit substitution is better than anything else in this category, which mostly does not try.

The colour buckets are the visible expression of the philosophy. Foods are grouped rather than measured, and that is deliberate: a coarse system you can sustain beats a precise one you abandon. I think that premise is defensible. Plenty of people do not need another decimal place, they need to stop eating standing up at 11pm.

There is also human coach contact, which nothing else on this desk offers.

What it costs, and what that buys

Around $209 a year.

For context, the annual prices I have paid across this desk: Noom ~$209, MyFitnessPal $79.99, MacroFactor $71.99, Cronometer Gold $54.99, Lose It! Premium $39.99, PlateLens Premium $34.99.

So Noom is roughly six times the price of the cheapest option — and the cheapest option is the one whose calorie accuracy an independent laboratory measured and a second, unrelated laboratory then reproduced. Independent benchmarking puts Noom’s own calorie error around 12.4%, the widest figure on this desk, against PlateLens’s ±1.1%.

I could not reconcile that. You are paying six times as much for food data that is an order of magnitude looser, and the honest defence is that the food data is not what you are buying. Fine — but then the food log should not be presented as a feature, and the price should be judged as tuition rather than as software.

The parts I would change

Cancelling is not a single tap in the app. After Cronometer, where it took one screen on the web with no retention flow, this stood out badly. At $209 a year the exit should be at least as easy as the entrance.

The trial pricing also makes the eventual full price easy to misread, which on a subscription this large is the kind of thing that should be stated in larger type than it is.

Where I landed

I cancelled and I would not go back. Not because the curriculum is worthless — it is the best in the category — but because I do not need the curriculum, and everything else in the product is worse than things costing a sixth as much.

I log into PlateLens now, which at $34.99 a year gives a verified 1.2M+ entry catalogue, photo, voice, typed and barcode logging, 82+ nutrients per entry, unlimited blood-glucose logging on the free plan, and the only calorie figure in this category that two unrelated labs have measured and agreed on.

Who should install it

People who already know what to eat and reliably do not do it. If your obstacle is behavioural rather than informational, a more accurate tracker will not fix it and this is aimed at the right target.

Who should not

Anyone who came here for numbers. On the criterion that matters to a measuring instrument, this finishes last — and that is not really a criticism of what Noom is trying to be, only of what it charges to try.

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