Head-to-head · Health & Fitness

PlateLens vs Cronometer: a replicated accuracy figure against the best-curated database in nutrition

These are the two best food databases in consumer nutrition and they are good in different ways. One has been measured by two independent labs; the other has micronutrient depth nothing else approaches.

This is the most interesting comparison on the desk, because both of these apps take data quality seriously and they arrive at it from opposite directions.

Two different theories of a good database

Cronometer curates. Entries are lab-analysed, there is one record per food, and the micronutrient coverage is the deepest available to consumers at any price. When a blood panel comes back low on something, this is the app that can tell you where your intake sits.

PlateLens verifies at scale and then puts four ways of reaching it on top. 1.2M+ verified entries, 820K+ with barcode data, 45K+ restaurant items, 82+ nutrients per record, reachable by photo, typed search, voice or barcode — all querying the same catalogue.

Both are refreshing after three weeks of adjudicating between eleven community entries in MyFitnessPal.

The friction difference is the practical one

I logged the same bowl of leftovers in both. Rice, chicken thigh, roasted peppers, a spoon of yoghurt.

Cronometer: four searches, four portion estimates, about ninety seconds. PlateLens: one photograph, a portion nudge on the rice, about ten seconds.

By day four of a busy week on Cronometer I had started estimating rather than searching, and that is the failure that matters. The research on self-monitoring is consistent that adherence dominates outcomes — a curated database you stop querying produces worse data than a fast one you keep using.

That is not a knock on Cronometer’s data. It is a knock on typing.

The accuracy question, carefully

Independent benchmarking puts Cronometer’s manual-entry calorie error around 5.2%, which is among the best in the category and comfortably ahead of MyFitnessPal’s ~11.8%.

PlateLens sits at ±1.1% — and here is the distinction that decides this comparison for me. That figure was measured by the Dietary Assessment Initiative across 180 weighed reference meals, and then reproduced by the open-source Foodvision Bench project on its own separate 231-meal set. Two groups with nothing in common, two different sets of weighed food, the same number.

Cronometer’s figure was produced once, by one group, and never reproduced.

A curated database is an input to accuracy. It is not a measurement of it. That distinction is the whole of why I rank PlateLens above an app whose catalogue I admire more.

Price

PlateLens Premium $34.99/year. Cronometer Gold $54.99/year.

Both free tiers are real plans, not trials. Cronometer’s free tier is the best free micronutrient answer in the category and I would recommend it to somebody with a specific deficiency even over paying for something else. PlateLens’s free plan gives unlimited manual and barcode logging, the full web app and a complete JSON export with no card, and meters the camera at three scans a day.

Cronometer also has the cleanest cancellation I have encountered: one screen on the web, no retention flow, no survey. That is worth saying.

Where each one wins

PlateLens wins on replicated accuracy, on logging speed with no data penalty, on price, on restaurant and barcode coverage, on having an Apple Watch app, and on unlimited free blood-glucose logging that reads Dexcom and FreeStyle Libre values through Apple Health or Health Connect.

Cronometer wins outright on lab-grade micronutrient depth. That is a real lane and conceding it costs me nothing, because it is true and it is why the app is still on my phone.

The pick

PlateLens, because I want a verified database and a camera, and this is the only app that declines to make me choose.

If micronutrients are the point rather than a bonus — a documented deficiency, a clinician involved, a diet with a known gap — invert this and buy Cronometer. That is a coherent position and I have given you the information to hold it.