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For some people, keeping track of food and calorie intake can be helpful for promoting weight loss.
Research shows that people who log calories lose more weight and are more likely to keep the weight off in the long run (1, 2).
These days, counting calories is very easy. There are many useful websites and apps that help you log your meals and track your intake.
Most of them are accessible online, and signing up takes less than a minute. They all have apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.
Last but not least, most of them are free.
This article reviews the 8 best calorie counters available today.
Even though logging calories can be a helpful weight loss tool for some, it’s important to note that tracking food and calories can lead to unhealthy behaviors like food obsession and disordered eating tendencies.
Plus, tracking foods and logging calories are not always necessary for healthy weight loss. If you’re trying to lose weight, it’s important to find methods that are effective and don’t have a negative impact on your physical or mental health (3, 4, 5).
Calorie-counting apps and other self-monitoring technologies are great tools that allow users to monitor their food intake and dietary choices.
While most research on the impact of calorie counter apps and body weight centers on their beneficial effects on weight loss, some studies also point out other highly valuable benefits.
For instance, food logging may also encourage behavior changes that help modify unhealthy habits — one of the main goals of nutrition interventions (6).
In addition, just as they recommend a maximum of calories to consume to reach your target weight, the calorie monitor can also help you realize whether you’re eating too little, which could cause your resting metabolic rate (RMR) to slow down after weight loss (7).
Your RMR is the number of calories your body burns at rest. By slowing down, it acts as a preventive measure that counters excessive weight loss, which may lead to weight regain (7).
Lastly, some apps also provide accountability, which is key when aiming for consistency, a determining factor for weight loss success (8).
Aside from helping you reach your weight loss goals, calorie-counting apps are a great tool to help you modify unhealthy habits and realize whether you’re eating too little. They also provide accountability, which helps with consistency.
Here’s what we took into account to select the best calorie counter apps:
MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular calorie counters right now.
It tracks your weight and calculates a recommended daily calorie intake. It also has a well-designed food diary and an exercise log.
The home page provides a clear picture of how many calories you’ve consumed during the day. In addition, it shows your remaining recommended intake and how many calories you’ve burned by exercising.
If you’re using a fitness tracking device, MyFitnessPal can likely sync with it to include its data in the exercise log.
The app tracks your progress toward your goals and offers chat forums with fellow users. The forums include conversations, recipes, tips, and personal success stories.
MyFitnessPal’s nutrition database is extensive, containing more than 11 million foods. You can also download recipes from the internet or create custom foods and dishes.
The app even saves your favorite meals for convenient logging.
Additionally, MyFitnessPal’s barcode scanner allows you to enter the nutritional information of some packaged foods instantly.
Each day is presented as a pie chart, showing your breakdown of carbs, protein, and fat. You can also write a note for each day, recording how things went or how you were feeling.
MyFitnessPal does offer a free version. However, some of its features — such as meal prep and recipes, macronutrient counters, and guided fitness — can be accessed only in the premium version.
Lose It! is another health tracker that includes an easy-to-use food diary and an exercise log. You can also connect a pedometer or another fitness device.
Based on your weight, height, age, and goals, Lose It! provides a personalized recommendation for calorie intake. It then tracks your calories on the home page.
It features a comprehensive food database and an icon representing each food entry. The food diary is simple and user-friendly. Adding new foods is not complicated.
Additionally, Lose It! has a barcode scanner for packaged foods, and common foods are saved for quick entry later on.
Lose It! presents weight changes on a graph, provides access to an active chat community, and keeps a daily and weekly total.
The tab called “Challenges” allows you to participate in dietary challenges or make your own.
With a premium membership, you can set more goals, log additional information, and get some extra features.
FatSecret is a free calorie counter. It includes a food diary, a nutrition database, healthy recipes, an exercise log, a weight chart, and a journal.
A barcode scanner helps you track packaged foods.
The home page shows total calorie intake and the breakdown of carbs, protein, and fat — displayed both for the day and for each meal.
FatSecret offers a monthly summary view, which gives total calories consumed each day and averages for each month. This feature may be convenient for tracking your overall progress.
This calorie counter is very user-friendly. The app also includes a chat community where users can swap success stories and get tips, recipes, and more.
