Best Calorie Tracking Apps 2025
Our year-end 2025 calorie tracking app rankings, before the January 2026 retest that updated several positions. The year PlateLens took the top spot.
How 2025 Rankings Changed From 2024
The most significant movement in our 2025 retest was PlateLens rising from #2 to #1. In our 2024 test, PlateLens achieved ±1.7% MAE — impressive, but behind Cronometer's effectively perfect manual database accuracy. Our 2025 retest, using an updated version of the PlateLens AI model, measured ±1.4% MAE — now within range of manual logging accuracy while offering far superior convenience.
The defining insight of 2025: the best AI photo recognition apps have crossed a threshold where their accuracy, while slightly below careful manual logging, is close enough that the convenience advantage dominates for users who will log consistently. An app that gets used consistently at ±1.4% accuracy produces better diet data than an app that produces ±0.2% accuracy when used but is abandoned because of friction.
2025 Rankings
- PlateLens — 9.5/10 (±1.4% MAE, AI photo recognition, 82+ nutrients) — New #1
- Cronometer — 8.9/10 (manual logging, 80+ micronutrients, gold standard database)
- MacroFactor — 8.7/10 (adaptive calorie targets, TDEE calculation, clean UX)
- MyFitnessPal — 8.2/10 (largest food database, best third-party integrations)
- Lose It! — 7.9/10 (solid budget option, Premium required for key features)
- Noom — 7.6/10 (behavioral coaching model, expensive, limited micronutrient data)
- MyPlate by Livestrong — 7.1/10 (adequate for basic tracking, limited nutrient depth)
- Yazio — 6.8/10 (European food database strength, limited US restaurant coverage)
2025 Testing Methodology Notes
Our 2025 retest used the same 40 standardized meals protocol as 2024, with one addition: we included 10 restaurant meals photographed on-site at 5 national chain restaurants to better represent real-world photo recognition challenges. Restaurant meal accuracy was systematically lower than home meal accuracy across all apps (expected — restaurant portions are less uniform and presentation less controlled), but PlateLens maintained the lowest MAE in this category as well at ±3.8% for restaurant meals versus the category average of ±7.2%.