Best Apps to Track What You Eat

Most apps for tracking what you eat fall into two categories: ones built around a searchable food database, and ones that estimate a meal directly from a photo, voice note, or text description. Here’s what actually differs between the well-known options, and where a no-search approach like Trackbie’s fits in.

Database-Search Apps

Cronometer offers one of the more detailed food databases, tracking up to 95 nutrients, with barcode, photo, voice, and text search logging methods and a free tier plus a paid “Gold” upgrade.

MyFitnessPal is known for an extensive, largely user-contributed food database and social features, alongside barcode scanning and manual search as the primary logging methods.

MyNetDiary is built around a staff-verified database of over 2 million foods with up to 108 nutrients tracked per entry, plus a free barcode scanner and no ads on its free tier.

FatSecret offers free barcode-based food tracking and is commonly recommended as a no-cost option for macro and calorie logging.

Photo-Based Logging

A smaller category of apps skip manual search by estimating meals from a photo instead — useful for home-cooked or mixed dishes that don’t map cleanly to a single database entry, though accuracy depends on photo clarity and portion estimation.

Trackbie: Photo, Voice, or Text — No Search Required

Trackbie takes the photo-based approach further by also supporting voice and text: share a meal any of the three ways, and it tells you the calories and macros without a manual database search. Once it has a real picture of your eating pattern, Plan My Day uses that to build your next few meals automatically — going a step beyond food logging into actually planning your day. Trackbie is free to download and use, currently on Android, with iOS coming soon.

Choosing Between Them

If you want the deepest possible food database and don’t mind searching for each item, Cronometer or MyNetDiary are strong picks. If you’d rather skip searching entirely and want the app to also plan ahead rather than just record what already happened, that’s the gap Trackbie is built to close.