Free MyFitnessPal alternatives in 2026, and the part nobody tells you about barcode scanning
MyFitnessPal moved barcode scanning behind its paid tier, and that one change is why most people start looking for something else. Checked on 2 November 2026, Premium is 19.99 US dollars a month or 79.99 a year, and the comparison table on their own site lists barcode scan as not included with a free account.
Custom macro targets are on the paid side too. That one gets less attention and matters more if you are tracking protein rather than just calories, because setting your own macro split is the whole reason a lot of people opened a tracker in the first place.
So the question is not really "what is like MyFitnessPal". It is "what do I actually need, and who gives me that without charging for it".
Below is what I would genuinely recommend, including the apps that beat mine, and then the thing I have not seen written anywhere else, which is that a free barcode scanner and a correct number are two different things.
Cronometer, if you want the strongest free tier
If your only problem with MyFitnessPal is that scanning now costs money, Cronometer solves it outright. Their own page states unlimited use of the barcode scanner on the free Basic account, along with up to 95 nutrients tracked, over a million food entries, custom recipes, and device integrations.
The catch is history. The free account gives you seven days of nutrition data. Long term charts and unlimited history sit in Gold, which is about 9.99 a month or 54.99 a year. For a lot of people seven days is fine, because they look at today and this week and never open a chart from March.
Cronometer is also the most serious app here about micronutrients. If you care about iron or B12 or magnesium rather than just the big three, it is not close. It is the best free answer to the question most people are asking, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
MacroFactor, if you are willing to pay
MacroFactor has no free tier at all, just a seven day trial, and it is 11.99 a month or 71.99 a year. So it is cheaper than MyFitnessPal Premium but it is not free, and if free is the point you can stop reading this section.
What you get for it is the one thing nobody else does well: it watches your weight and your intake and adjusts your calorie target on its own, rather than making you guess a number at the start and re enter it every few weeks when progress stalls. If you have ever been stuck because your targets were set for a version of you from two months ago, that is the feature.
MyMealStream, if the problem is actually dinner
This is mine, so treat it accordingly. It is free to start and there is a paid tier.
It exists for a different problem from the two above. Those are trackers: they are very good at recording what you already ate. They are not trying to answer what you should cook this week. If you find yourself with a perfectly logged day and no idea what to make tomorrow, that gap is the one I built for.
What it does that the others do not: you share a recipe into it from Instagram or TikTok, it reads the ingredients, works out the macros from those ingredients, and then builds a week of meals around your targets with a shopping list. The recipes are the ones you already saved, not a stock library.
What it does not do, honestly: it has nothing like Cronometer's micronutrient depth, and it will not adapt your targets the way MacroFactor does. If you want a pure tracker, pick one of those.
The part nobody tells you: a free barcode scanner is not a correct number
Nearly every "MyFitnessPal alternative" article stops at which apps let you scan for free. I think that is the wrong place to stop, and here is why.
A barcode is just an identifier. It carries no nutrition at all. When any app scans one, it looks the number up in a database, and for most free apps that database is Open Food Facts, which is an open project that volunteers type product labels into by hand. It is a genuinely good resource. It is also a wiki, and wikis contain typing mistakes.
Here is a real one. A carton of Devondale cream, barcode 9300639606217, was listed at 3,060 calories per 100 grams. The true figure is around 740. Somebody had typed the kilojoule value into the kilocalorie field. Scan that carton, log four grams of cream in your coffee, and your app tells you with total confidence that you have eaten 122 calories.
Nothing in the scan flags it. It arrives looking exactly as authoritative as a correct entry, which is worse than no answer, because you have no reason to doubt it.
I checked that record again while writing this, and it has been fixed. It now reads 745, which matches the carton. That is the wiki working as a wiki should, and it is also precisely the point: it was wrong for as long as it was wrong, nobody who scanned it in that window was told, and there are a million other products in there that nobody has checked yet.
The useful thing is that this whole class of error is catchable without knowing anything about the product, because there is a physical ceiling. Pure fat is about 900 calories per 100 grams and no food can be denser than that, so a figure above it is impossible rather than merely surprising. Three thousand is not a food.
Better still, you can usually rebuild the real number from the same record, because the fat and carbohydrate figures are typed into different fields and are usually fine. That record lists 82 grams of fat and 1 gram of carbohydrate per 100 grams. At 9 calories a gram for fat and 4 for carbohydrate, that is 742, which is the carton.
You do not need an app to use this. Two habits cost you nothing:
- If a scan returns something over about 900 calories per 100 grams, it is wrong. Do not log it.
- If a number looks surprising, check it against the panel on the actual packet before you trust it. The packet is right more often than the database.
I will say that my own app applies that ceiling and rebuilds the number when it can, because that is why I know about the cream. But the rule is free and works in any app you choose.
The other thing that quietly ruins your numbers: raw against cooked
This one is not about barcodes and it costs people more than they realise.
A recipe weighs food as you buy it, which for meat means raw. A food diary entry means the cooked thing you actually ate. Those are not the same weight, and the gap is large. Meat loses roughly a quarter of its weight as water when you cook it, so 100 grams raw is about 75 grams cooked. Rice goes the other way and roughly triples as it absorbs water.
Log a cooked chicken breast against a raw database entry and you are overcounting by about a third. Log dry rice weight against a cooked entry and you are wildly undercounting.
There is a second half that almost nobody accounts for, which is fat that leaves the pan. When I measured a set of real recipes against the nutrition figures their own authors published, the ones that involved cooking read about 29 percent high on fat, and the ones that needed no cooking were within a few percent. That gap is fat that stayed in the pan and went down the sink. The published food science tables cover this: pan fried chicken keeps around 65 percent of its fat, beef about 75.
The practical version is simple. Pick raw or cooked, use the matching database entry, and stay consistent. Consistency matters more than which one you pick.
How to actually move
If you switch, you will lose your history. Every app here is a separate account with a separate database and there is no import. That is annoying and it is also usually fine, because almost nobody reads their old logs.
What I would do:
- Work out which of the three problems you have. Scanning costs money, your targets have gone stale, or you do not know what to cook. They have different answers.
- Install one, not three. Running two trackers in parallel is how people quit both.
- Log one normal day end to end before you decide. A tracker feels completely different on day one than it does in the app store screenshots.
- Set your protein target first and worry about the rest later. It is the one that changes how you eat.
If the answer is "scanning costs money", go to Cronometer and stop reading. If it is "my targets are stale", MacroFactor. If it is "I have 40 recipes saved on Instagram and still order takeaway", that is the one I built.
_Prices and tiers above were checked against each company's own pages on 2 November 2026. They change. If you spot one that has moved, tell me and I will fix it._