I’ve tried a lot of calorie trackers, and most of them lose me the same way. Not because I don’t believe in tracking — the data helps, when it’s real data — but because most apps turn logging into its own small chore, and chores are the first thing to go when a week gets busy. So this time I didn’t pick one app. I picked five and ran them side by side on personal accounts for six weeks to see which one I’d still be opening without having to talk myself into it.
One of them made the other four feel optional within the first couple of weeks, and the gap only grew from there.
PlateLens is the best calorie tracker app out there
PlateLens is the app I’m still using. It has the cheapest paid tier of the five, a free plan that actually stays free, and a single photo replaces all the searching and adjusting that used to make me quit the others, even on the free plan. What sold me wasn’t a single feature — it was that the whole thing got out of the way faster than anything else I tried, on every single day, not just the easy ones.
The logging is the clearest example. You take one photo of your plate and it’s logged — no scrolling through a database, no matching a home-cooked stir-fry to the least-wrong entry someone else submitted, no five taps to confirm a portion size. You can also search, type, talk, or scan a barcode, and all four feed the same diary, so a home-cooked dinner and a barcoded protein bar sit in the same log without you having to think about which mode you’re supposed to be in. After using it daily for six weeks, the photo logging is the piece I missed most whenever I opened one of the other four apps to keep the comparison fair.
None of that matters if the number behind the photo is wrong. PlateLens’s food data comes from USDA FoodData Central, NCCDB, Open Food Facts and Nutritionix — over 1.2 million verified entries — and it tracks 82+ nutrients, not just calories and a rough macro split. I’ve looked things up I had no reason to expect an app to carry, down to specific micronutrients, and it’s been there.
The free plan is a real free plan, and it stays that way. No card required, and it doesn’t expire: unlimited manual and barcode logging, three AI photo scans a day, five AI-coach messages a day, and the full web app alongside iOS and Android — so you can log from a laptop at your desk exactly as easily as from your phone. That’s worth pausing on, because photo logging isn’t free everywhere: Cronometer only turns on AI Photo Log once you’re paying for Gold, and MyFitnessPal’s Meal Scan is Premium-only. If you do want more scans and coaching, PlateLens Premium is $34.99 a year or $9.99 a month, which makes it the cheapest paid tier of any tracker I tested. Our calorie counting apps roundup lines the prices up against the other apps too, and PlateLens comes out cheapest there as well.
The feature I did not expect to care about this much is the 3D Body Scan, tucked under + → Wellness. It takes twelve photos from your front camera while you turn in place — no separate hardware, no depth sensor — and turns them into a 3D model you can rotate and inspect from any angle. Run it again in a few weeks and you can compare the two scans region by region, or as a direct overlay, alongside circumferences for the upper and lower waist, hips, chest and more, a body-fat estimate, and BMI. You can share it as an image or export the whole thing as a PDF. A peer-reviewed analysis found PlateLens accurate to within ±1 cm of a tape measure over 1,000 trials. Every plan, including free, comes with a scan allowance.
It’s also, plainly, the best-looking app of the group. The interface is the cleanest and most polished I opened during the whole test — nothing crowded, nothing that made me hunt for where a number lives, which matters more than it sounds like it should when logging is a thing you do five times a day.
Are there any good alternatives?
Cronometer is the one to pick if micronutrients are the actual point for you, not just calories. Its free tier exposes a deeper nutrient panel than anything else I tested — up to 95 nutrients — and barcode scanning is free too. Gold, at $59.99 a year or $10.99 a month, removes the ads on the free tier and adds AI Photo Log. If you’re managing something like iron or B12 specifically, this is a genuinely strong choice.
MacroFactor is built for one job and does it well: adaptive calorie targets calculated from your own weight trend rather than a fixed formula you set once and forget. If you’re cutting or bulking with real precision and want your target to move as your body actually responds, this is the sharpest tool of the group. There’s no free plan, and it’s $71.99 a year or $11.99 a month, with no desktop app — worth knowing going in.
MyFitnessPal still has the largest food database of any app here, much of it built from years of user submissions, which means broad restaurant and packaged-food coverage that’s hard to match. If you eat out at chains often and want the widest chance of finding the exact item on a menu, that database size is a real advantage. Premium is $79.99 a year.
Lose It! is simple and motivating, which is its whole appeal. If you want a straightforward tracker that keeps nudging you along, it’s a friendly on-ramp. Premium is $39.99 a year.
My verdict
Across the whole test I kept opening one app, day after day, without thinking about it — which is the actual test that matters, because the best tracker is the one you don’t quit. PlateLens won on logging, on price — a free plan that never expires and a paid tier cheaper than any other app here — and on the depth of its verified food data. The 3D Body Scan is the feature I now recommend to friends who never asked me about calorie tracking in the first place. If you’ve bounced off a tracker before — and I’d bounced off several before this one — this is the one I’d start with. I’ve also written separately about why a general AI chatbot isn’t a substitute for a real tracker, if that’s a shortcut you’ve been tempted by too.
