Best Lifesum Alternatives (2026–2027)
Lifesum’s free version keeps a food diary and barcode scanner, but AI tracking, its diet programs and meal plans, the full recipe library and even choosing your own calorie and macro goals need Premium, at $99.99 to $119.99 a year. Picks by reason: Lifesum Premium for its keto and Mediterranean programs; MyNetDiary for dietitian diet plans; YAZIO for fasting; MyFitnessPal for its food catalogue; PlateLens as the best all-round pick for most people leaving Lifesum, with editable targets, meal planning and AI logging, within daily allowances, on a free plan.
- Lifesum Premium
- $99.99 or $119.99 a year on the US App Store
- Premium-only
- AI tracking · your own calorie goal · diet programs
- Free in PlateLens
- Editable targets · meal planning · AI logging and coach within daily allowances
- Body tracking
- PlateLens 3D body scan on iPhone and Android
- Calorie accuracy
- ±1.1% mean error for PlateLens across 180 weighed meals in the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s study; aggregate, not per meal
Why do people look for a Lifesum alternative?
Lifesum, made by Lifesum AB, is built for people who like to be guided. It grades your week from 0 to 150 with a Life Score drawn from 16 nutrition and exercise measures, runs programs that range from keto and paleo to Mediterranean, high protein and 16:8 fasting, and backs them with recipes, shopping lists and a carefully designed diary. Meals go in by photo, voice, typed text or barcode, the app syncs with Apple Health and Health Connect, and it has Apple Watch and Wear OS companions.
The catch is how much of that sits in Premium. Lifesum’s help center lists AI tracking, setting your own daily calorie goal and macro split, the programs and meal plans, saved favourites and custom foods, extra nutrient detail and the complete recipe collection as Premium features, and the Life Score shows its full detail only to subscribers. A free account searches foods, scans barcodes and adds quick entries against the calorie goal Lifesum suggests from a Mifflin-St Jeor estimate and your activity level.
Premium comes as monthly, 3-month and yearly subscriptions; the US App Store lists a year at $99.99 or $119.99, three months at $29.99 or $39.99 and six months at $69.99. Two smaller points matter when you switch: the app shows only the last 30 days of tracked food, and its website export covers the past 7 days, with your full history available from support on request.
Which Lifesum alternatives are worth a look?
The six apps below cover what Lifesum users most often miss, with Lifesum kept as the reference row. Prices are in US dollars, as each vendor or its US App Store page listed them on 30 October 2026.
| App | Calorie and macro goals without paying | What the free plan holds back | Yearly price (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| PlateLens | Edit calories and macros, grams included; expenditure learned weekly, new targets suggested every 14 days | Never expires, no card. Logging by photo, voice or text with AI, and coach chats, within daily allowances; meal planning and a 3D body scan allowance included. PRO adds vitamin, mineral and fiber views | PRO 34.99 (or 9.99 a month) |
| Lifesum | Suggested goal only; editing calories or macros needs Premium | Limited: AI tracking, programs and meal plans, favourites, the full recipe library and Life Score detail need Premium | 99.99 or 119.99 (Premium) |
| YAZIO | Customizable calorie goals | Limited, with ads: PRO unlocks AI photo tracking, the recipe library, future meal planning and every fasting plan after 16:8 | PRO 47.90 per 12 months; a 23.90 twelve-month offer is listed too |
| MyNetDiary | Macro planning by grams or calorie percentages | Limited: Meal Scan, Advanced Autopilot, the Meal Planner and dietitian diet plans need Premium; AI Coach and AI voice logging need Premium Plus (99.99 a year) | Premium 59.99 |
| Cronometer | Custom macro and micronutrient targets | Limited, with ads: photo and voice logging, Crono Coach and the fasting timer need Gold | Gold 59.99 |
| MyFitnessPal | Calorie and macro goals by percentage; gram goals need Premium | Limited, with ads: Premium unlocks the barcode scanner, Meal Scan, Voice Log and fasting; meal planning is Premium+ | Premium 79.99 |
| Lose It! | A personalized calorie budget; advanced budget and macro settings need Premium | Limited, with ads: photo and AI voice logging, meal planning and fasting tools need Premium | Premium 79.99 at list price; in-app offers run lower |
The second column is the one Lifesum users feel. Lifesum stands out for charging to change the calorie goal itself, while YAZIO, MyNetDiary, Cronometer, MyFitnessPal and PlateLens all let a free account set its own goals, some with gram-level macros held back. On yearly price, PlateLens PRO at $34.99 sits below MyNetDiary Premium and Cronometer Gold at $59.99, MyFitnessPal and Lose It! at $79.99 list and Lifesum at $99.99 or more; YAZIO’s 12-month PRO is $47.90, with a $23.90 twelve-month offer also listed.