FatSecret offers a feature called “Challenges,” where users can create or participate in dietary challenges in a closed group of people.
The website is full of information and tips, as well as articles on a variety of topics.
Cronometer lets you easily keep track of your diet, exercise, and body weight.
It offers exact serving sizes and a useful exercise database. If you are pregnant or lactating, you can select a customized profile based on higher calorie needs.
You can also tell Cronometer if you’re following a specific diet, such as the paleo diet, a low carb diet, or a low fat vegetarian diet. This changes the macronutrient recommendations.
The food diary is very simple and user-friendly. Below it, you’ll find a bar chart showing the breakdown of carbs, fat, and protein for that day alongside the total calories consumed.
Cronometer is particularly useful for tracking micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals.
The app offers a Gold upgrade that eliminates ads, provides advanced analysis, and includes some extra features.
Noom is not only a calorie counter but also an app designed to help you lose weight and sustain weight loss.
The app asks for specific information, such as your age, height, weight, gender, and lifestyle, and uses it to create a calorie budget — an estimate of the number of calories you should consume each day.
It then uses your calorie budget to help you reach a calorie deficit.
Noom encourages you to track the number of calories you consume each day, as well as take your weight at least once a day.
It also helps create diet plans without limiting or restricting certain food items. Instead, the app focuses on calories and nutrients as a way to promote weight loss.
Noom has different price options that vary depending on the length of the suggested plan, but it does offer a free trial.
Lifesum is a calorie counter app that focuses on teaching you how to lead a healthier lifestyle.
Aside from tracking your calories and macros, Lifesum provides a food and meal rating system that explains whether a food is nutritious and whether your meal is healthy or imbalanced.
However, no food is off-limits, and the app uses constructive language that does not categorize foods as “good” or “bad.”
In addition, Lifesum tracks water intake, body measurements, and exercise and adjusts your daily calorie goal based on calories burned during physical activity.
Lifesum is very easy to use. Its home page shows total calorie and macro intake and a breakdown of foods and calories per meal, which you can log manually or with a barcode scanner. You can also create foods, meals, and recipes.
Upgrading to premium starts at $4.17 per month for an annual subscription. This unlocks more features, such as a more detailed nutrient breakdown, recipes, insights, and educational content to learn how to make healthier food choices.
It also gives you access to multiple meal plans suitable for different diets, including paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, vegan, and even Scandinavian and Mediterranean diets.
MyNetDiary is an intuitive and comprehensive calorie tracker that provides advice and feedback to motivate you through your health journey.
Logging your food is quick and easy. You can do it manually or by using a voice log or a barcode scanner. The food log includes a picture-based portion guide to help you measure food quantities more accurately.
It also has a food scoring system that grades foods by imitating how a nutrition expert would score their healthfulness based on the nutrition label or profile and serving size. This feature is meant to help you compare foods to choose the best option and improve your diet quality.
MyNetDiary lets you fully customize your daily calorie and macro targets and can be used to support weight loss, weight maintenance, and special diets, including the dietary needs of people who are pregnant or breastfeeding.
It provides daily nutrient and meal analysis, macros charts, and access to numerous recipes — including vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free — and even allows you to import recipes and calculate their nutrition information.
Its premium version also tracks micronutrients and grants you access to meal planners, diet plans, blood pressure and cholesterol tracking, and a diabetes-focused dashboard that tracks blood sugar and medication.
If you’re looking for the simplest calorie tracker app, then Calory may be just the one for you.
With Calory, you can log either calories or foods, but it only tracks your calorie intake.
Its home page displays a bar chart with the percentage of calories consumed and your day’s remaining calories, which the app calculates when you set your goals. However, you can also manually customize your calorie target.
The history tab shows a breakdown of the foods and calories consumed per meal, along with weekly, monthly, and yearly charts of your total calorie intake and weight changes.
Calory’s food database is linked to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foods Database. Logging your food is relatively easy, although the database may be tricky to use.
Additionally, the app saves your most recent food logs and provides a list of common foods to make future entries easier.
Upgrading to premium unlocks macro and water tracking, a barcode scanner, recipes, and access to a premium food database.
Trying to “do it right” when it comes to nutrition may feel tempting, but it can backfire.
