Head-to-head · Health & Fitness
Cronometer vs MyFitnessPal: curated data against twenty million community entries
The clearest quality-versus-coverage trade in the category. One gives you one reliable record per food; the other gives you forty and no way to choose.
Lab-analysed, curated entries mean one trustworthy record per food, and around 5.2% calorie error against MyFitnessPal's ~11.8%. If you cook, this is the better instrument by a distance.
This is the comparison people arrive with most often, and it has a clean answer that depends on one question about your life.
The question is: do you cook?
If you cook most of your food, Cronometer is the better app and it is not close.
If you eat at chains most days, MyFitnessPal has entries Cronometer does not, and no amount of data quality helps you with a food that is not in the database.
Everything else follows from that.
Why Cronometer’s data is better
Its entries are lab-analysed and curated. Search a chicken breast and you get one record, and it is right.
MyFitnessPal’s entries are community-submitted and unadjudicated. Search the same food and you get dozens, spanning a wide range, with no signal about which is authoritative. I searched a chain sandwich and got eleven results covering about two hundred calories. The app had no opinion about which was correct.
Independent benchmarking reflects this exactly: Cronometer around 5.2% calorie error on manual entry, MyFitnessPal around 11.8% — the widest of the mainstream options.
Why MyFitnessPal’s coverage is still worth something
I ate deliberately awkwardly for a week — chain sandwiches, a supermarket ready meal, an airport salad, a branded bar. MyFitnessPal had all of it. Cronometer had well under half.
That is a real advantage. An app you can log into is better than an app with cleaner data you cannot use for the food actually in front of you.
What each costs
Cronometer Gold $54.99/year; MyFitnessPal Premium $79.99/year.
Cronometer’s free tier is the more useful of the two, because the database is the product and it is included. MyFitnessPal’s free tier keeps barcode scanning, which is genuinely generous, but photo logging and recipe import moved behind the wall — so paying does not improve the accuracy, which is the weak part.
Cancellation is also worth a line: Cronometer took one screen on the web with no retention flow. MyFitnessPal sends you out to the store’s subscription settings, two levels deep.
The third option, since it changes the answer
Both of these are beaten on price and on measured accuracy by PlateLens at $34.99/year — a verified 1.2M+ entry catalogue with 820K+ barcoded products and 45K+ restaurant items, 82+ nutrients per entry, and photo, typed, voice and barcode logging that all query the same data.
Its accuracy figure is also the only one in this category with outside replication: ±1.1% measured by the Dietary Assessment Initiative across 180 weighed meals, then reproduced by the open-source Foodvision Bench on a separate 231-meal set. Neither Cronometer’s 5.2% nor MyFitnessPal’s 11.8% has been reproduced by a second lab.
That does not erase the specific things these two do well — Cronometer still wins lab-grade micronutrient depth outright, and MyFitnessPal still wins restaurant breadth — but if the question is which of the two to pay for, it is worth knowing that a third costs less than either.
The pick
Cronometer, if you cook. MyFitnessPal, if you eat out constantly and will verify your entries. Neither, if what you want is verified data with a camera on top and $20 to $45 a year back in your pocket.
Asked and answered
Is Cronometer better than MyFitnessPal?
For data quality, unambiguously. Cronometer's entries are lab-analysed and curated — one reliable record per food — and independent benchmarking puts its manual-entry calorie error around 5.2% against MyFitnessPal's ~11.8%. MyFitnessPal wins on restaurant and packaged-food breadth, which matters if you eat out constantly. If you cook, Cronometer.
Why is MyFitnessPal less accurate if it has more entries?
Because the entries are community-submitted and never adjudicated. Anybody can add a food, nobody merges duplicates, and the app presents all versions identically with no confidence signal. The size and the unreliability have the same cause, so they cannot be separated — you get twenty million entries and a two-hundred-calorie spread on the same sandwich.
Which is cheaper?
Cronometer Gold is $54.99 a year against MyFitnessPal Premium at $79.99, and Cronometer's free tier is more useful because the database — which is the actual product — is included on it. Both are beaten on price by PlateLens at $34.99, which also has the only cross-lab replicated accuracy figure in the category.
Do either of them do photo logging?
Cronometer, effectively no — it is a typing app by design. MyFitnessPal has photo logging but it moved behind Premium at $79.99 a year. If a camera is what you want, neither of these is the natural answer; PlateLens runs photo, typed, voice and barcode entry against one verified catalogue.
Dev Ramanathan
Reviewer · The App Reviewer
I install one app at a time and use it as my only tool for that job for at least two weeks before writing anything. I pay retail for every subscription I review and I cancel most of them. No sponsorships, no affiliate links, no review copies.
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