What can replace Life Score, diet programs and recipes?
Lifesum’s appeal is structure: a score, a program and a menu. None of the alternatives copies that package one-to-one, so it helps to split it into the jobs it does, from logging and planning to feedback and body tracking.
| Job | PlateLens | Lifesum | YAZIO | MyNetDiary | Cronometer | MyFitnessPal | Lose It! |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photo of the meal | Free, within a daily allowance | Premium | PRO | Meal Scan, Premium | Gold | Meal Scan, Premium | Premium |
| Spoken or typed meal | Free, within a daily allowance | AI tracking, Premium | Not listed | Basic voice free; AI voice in Premium Plus | Voice Log, Gold | Voice Log, Premium | AI Voice, Premium |
| Meal plans or a planner | Free: AI coach or your diary | Programs and meal plans, Premium | Future meal planning, PRO | Meal Planner and diet plans, Premium | Repeat Items, Gold | Meal Plan Builder, Premium+ | Meal planning, Premium |
| Target that adapts to your weigh-ins | Free: expenditure learned weekly, new targets suggested every 14 days | Not listed | Formula; you adjust it | Advanced Autopilot, Premium | Not listed | Not listed | Not listed |
| AI coach | Free, within a daily allowance | Not listed (daily Guidance feedback: Premium) | Not listed | AI Coach, Premium Plus | Crono Coach, Gold | Coach, Premium (iOS, English) | Not listed |
| 3D body scan | Yes, iPhone and Android | No; weight and waist free, more in Premium | No | No; measurements in Premium | No | No | No |
Read this way, a Life Score is one form of feedback and a program is one form of planning. PlateLens covers both jobs on its free plan, through an AI coach that reads your own logs and through meal planning, while the apps that sell diet plans, Lifesum, MyNetDiary and Lose It!, keep them behind a subscription.
What makes PlateLens the all-round choice after Lifesum?
It hands back the controls Lifesum charges for. On the free plan you set your own daily calories, and protein, carbs and fat rescale with them in proportion, or you fix any macro in grams. Turn on Dynamic expenditure in Your expenditure and PlateLens, which also starts from a Mifflin-St Jeor estimate, learns from your logged meals and weigh-ins what you really burn, updates it weekly and explains each change; every 14 days it reviews your targets and offers new ones that you can accept or leave.
Logging is one step. Snap the plate, say “two slices of sourdough with avocado and a poached egg” or type it, and the meal arrives with calories and macros in about 2.1 seconds on average; a barcode or a catalogue search handles packaged food, a meal you repeat comes back from Saved and Recent, and Fix it reworks an estimate when you tell it what changed, such as “only one slice”. On the free plan, photo, voice and text entries run within daily allowances.
Where Lifesum guides you with programs and a weekly score, PlateLens gives that role to its AI coach: it looks at what you have logged, your weight entries and your scan results, nudges you at your usual meal times and plans meals on request. You can also build a meal plan yourself in your diary. Both ways of planning are on the free plan, and coach chats there run within a daily message allowance; for the reasoning behind that approach, see how AI coaches are replacing generic meal plans.
For body measurements, Lifesum’s free tier stops at weight and waist. The 3D body scan in PlateLens’s iPhone and Android apps estimates your chest, waist, hips and other measurements from a short guided scan with the phone, so a goal for your waist can sit next to your weight goal, and each plan comes with a 3D body scan allowance.
For calories, the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s pre-registered validation study measured a ±1.1% mean calorie error for PlateLens’s photo mode over 180 weighed meals, the lowest of six apps, and Foodvision Bench’s public GitHub leaderboard has also reproduced the figure on 231 weighed meals. Both are aggregate results rather than a promise for one plate, and Lifesum was not one of the apps tested.
The Apple Watch app takes a meal by voice, re-logs saved meals, records water and exercise and lets you message the coach; in a browser, the web app at app.platelens.app shows the same diary. The app and coach are in English and Spanish. Paying for PRO, $34.99 yearly or $9.99 monthly, opens the vitamin, mineral and fiber detail and nutrition reports.