If you are preoccupied with food or your weight, feel guilt surrounding your food choices, or routinely engage in restrictive diets, consider reaching out for support. These behaviors may indicate a disordered relationship with food or an eating disorder.
Disordered eating and eating disorders can affect anyone, regardless of gender identity, race, age, body size, socioeconomic status, or other identities.
They can be caused by any combination of biological, social, cultural, and environmental factors — not just by exposure to diet culture.
Feel empowered to talk with a qualified healthcare professional, such as a registered dietitian, if you’re having a hard time.
You can also chat, call, or text anonymously with trained volunteers at the National Eating Disorders Association helpline for free or explore the organization’s free and low cost resources.
We do the work so you don’t have to. Our evidence-driven reviews and brand comparisons make your search simple and help you live your healthiest life.
Here are some important factors to consider when choosing a calorie counter app:
A calorie is a unit of measure for energy. It’s an estimate of the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. You consume calories through food, and they provide you with energy to maintain life and fuel physical work (9, 10).
The calories you consume each day make up your calorie intake, while the ones your body burns through physical activity, digestion, or basal metabolic rate compose your calorie expenditure (11).
Energy balance is a term used to indicate that your calorie intake matches your expenditure. According to the “calories in, calories out” paradigm, an energy balance helps maintain your body weight (10, 11).
In contrast, creating a calorie deficit leads to weight loss, while a calorie excess or surplus leads to weight gain (10, 11).
A calorie deficit can be achieved by reducing intake or increasing expenditure — or both. In contrast, a calorie surplus is achieved in the opposite way: by increasing intake, reducing expenditure, or both.
Research shows that calorie counting by logging your food intake may be a successful weight loss strategy because it helps increase awareness of current and desired eating behaviors (1, 2).
However, studies also note that people who use apps to self-monitor diet and physical activity are more likely to engage in disordered eating behaviors (12, 13, 14).
Counting calories may be especially unsafe for people with a history of disordered eating.
In fact, one study found that calorie-counting apps may increase the desire to be underweight, and some users even acknowledge the apps’ role in worsening their disordered eating behaviors (13).
If you’re concerned about safety, shifting the focus from counting calories for weight loss to eating intuitively to improve well-being may be a healthier and more successful approach in the long run (15).
While calorie counter apps have millions of foods to choose from, with different available serving sizes to match what’s on your plate, they are still not 100% accurate for multiple reasons, which ultimately come down to human error.
On one hand, food logging still requires that users take time and effort to record food intake. While technology has made it easier, the process still relies on users’ discipline — and even their memory, if they log their intake afterward (2).
On the other hand, users may incorrectly track their food intake, either by inaccurately logging or estimating amounts or by neglecting to track some ingredients, which may add or subtract calories from their calorie budget.
Before calorie counter apps were a thing, there were multiple techniques or tools that helped account for a day’s worth of calories, which you could try if you find calorie-counting apps too tedious or burdensome.
Common tools include (16):
Still, keep in mind that whether you rely on an app or not, calorie counting is more of an estimation than an exact measurement. In both cases, practice and patience are needed to improve your estimates.
Calorie counting apps may be safe for some people but are not recommended for those with a history of disordered eating. They’re also not 100% accurate, primarily due to human error. You can always try other tools to estimate your caloric intake.
Calorie counters and nutrient trackers are incredibly useful if you’re trying to lose, maintain, or even gain weight.
They can also help you make specific changes to your diet, such as eating more protein or fewer carbs.
However, there is no need to track your intake constantly.
Try tracking it occasionally for a few days or weeks to get a more nuanced view of your diet.
That way, you’ll know exactly where to make adjustments to achieve your goals.
Last medically reviewed on September 28, 2022
Our experts continually monitor the health and wellness space, and we update our articles when new information becomes available.
Current Version
Sep 29, 2022
Written By
Adda Bjarnadottir, MS, RDN (Ice), Ariane Lang
Edited By
Cat Staskawicz
Medically Reviewed By
Micky Lal, MA, CSCS,RYT
Copy Edited By
Anne Arntson
Jun 6, 2022
Written By
Adda Bjarnadottir, MS, RDN (Ice), Ariane Lang
Edited By
Brittany Ladin
Copy Edited By
Jill Campbell
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