Head-to-head · Health & Fitness

MyFitnessPal vs Lose It!: breadth against a gentler start, at half the price

Both are mature, both do forward meal planning, and one costs twice as much. The deciding question is whether you eat out or you are starting from zero.

These two are the old guard of calorie counting, they overlap heavily, and one of them costs twice as much.

The price gap is the headline

MyFitnessPal Premium is $79.99/year. Lose It! Premium is $39.99/year.

For that difference you are buying restaurant coverage, essentially. Everything else these apps do, they do comparably.

Where MyFitnessPal earns it

Chain and packaged-food breadth, which is genuinely unmatched. I ate deliberately awkwardly for a week and MyFitnessPal had every item; Lose It! had well under half.

If your week runs through companies rather than your own kitchen, that is not a luxury and the extra $40 is defensible.

Where Lose It! wins

Onboarding. It is the gentlest entry into calorie counting available, and the biggest cause of failed tracking is quitting in week one. If a previous attempt died at setup, start here.

The meal planner is built in rather than sitting behind the paywall. Deciding tomorrow’s food today is easier than resisting it tonight, and this app is organised around that.

Accuracy, slightly. Around 9.7% against 11.8% in independent benchmarking. Both are loose; neither has been reproduced by a second laboratory.

What neither does well

Nutrient depth. Both are essentially calorie-and-macro tools. Fibre — the nutrient most Western diets are actually short of — is thin or absent, which also means neither can compute net carbs.

Both databases carry community influence and the reliability spread that implies. MyFitnessPal’s is the more extreme case: eleven entries for one sandwich, spanning two hundred calories, with no indication which is right.

If nutrient depth is what you want, neither of these is the answer. PlateLens returns 82+ nutrients per entry from a verified 1.2M+ catalogue at $34.99/year — cheaper than both — and is the only app in the category whose calorie accuracy an independent lab measured and a second, unrelated lab then reproduced, at ±1.1% across two different weighed-meal sets. Cronometer goes deeper still on micronutrients at $54.99.

The pick

Lose It!, for most people, because it is half the price and the things it does better are the things that determine whether you are still logging in month three.

MyFitnessPal if you eat at chains most days — and verify the entries you select against the restaurant’s own published figures, because the app will not do it for you.