What is a good alternative to MyFitnessPal?

What does MyFitnessPal do well?

Reach. It has a very large crowd-sourced food database, a barcode scanner (Premium, according to the reviews read on 4 September 2026), integrations with watches and scales, and a large community forum. Its US App Store listing stood at 4.7 over 2.4 million ratings on 4 September 2026, a lifetime average over many versions.

For a person who eats mostly packaged food, scans it, and wants the number without a conversation, that is hard to beat, and this page does not pretend otherwise. Its users of ten and fifteen years, in the threads read on 4 September 2026, say what kept them: the whole day in one view.

The honest frame, then: the alternatives below give up some of that reach. They are for the person who left over what MyFitnessPal added around the diary, not over the diary itself.

What does MyFitnessPal cost, and what is free?

The free tier keeps the diary, the database and the daily goal, with ads. Premium costs $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year on the App Store, read 14 September 2026, and its own page lists "ad-free logging experience" and "custom macros and goals" as Premium; "voice logging and multi-day logging" sit a tier higher, in Premium+.

So the trade at MyFitnessPal is the category's usual one: the record is free, the comfort is paid, and macro goals in grams sit behind the first paywall while the macros themselves show for free. The reviews read on 4 September 2026 name that move: barcode scanning and gram-based macro goals moved behind Premium; reviewers in the same reading write that the yearly price is about 60 percent higher than two years before.

None of that is unfair in itself; a company may charge for what it builds. It matters because the diary is the thing people open four times a day, and an ad or an upsell inside it is felt four times a day. The free-tier comparison has each seller's page, dated.

What did MyFitnessPal's users leave over in 2026?

The redesign. In April 2026, version 26.16.0 split the diary into large cards, hid the meals behind "View all", shrank the per-meal calories, and removed copy-meal and multi-select; two or three taps became six to ten. Two press reports read on 4 September 2026 described a fall in recent ratings around the update, from about 3.2 to about 1.5, without stating the store, the country or the number of ratings behind each figure, while the US App Store listing itself, a lifetime average, still showed 4.7 over 2.4 million ratings the same day; in the threads we read, users of ten and fifteen years said they were leaving for Cronometer and Lose It!.

"It's a database. By the day. By the meal. So people can see all they ate today in one view and see what the results are, summarized in a simple graph. Everything else is unnecessary clutter." A MyFitnessPal user on r/Myfitnesspal, in a thread titled "That's it. I'm out.", read 4 September 2026.

The other complaints are older and steadier: the ads in the free diary, the database, which one reviewer summed up as "Same food, ten results, ten calorie counts", and billing, with 20 complaints to the Better Business Bureau in three years, 17 of them unanswered, read the same day. "You can no longer see how many calories are left for the day when you're logging for a specific meal. If I'm cooking dinner, I want to know how much of an ingredient to add," wrote another user on r/Myfitnesspal, in a thread titled "Why the app facelift sucks", read the same day. That sentence is most of what a tracker is for.

Which alternatives, and what does each keep back?

Five, and each one trades something MyFitnessPal has. Two of them have a page of their own here: MacroFactor and YAZIO, the paid diary against the free one with ads, and Noom, which is not a diary at all but a coaching programme. The table says what each seller's own page states about its free plan, what people leave each one over where we have read it, and what you give up against MyFitnessPal. No figure here is ours, and no claim about a product comes from anywhere but its own page or a dated reading.

One row is missing on purpose: a plain chat with ChatGPT or Claude. It knows the foods and keeps no diary with a total behind it, so it is not a tracker; what it becomes with a record behind it is the last section.

If the diary is what you loved and the rest is what you left, what changes?

IZeat is the calorie tracker inside ChatGPT, Claude or any other assistant. Tell the assistant you already use what you ate instead of searching for foods and entering them one by one. The search box, the ten entries and the cards are not redesigned; they are gone, so that the diary is easier to keep while you work toward your goal.

Thursday, 12:30, in the chat you already have open: "Lunch was 180 g of chicken breast, grilled with no oil, 150 g of cooked rice and a 125 g plain yoghurt." IZeat returns the receipt: three rows with their calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat and where each item's numbers came from, the meal total, and, once you have set a target, what is left of the day. If the yoghurt's brand or fat content is missing, the assistant asks before it logs, or records it from a reference table and says so. No card to unfold, no entry to pick among ten, no ad between the lunch and the number. At 18:00 you ask what to make with what is in the fridge; the assistant reads the day from IZeat and proposes; you decide, and IZeat records what you ate.

• The whole day stays on one screen. Every meal with its numbers, the total, the target and what is left, read-only on the web app, without a tap; the thing the redesign took away is the first thing the day page shows.
• Nothing interrupts the diary. No ad between two meals and no locked macro, because the only person paying is you; the macros are on every item from the first meal.
• You can see where each item's numbers came from. A weighed portion, a label read back to you, a reference table, or an estimate marked as one, so a week later you know which dinner was a guess.

The limit, plainly: IZeat has no database and no scanner, today. A packaged food is a label you photograph and the assistant reads back; a plain food is valued from a reference table; the rest is an estimate that says so. If scanning a barcode and getting the entry is what you loved, MyFitnessPal still does it, and so does Lose It! for free; if what you loved was the list with a total, and what you left was everything around it, this is the alternative built for you.