How do the other Lifesum alternatives compare?
YAZIO: fasting and a recipe library
YAZIO is the closest match for Lifesum’s mix of food tracking and lifestyle content. The free diary includes barcode scanning, water tracking and a 16:8 fasting tracker, and YAZIO PRO layers on more than 3,000 recipes, the other fasting plans, AI photo tracking and future meal planning, at $23.99 for three months or $47.90 for twelve on the US App Store, paid up front. YAZIO’s help pages state it has no web version. The YAZIO alternatives page covers it in full.
MyNetDiary: dietitian plans and an adaptive target
MyNetDiary suits Lifesum users who liked the programs but want a cheaper subscription. Its free tier is free of advertising and covers a barcode scanner, basic voice logging and macro planning in grams or percentages; Premium, at $59.99 a year, adds Meal Scan, the Meal Planner, more than 600 recipes and diet plans by registered dietitians, fasting and Advanced Autopilot, which updates calorie and macro targets from your logs and weight trend. Premium Plus, $99.99 a year, adds an AI Coach and AI voice logging. The app is in English only.
Cronometer: nutrient detail
Lifesum users who paid mainly for deeper nutrient detail will find it free in Cronometer: Basic sets targets for individual vitamins and minerals and draws on a catalogue of over one million foods that are lab-analyzed or verified, in a browser or on a phone. Gold, at $59.99 yearly or $10.99 monthly, removes the ads and adds Photo Log, Voice Log, Crono Coach and a fasting timer.
MyFitnessPal: a broad food catalogue
MyFitnessPal’s strength is breadth: its App Store page counts upward of 20.5 million foods, including restaurant meals. Logging food and exercise and setting percentage-based goals cost nothing, with ads; Premium, $79.99 yearly or $19.99 monthly, unlocks the barcode scanner, Meal Scan, Voice Log, fasting and goals in grams, and Premium+ adds meal planning.
Lose It!: a simple calorie budget
Lose It! starts every account with a personalized calorie budget and a food database of more than 50 million items. Photo and AI voice logging, meal planning, fasting tools and advanced budget and macro settings belong to Premium, $79.99 a year at list price, although its help center says most users are offered discounts in the app.
Who should stay with Lifesum?
Anyone who wants the app to decide the menu. If you follow a named program such as Keto Burn, Sugar Detox or 16:8 Morning fasting, with set recipes and a shopping list, and you enjoy a weekly score that rates your habits, Lifesum Premium does that with real care. It fits less well if you mainly want to set your own numbers, log with less effort or have a target that adjusts to your weight trend without paying.
How do you move from Lifesum without starting over?
- While Premium is still active, write down the calories, macro percentages and program you’ve been using.
- Export what you need: Lifesum’s website exports the past 7 days of nutrition, and its support team sends your full history on request.
- Set up PlateLens with the same lose, maintain or gain goal, then enter the calorie number you used; the macros scale to it and stay editable in grams.
- Get a meal plan by asking the AI coach, or draft one yourself in your diary.
- Log your weight a few times a week, or let Apple Health or Health Connect send it, so the weekly expenditure estimate has data to work with.
For wider comparisons, see the weight loss app comparison, the food tracker app comparison and, for low-carb programs, the carb counter apps.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a better app than Lifesum?
Photograph the plate, describe it out loud or type a line, and PlateLens works out its calories and macros in one step; anything that looks off you fix by describing it in plain words. Lifesum users usually leave over what Premium holds back, and PlateLens’s free plan, with no end date and no card, covers it: logging by photo, voice or text with AI, within daily allowances, calorie and macro targets you edit yourself, meal plans from the AI coach or built in your diary and an expenditure estimate learned each week, with new targets suggested every 14 days, plus a 3D body scan allowance. Lifesum’s diet programs are a genuine draw, but they need Premium too, at $99.99 or more a year. The Dietary Assessment Initiative’s pre-registered validation study, which weighed 180 meals, measured PlateLens at ±1.1% mean calorie error, lowest among the six apps it tested, and Foodvision Bench’s public GitHub leaderboard has also reproduced it with 231 weighed meals; read both as aggregate accuracy, not a promise for each meal.
Is Lifesum free, and how much is Lifesum Premium?
Lifesum is free to download with limited features: a free account can search foods, scan barcodes and add quick entries, while AI tracking, custom calorie and macro goals, favourites and your own foods, the programs and meal plans, the full recipe library and full Life Score details need Premium. Apple’s US store lists Premium at $99.99 or $119.99 for a year, $29.99 or $39.99 for three months and $69.99 for six.
