The Best Free Calorie Counting Apps in 2026 — and Which Ones Stay Free

What this compares, and what it leaves to other posts

This is the money question only: install the free version and what do you actually get. If your question is which app logs food with the least effort, that ranking is in our AI calorie tracker roundup. If it is how to start without creating an account — and what the four different arrangements called "free" mean — that is the no-signup post, and this one borrows its vocabulary rather than repeating it. Readers leaving MyFitnessPal specifically have their own piece.

Five things decide whether a free tier is usable past the first week: the barcode scanner, the size of the food database, ads inside the diary, whether you can get your data out, and whether the free tier is permanent or a trial in disguise. Those are the columns; the profiles fill in what a table cannot.

Disclosure: Olivka is our product. It appears in the table and gets a profile but is not ranked as a free app, because it is not one — the first meals are free, then it is a paid subscription. Every competitor fact was checked on the vendor's own site or store listing on 2026-09-10; where a page would not open, the profile says so.

The free tiers side by side

Read down the third column and one pattern stands out: the barcode scanner is the hinge. Two of the seven put it behind the paywall, and for anyone eating mostly packaged food that line decides the comparison. The quieter pattern: every free tier that carries ads also sells ad removal, so the ads are part of the pricing, not an accident.

The apps, one at a time

MyFitnessPal

The free tier still has the largest database in the category — the Google Play listing cites 20.5 million foods — and search-based logging, a calorie and macro breakdown and a water tracker cost nothing. What has moved is the scanner: MyFitnessPal's own comparison page lists "barcode scan and meal scan" under Premium, alongside voice logging, custom macro goals, the fasting tracker and progress-report downloads. Premium is $79.99 a year, Premium+ (meal plans and recipes) $99.99 a year or $24.99 a month, with a 7-day trial. The Play listing declares ads, and ad removal is a Premium line item. Diary export is not stated.

FatSecret

The App Store listing opens with "fatsecret is free" and the free list is long: a food diary, a barcode scanner, photo recognition of meals and products, calorie and macro reports, a weight tracker, and sync with Google Fit, Samsung Health and Fitbit. Premium adds dietitian-written meal plans, advanced meal planning, six extra meal slots and water tracking — conveniences, not the diary itself. Two caveats: the database is described as "the world's highest quality" with no size given, and fatsecret.com refused our request on 2026-09-10, so the store listings are the source here. The Play listing carries no "Contains ads" label, which is unusual for this category.

Cronometer

Cronometer's pricing page has the clearest free-tier description of the seven: a Basic plan at $0 with a barcode scanner, a database of over one million lab-analysed or verified foods, up to 95 nutrients, custom macro and micronutrient targets, device sync and custom recipes. The same page is equally clear about the limits: reports cover a 7-day window, and older history, photo and voice logging, the fasting timer, the recipe importer and ad removal are Gold, at $10.99 a month or $59.99 a year. The Play listing declares ads. If you care about iron, magnesium and fibre rather than only calories, start here — as long as a week of visible history is enough.

Lose It!

Lose It! separates its free and paid features explicitly in its Google Play listing, and the result is stark. "Free basic features" are calorie tracking, a personalised calorie budget and weight plan, and community. Under "Premium plan features" sit the barcode scanner, photo and voice logging, macro tracking, intermittent fasting, meal planning and fitness-app syncs. So the free tier counts calories against a budget from a 56-million-item database, with ads, and that is the whole of it. The App Store lists Premium purchases from $9.99 up to a lifetime option; loseit.com/premium would not load for us, so we cannot quote a headline price.

Yazio

Yazio's listing describes a "free, intuitive calorie tracker": a diary with customisable calorie goals, macro analysis, over four million items, a barcode scanner, food ratings and a water tracker — and, unusually, "instant access with no signup required". PRO buys ad removal, custom meal plans, in-depth food analysis, Fitbit and Garmin sync, mood tracking and long-term trend charts. The App Store lists a year of PRO at $47.90, with discounted offers lower; the listing declares ads. The site advertises AI photo tracking without saying which tier it belongs to, so we count it on neither side.

