MyFitnessPal has been the default answer to "which calorie counter should I use" for more than a decade, which makes it unusually hard to review. Most of what is written about it is either a decade-old habit talking, or a competitor with an incentive. This review takes a narrower approach: every claim below comes from a source you can open — MyFitnessPal's own pricing page, its App Store listing, or peer-reviewed research — and every one is dated, because this category changes its pricing more often than its features.
One disclosure up front. SlimAI makes a competing app, and SlimAI appears in the alternatives section near the end of this article. Nothing in the review sections was written from hands-on testing of MyFitnessPal, because inventing a testing narrative would be worth less to you than a sourced one. Where a number appears, the source is linked.
What MyFitnessPal is, and who it was built for
MyFitnessPal is a food and exercise diary. You tell it your weight, goal and activity level; it gives you a daily calorie budget; you log against that budget and it subtracts as you go. Exercise adds calories back. Weight entries adjust the target over time.
That description has barely changed since 2005, and that is the point. It is a general-purpose tracker built for the broadest possible audience, and its design decisions consistently favour coverage over depth: whatever you ate, it is probably in there somewhere.
Its App Store listing, published by MyFitnessPal, Inc., advertises access to "20.5M+ foods, including restaurant dishes" and carries a 4.7-star rating from roughly 2.4 million ratings as of 23 August 2026. Whatever else is true, no other tracker in this category has been rated by that many people.
What MyFitnessPal does well
Coverage. The 20.5M+ figure is a genuine advantage for anyone who eats packaged food, restaurant food or regional food. Smaller curated databases return nothing for a supermarket own-brand ready meal; MyFitnessPal usually returns something.
Accumulated context. This is the underrated one, and it is the reason most people who complain about MyFitnessPal are still using it. Years of saved foods, custom recipes, frequent meals and diary history compound into something that makes logging fast for you specifically. It is also the thing no competitor can import.
Integrations. MyFitnessPal connects to a long list of wearables, scales and fitness apps. If your step count, workouts and weight already flow in automatically, that pipeline has real value and rebuilding it elsewhere costs an afternoon.
Export. MyFitnessPal lets subscribers download progress reports, and its data export exists — which matters more than it sounds. An app you can leave is an app you can trust with three years of your eating history.
What it costs, as of 23 August 2026
This is the section most reviews get wrong, because they were written against a pricing page that has since changed. These figures were read off myfitnesspal.com/premium on 23 August 2026:
| Tier | Price | What the page lists |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Basic food and exercise logging, goal and progress tracking, app and device syncing |
| Premium | $79.99 billed annually | Ad-free logging, barcode scan and meal scan, voice logging and multi-day logging, custom macros and goals, intermittent fasting tracker, downloadable progress reports, priority customer support |
| Premium+ | $99.99 billed annually, or $24.99 billed monthly | Everything in Premium, plus a custom meal planner, 1,500+ recipes, budget-friendly options, automated grocery lists |
A 7-day free trial is offered to new subscribers. Prices vary by region and promotion, and the App Store listing shows several historical price points still attached to the app's in-app purchases — so treat the table above as a snapshot, not a permanent fact, and check the page yourself before you subscribe.
Where MyFitnessPal frustrates people
Scanning is a paid feature
The single most-cited complaint about MyFitnessPal is not a matter of opinion — it is written on the company's own pricing page. "Barcode scan and meal scan" appears in the Premium column, not the Free one, alongside voice logging and custom macro goals.
For a new user in 2026 this reframes what the free tier is. It is not a limited version of a modern tracker; it is a manual-entry diary with search. If your mental model of MyFitnessPal is "the app where you scan the barcode," that model describes the subscription.
For long-time users the sting is different: barcode scanning was free for years before it moved. Nothing was taken away from the product, but something was taken away from the free tier, and people notice that far more sharply than they notice a price rise.
Database size and database accuracy are different things
A 20.5M+ entry count is a count of rows, not of foods. Crowd-sourced databases accumulate brand spellings, plurals, language variants, portion variants and duplicate submissions, which is why searching for a common food can return dozens of results with different calorie figures attached to the same product. MyFitnessPal marks curated entries with a verified badge, and those are the ones worth selecting — but the burden of noticing sits with you, on every log.
This is not a MyFitnessPal-specific criticism, and it should not be read as one. It is the structural trade-off every crowd-sourced database makes, and the research bears out both halves of it.
What the research says
Two findings are worth knowing before you commit to any tracker, MyFitnessPal or otherwise.
Trackers systematically underestimate what you ate. A meta-analysis of 14 validation studies covering 12 dietary-record apps found that every app underestimated energy intake against its reference method, pooled at −202 kcal/day (95% CI −319 to −85). The important part is the follow-up analysis: where the app and the reference method used the same food-composition table, the gap fell to −57 kcal/day (95% CI −116 to 2). Most of the error came from the database, not from the app or the user. (Zhang L, Misir A, Boshuizen H, Ocké M, 2021, Advances in Nutrition 12(6):2321–2332, doi:10.1093/advances/nmab058.)
The gap is uneven across nutrients. Researchers entered 30 dietary recalls into MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, Lose It!, MyPlate and Lifesum and compared the output against NDSR, a research-grade database. Energy and macronutrient correlations were strong, running 0.73–0.96. Individual nutrients were not: underestimates ran 7–41% depending on the app, with MyFitnessPal underestimating protein, total fat, sodium and cholesterol. (Griffiths C, Harnack L, Pereira MA, 2018, Public Health Nutrition 21(8):1495–1502, doi:10.1017/S1368980018000393.)
