FatSecret vs MyFitnessPal vs Lose It!: The Free Tiers, Compared

The short answer

All three log food the same way — search a database, pick an entry, set a portion — so the choice comes down to what the free tier withholds and what the paid tier costs.

• FatSecret if you want a barcode scanner and photo recognition without paying — its store listing calls the app free and lists both among the free features. The trade is a smaller database (1.9 million verified foods, by its own count) and a plainer interface.
• MyFitnessPal if the database matters most and you will pay for the scanner: its own site says free members get a simple food search and Premium members get barcode and camera scanning. Premium is $79.99 a year.
• Lose It! if you want a weight-loss plan with a calorie budget and will log by typing. Its free tier is the narrowest: on its store listing, photo logging, barcode scanning and macro tracking are all Premium.

Disclosure: Olivka is our product and it appears near the end, in the section on what none of these three does. It is a free trial followed by a paid subscription, it has no barcode scanner, and it is not a replacement for any of these apps if scanning packaged food is your main way of logging.

Leaving MyFitnessPal rather than choosing from scratch? The reasons people leave, and what each move costs, are in our MyFitnessPal alternatives post. This one is the head-to-head.

The free tiers side by side

Every cell was read off the vendor's own website or app-store listing on 2026-09-10; where two vendor surfaces disagree, both figures are given. Paywall lines here move — MyFitnessPal's scanner alone has been free, then paid — so this is a snapshot with a date on it.

Databases: the biggest number is not the point

The database is the first thing every comparison reaches for, and the vendors' figures are far apart — 1.9 million for FatSecret, 18 or 20.5 million for MyFitnessPal depending on which of its pages you read, and 32, 50 or 56 million for Lose It! depending on which of its.

Those figures measure different things. FatSecret counts entries it calls verified; MyFitnessPal and Lose It! count everything users have ever added, which is why their numbers are ten to thirty times larger — and why experienced users prefer verified entries and sanity-check anything improbable. In a 2020 validation study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, 50 Belgian adults kept four-day food records in MyFitnessPal; against the national food-composition database, energy correlated at r = 0.96 and the macronutrients at about 0.90 — but only after 2.8% of entries had been removed as implausibly high, and cholesterol and sodium correlated weakly.

A 2022 comparison in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics checked the 50 most-eaten foods from a weight-loss study across four commercial databases against a research database: Lose It! and MyFitnessPal agreed well to excellently on most nutrients, except fibre in MyFitnessPal, and MyFitnessPal showed the widest calorie scatter. None of that makes any of them unusable. Database size tells you how likely you are to find your food, not how right the entry is once you do; how much precision any count can honestly claim, ours included, is on our accuracy page.

Barcode scanning: the line that keeps moving

This is the feature most people mean when they ask which free tier is best.

FatSecret's Google Play listing lists "a barcode scanner and auto-complete functions" among the features of an app it describes as free, with no Premium marker against it. Its Premium list is meal plans, advanced meal planning, extra meal headings and water tracking — nothing about scanning.

MyFitnessPal's own site answers directly in its homepage Q&A: free members can do a simple food search; Premium members get the tools that scan a barcode or individual foods with the camera. The scanner was free for most of the app's life and moved behind Premium a few years ago, so an older review calling it free was right when written — check the vendor's page on the day you decide.

Lose It! puts the barcode scanner under "Premium plan features" on its Google Play listing, alongside photo and voice logging. Its website's feature grid shows a "Scanner feature" without saying which tier it belongs to; the store listing is the more recent of the two, updated two days before we checked.

Whether the feature is worth choosing an app for is a separate question — how much of your food actually has a barcode puts a number on it.

Ads, and what removing them costs

Google Play labels both MyFitnessPal and Lose It! "Contains ads"; the FatSecret listing carries no such label, and whether its free app shows ads is not stated on the pages we opened. MyFitnessPal's store listing describes ad-free logging as part of Premium.

The paid tiers, as stated today: MyFitnessPal's Premium page lists Premium at $79.99 a year and Premium+ at $99.99 a year or $24.99 a month, both with barcode and meal scan, voice logging, custom macros and downloadable progress reports. FatSecret publishes no Premium price on any page we could open — the App Store lists several tiers, monthly from $10.49 and annual from $38.99. Lose It!'s premium page redirects to the stores, whose listing does not say which period each of its prices covers.

FatSecret: free forever, with a lower ceiling

FatSecret's positioning is the plainest of the three: its store listing opens with "best of all, fatsecret is free", its web sign-up says "100% free", and its company site describes more than eighteen years in the market, 12.9 million annual active users and a 1.9 million-food verified database that it also sells as an API to other apps.