Lifesum

Lifesum is the one to read carefully. Its listing says it is "free to download and use with limited features", and its own help centre spells out what Premium adds: AI photo, voice and text tracking, setting your own calorie goal, setting your own macro goals, custom foods and recipes, meal plans and the full recipe library. In other words the free tier logs food against a target Lifesum picks for you, and you cannot create a custom food without paying. The App Store lists a year of Premium at $99.99 to $119.99 depending on the offer. The Play listing carries no ads label.

MacroFactor

MacroFactor is here for the opposite reason. Its App Store listing states it plainly: "MacroFactor has a free trial, but does not offer a free subscription tier." The trial is seven days; then $11.99 a month, $47.99 a half-year or $71.99 a year. You pay for an expenditure estimate that adjusts your calorie and macro targets weekly from what you log, a verified database, a barcode scanner and no ads. A good product for someone who wants the target managed, not just the log — and a bad install for anyone searching for a free app.

Olivka — disclosed, and not a free app

Our own product does not belong in a free ranking, so here is exactly what it is. You send a photo, a voice note or a sentence in WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram or Instagram; a vision model reads the plate, ingredients are matched against USDA FoodData Central and Open Food Facts, and you get an itemised meal card with Confirm and Edit. The first meals are free, with no account and nothing installed. After that it is a paid subscription, shown at the end of onboarding — no price here, because the site does not publish one. There is no barcode scanner; for packaged food you photograph the label. If barcodes are most of your logging, one of the free tiers above will serve you better, and we would rather say so. How the estimates are made is on our accuracy page.

Which free tiers actually stay free

Six of the seven describe a permanent free tier; MacroFactor describes a trial. The harder part is that a permanent free tier is a moving boundary: the vendor decides each year which features sit on which side, and the one most likely to move is the one that costs most to run or sells best. MyFitnessPal's scanner and Lose It's macros are on the paid side today; neither vendor promises they will stay where they are. So the practical test is not "is it free" but "is the thing I do every day free" — open the pricing page, not the store blurb, and find your daily action in the comparison table before you log a week of meals. If it is in the paid column, you are on a trial with no end date, which is a worse deal than a trial with one.

Two smaller checks. Ads: four of the six free tiers declare them on Google Play, and in a diary you open several times a day an interstitial ad is not cosmetic. Export: none of the seven states a plain file export on the pages we read (Lifesum mentions pushing data to Apple Health or Health Connect, which is not the same thing), and "not stated" usually means your history stays where it is. Ask before you need it.

How to choose in one question

Ask what most of your food looks like. The answer picks the tool.

• Mostly packaged food with barcodes: pick a big-database free tier that keeps the scanner free. FatSecret, Cronometer and Yazio all do; MyFitnessPal only if you are prepared to pay for it.
• Mostly cooked or restaurant food, nothing to scan: a scanner is worth little and a photo or a sentence is the fastest log. That is what photo-based tools, Olivka included, are for — with the caveat that a photo estimate is less precise than a label.
• You want the target itself managed, adjusted from what you log week to week: that is a MacroFactor-type product, and it is paid. No free tier in this set does it.

Whichever you pick, the thing that predicts a result is not the app but whether you keep logging. A 2011 systematic review in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association covered 22 studies of self-monitoring in weight-loss programmes, 15 of them on diet, and found a significant association between self-monitoring and weight loss consistently across them — while noting the evidence was weak, since most studies relied on self-report and on samples that were mostly white women. Read it as a direction, not a guarantee: the free tier you are still using in week six beats the paid one you abandon in week two.

Before any of it, get the number you are tracking against. Our calculators are free permanently, need no account and store nothing — Mifflin-St Jeor, energy rounded to 10 kcal because the equation is not more precise than that, and no target below your own basal rate.

Two narrower questions have their own posts: FatSecret, MyFitnessPal and Lose It! head to head if your shortlist is already down to those three, and whether you need a barcode scanner at all if that feature is what you are choosing on.

The privacy check, briefly

A food log records what you eat, when and how much — and by inference a good deal about your health. Before committing a month of meals to a free tier, run the three-line check from the no-signup post: the tool names a company, publishes a privacy policy, and tells you how to delete your history. All seven pass the first two on their store listings. Read the third for yourself — it is the one that matters once you stop using the app.

One more line for anyone tracking because of a medical condition, a pregnancy or a history of disordered eating: a calorie app is a notebook, not a clinician, and none of the free tiers above knows which of those applies to you. Talk to someone who does before you set a target.