Read together, these say something useful and slightly deflating: your tracker's calorie total is a consistent index, not a measurement. It is reliable enough to steer by — the same meal logged the same way produces the same number, so the trend is real — and it is not precise enough to argue with a scale about 100 calories.
What actually predicts results is whether you keep logging. In a study of 90 adults using an app for eight weeks, participants who completed the study logged on 70.2% of days and lost 2.19% of body weight, against 1.54% for the sample as a whole, which logged on about half of days. (Payne JE, Turk MT, Kalarchian MA, Pellegrini CA, 2022, Obesity Science & Practice 8(3):279–288, doi:10.1002/osp4.566.)
That is the frame worth applying to every app in this category, including this one's competitors: the tracker that produces results is the one whose friction is low enough that you are still using it in week ten.
Who should use MyFitnessPal
This is a real recommendation, not a setup.
- You already use it. If you have years of history, a library of saved meals and recipes, and devices syncing in, switching costs you all of that to gain a feature or two. That is usually a bad trade.
- Obscure or restaurant food is most of what you log. Nothing else in the category matches the coverage, and no amount of AI helps if the food simply is not in the database.
- You want one app your gym, your watch and your scale all talk to. The integration bench is the deepest available.
- You want a diary, not an opinion. MyFitnessPal records; it does not tell you what your week meant. For plenty of people that is exactly right.
Who might want something else
- You are starting from zero in 2026 and expected scanning to be free. It is not, so compare the Premium price against what other apps include in their base subscription.
- Logging friction is what breaks your tracking. Search-and-select is the slowest way to log, and the research above says the frequency of logging is what predicts the outcome.
- You need verified nutrient data. For a deficiency, a supervised plan or a medical condition, crowd-sourced entries are the wrong tool.
- The scale has stopped telling you anything. A tracker that only records intake cannot tell you whether the weight you are holding is fat or lean mass.
Alternatives worth considering
Three, chosen because each answers a different one of the complaints above rather than being a general-purpose replacement.
Cronometer — for verified nutrient data. Its entries come from curated, lab-verified sources rather than user submissions, and it tracks a far wider set of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. It is the right answer when precision is the reason you are tracking, and its free tier is unusually capable. It is slower to log in than MyFitnessPal, and that is the trade.
Lose It! — for a simpler calorie budget. If MyFitnessPal feels like more app than you wanted, Lose It! is deliberately narrower: a number, and a straightforward way to spend it. It splits several logging tools across its own Premium tier, so check what is included before assuming it is cheaper in practice.
SlimAI Calorie Tracker — for logging friction and for the progress-signal gap. Its genuine differentiator is not the food scanner, which several apps now have. It is AI Body Assessment: a body fat percentage estimate produced from two photos, or from six tape measurements if you would rather not take photos, using published formulas — the US Navy circumference method, RFM and CUN-BAE — sitting inside the same app as the food log. That answers the "is this fat or lean mass" question a diary cannot. Where SlimAI does not compete: its food database is curated and far smaller than 20.5M entries, and it has none of MyFitnessPal's accumulated history for an existing user. See current SlimAI pricing for what that costs.
How to decide in one week
If you are genuinely unsure, this settles it faster than more reading:
- Log three normal days in your current app. Not three good days — three ordinary ones, including the meal you would rather not record.
- Count the taps, not the calories. How many actions did an average meal take? That number is what determines whether you are still logging in week ten.
- Log the same three days in the app you are considering. Same meals, same conditions. Free trials are long enough for this.
- Check the entries you selected, not the totals. Did you pick a verified entry or the first result? The totals only mean something if the underlying rows do.
- Ask what you learned. If both apps produced a number and nothing else, weigh price. If one told you something about your week, weigh that.
Sources and References
- MyFitnessPal Premium pricing page, read 23 August 2026 — https://www.myfitnesspal.com/premium
- MyFitnessPal, Inc. App Store listing (rating, ratings count, 20.5M+ food database claim), read 23 August 2026 — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/myfitnesspal-calorie-counter/id341232718
- Zhang L, Misir A, Boshuizen H, Ocké M (2021). A systematic review and meta-analysis of validation studies performed on dietary record apps. Advances in Nutrition 12(6):2321–2332. doi:10.1093/advances/nmab058 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8634532/
- Griffiths C, Harnack L, Pereira MA (2018). Assessment of the accuracy of nutrient calculations of five popular nutrition tracking applications. Public Health Nutrition 21(8):1495–1502. doi:10.1017/S1368980018000393 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10261454/
- Payne JE, Turk MT, Kalarchian MA, Pellegrini CA (2022). Adherence to mobile-app-based dietary self-monitoring — impact on weight loss in adults. Obesity Science & Practice 8(3):279–288. doi:10.1002/osp4.566 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9159560/
- Woolcott OO, Bergman RN (2018). Relative fat mass (RFM) as a new estimator of whole-body fat percentage. Scientific Reports 8:10980. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-29362-1 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-29362-1
- Gómez-Ambrosi J, Silva C, Catalán V, et al. (2012). Clinical usefulness of a new equation for estimating body fat. Diabetes Care 35(2):383–388. doi:10.2337/dc11-1334 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22179957/
Related reading: best MyFitnessPal alternatives, SlimAI vs MyFitnessPal, feature by feature, is AI calorie tracking accurate?, and the free body fat calculator if you want the number without installing anything.