What Premium adds is narrow and clearly listed: dietitian-written meal plans (keto-style, balanced, Mediterranean, intermittent fasting, high-protein low-carb), planning meals ahead, six extra meal headings and water tracking. Everything to do with logging — diary, scanner, photo recognition, macro reporting, Fitbit and Google Fit or Apple Health sync, reminders — is free. If you do not want meal plans, there is little reason to pay.

The ceiling is the database and the interface: a verified 1.9 million entries covers mainstream packaged goods and chains well and thins out faster for niche brands and local bakeries than a crowd-sourced database ten times the size. The listing says the app is customised for each country's foods and brands — test that on your own ten most-eaten items before committing a month of meals.

Lose It!: Snap It, and where the free tier ends

Lose It! markets itself around three inputs — "Say It. Snap It. Scan It." — and its how-it-works page describes a Smart Camera that reads a barcode or the food itself. Snap It is a genuinely useful idea: photograph the plate and let the app suggest what is on it. On the store listing as of today, however, all three inputs are Premium; the free tier is listed as calorie tracking, a weight-loss plan and community support.

That makes it the most restrictive free tier of the three by the vendor's own description: a calorie budget and manual search logging, without macros, barcodes or the camera. Workable if the plan-and-budget framing is what you want and you are happy typing; if any of the three headline inputs is why you downloaded it, budget for Premium from day one.

Recipes in, data out

Two questions people ask late and should ask early: can I import a recipe from a URL, and can I get my diary out if I leave? None of the three vendor pages we opened describes pasting a recipe URL — MyFitnessPal's listing says you can save your own recipes and meals, FatSecret's mentions a recipe library, Lose It!'s custom meal sections; Cronometer, below, is the one that states it, as a paid feature. On export, MyFitnessPal's Premium page lists "download progress reports" under Premium and describes no plain diary export on the free side; FatSecret and Lose It! state no export option at all. Assume your history stays where you log it, and count that as a cost of switching later.

Also worth knowing: Cronometer

Cronometer is the fourth name that comes up, and its free tier is shaped differently. Its free-version page says the barcode scanner is unlimited on a Basic account, the whole database of "over 1 million accurate and reliable food entries" is available, custom recipes are included, and you can track up to 95 nutrients — with a seven-day window on your history and two basic charts. It also says it will never force you to upgrade.

Gold is $4.99 a month billed annually ($59.99) or $10.99 monthly, and adds ad-free tracking, photo and voice logging, a recipe importer that takes a URL, a fasting timer and unlimited history. If micronutrients matter and a smaller, curated database does not put you off, it is the strongest free scanner-plus-database combination on this page.

What none of them does

All four share one shape: a search box and a database. That works for packaged food with a barcode and badly for the food most people actually struggle to log — a home-cooked stew, a restaurant plate, a slice of something at a friend's — where there is no barcode and the nearest entry is somebody else's guess. The photo features that exist are either paid (Lose It!, MyFitnessPal, Cronometer) or, in FatSecret's case, free but still landing you in a list of entries to pick from.

The other cost is on no pricing page: search, disambiguate between nine entries for the same food, pick a serving unit, adjust the quantity — perhaps forty seconds, several times a day, at exactly the moments you are hungry and distracted. That is how most food diaries end in week three, and no tier of any of these apps changes it.

Olivka is our attempt at the other shape. You send a photo, a voice note or a sentence in WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram or Instagram; a vision model reads the plate or a nutrition label; the ingredients are matched to USDA FoodData Central and Open Food Facts, with a web lookup for restaurant and branded items; you get an itemised meal card with Confirm and Edit, and a correction replaces the earlier entry rather than adding a second one. Your first meals are free; after that it is a paid subscription, with the price shown at the end of onboarding, not here. It has no barcode scanner, no meal plans and no wearable sync, so if scanning groceries is your main way of logging, one of the three above is the better tool. How photo logging works and where it fails is in our post on calorie tracking from a photo, and the wider set of options that need no account is in our piece on free trackers with no signup.

The one-question chooser

Ask where most of your calories come from.

• Mostly packaged, labelled food, and you will not pay: FatSecret. Free scanner, free photo recognition, free macros.
• Mostly packaged food, and you will pay for the widest coverage: MyFitnessPal Premium at $79.99 a year. The database is the reason.
• You want a plan and a budget more than a diary, and you log by typing: Lose It! free, knowing the camera and the scanner are behind Premium.
• Micronutrients matter and you like a curated database: Cronometer free.
• Mostly cooked and restaurant food, and the search box is what stopped you last time: try a photo-first tracker — ours or another.

Whichever you pick, the calorie target you feed it matters more than the app. If you are pregnant, managing a medical condition, or your relationship with food feels fragile, run any target past a clinician before you start.

If your shortlist is wider than these three, the free tiers of seven apps are compared side by side.