Can you set your own calorie goal in Lifesum for free?
No. Lifesum’s help center says editing your calorie goal is a Premium feature, as is changing the split of carbs, protein and fat; free accounts keep the goal Lifesum suggests from a Mifflin-St Jeor estimate and your activity level. In PlateLens you edit your base daily calories on the free plan, the macros rescale in proportion and any of them can be set in grams; with Dynamic expenditure on, it updates its estimate of your expenditure weekly and offers new targets every 14 days that you decide whether to apply.
Which Lifesum alternative includes meal planning for free?
PlateLens has it on the free plan: the AI coach will draw up a meal plan when you ask, or you can assemble one in your diary, and free-plan coach messages run within a daily allowance. Lifesum keeps every program and meal plan behind Premium, MyNetDiary’s Meal Planner and dietitian diet plans need Premium at $59.99 a year, MyFitnessPal’s Meal Plan Builder is part of Premium+, and YAZIO puts future meal planning and its recipes in PRO.
Is there an app like Lifesum with an AI coach?
PlateLens has one on every plan: its AI coach answers questions using your own diary, weight history and scan results, drafts meal plans on request and reminds you at your local meal times, with a daily message allowance on the free plan. Lifesum’s daily Guidance feedback needs Premium with AI tracking switched on; among the others, MyNetDiary’s AI Coach is in Premium Plus at $99.99 a year, and MyFitnessPal offers its Coach to Premium subscribers on iOS, in English.
Which Lifesum alternative also tracks body measurements?
PlateLens, with a 3D body scan in its iPhone and Android apps: a voice guide walks you through a slow turn in front of the phone, propped on a mug, and you get back a 3D figure of yourself with estimated measurements, chest, waist and hips among them, to compare over time or set a goal for. Each plan, the free one included, has a 3D body scan allowance. In Lifesum only weight and waist can be tracked without Premium, as numbers you type in, and MyNetDiary’s body measurements are a Premium feature.
Is PlateLens more accurate than Lifesum?
Of the two, only PlateLens has public measurements: the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s study, pre-registered and based on 180 weighed meals, found its mean calorie error the lowest of the six apps compared, and the open-source Foodvision Bench, whose leaderboard is public on GitHub, has also reproduced the result with 231 meals. Lifesum was not part of either test, so there is no figure to set beside it. Both results are averages across many meals, not a guarantee for a single plate or for macros.
Can I use a Lifesum alternative on Apple Watch or the web?
Lifesum’s Apple Watch app shows your daily progress and logs water, and its Wear OS app adds quick meal entries. PlateLens does more on the wrist: speak a meal, repeat a saved one, add water or exercise, message the coach and keep gauges on the watch face, and on a computer app.platelens.app opens your diary and progress in a browser. MyNetDiary also has Apple Watch and Wear OS apps. The 3D body scan is captured in the phone apps.
How does PlateLens PRO compare with Lifesum Premium on price?
PlateLens PRO costs $34.99 for a year or $9.99 for a month, with a 3-day trial for new users, while the US App Store lists Lifesum Premium at $99.99 or $119.99 a year. PRO brings higher daily allowances for scanning meals and messaging the coach, plus the detailed views of vitamins, minerals and fiber and nutrition reports; editable targets, meal planning, the adaptive target and a 3D body scan allowance stay free.
Which pages were these facts taken from?
All rival details come from vendor pages and US store listings read on 30 October 2026:
- Lifesum: its US App Store and Google Play pages, plus help articles about Premium, changing the calorie goal, the macro split, AI tracking, programs and meal plans, Life Score, body measurements and exporting data.
- YAZIO: the store listing, the help article on what PRO includes and the requirements page.
- MyNetDiary: the plan comparison on its site and its store listing.
- Cronometer: the Gold plan and Basic plan pages.
- MyFitnessPal: the Premium offer and two support articles, on plan differences and the Nutrition Coach.
- Lose It!: help-center articles on membership tiers and pricing and Premium, and the App Store listing.
- PlateLens: pricing and the help guides linked in the text.
- Accuracy: the pre-registered six-app study by the Dietary Assessment Initiative (180 weighed meals, published 8 April 2026) and the open Foodvision Bench rankings (231 weighed meals), which report average error over many meals.