Best MacroFactor Alternatives (2026–2027)

MacroFactor has no free plan: after a 7-day trial it costs $71.99 a year, so a cheaper alternative has to keep its best part, a calorie target that adapts to your weigh-ins. Picks by reason: PlateLens as the best all-round pick, with that weekly learning on its free plan and PRO at $34.99 a year; MyNetDiary for adaptive targets in Premium at $59.99 a year; Cronometer for micronutrient detail; MyFitnessPal for the biggest food search; FatSecret and Lose It! for a simple diary; Carbon Diet Coach for check-ins at a higher price.

MacroFactor

$71.99/yr · $11.99/mo

MacroFactor trial

7 days · no free tier

Adaptive target

PlateLens free plan · weekly learning

3D body scan

PlateLens · iPhone & Android

Calorie error

Dietary Assessment Initiative’s published study: PlateLens ±1.1%, MacroFactor 4.8%, averages over 180 weighed meals, not per meal

What do you give up if you leave MacroFactor?

MacroFactor is built around one idea done well: your target should follow what actually happens to your weight. Each week it compares the calories and macros you logged with your weight trend, estimates the energy you really burn and resets your calories, protein, carbs and fat for the week ahead. You choose how much control to keep in Coached, Collaborative or Manual mode, and its check-in keeps working when you go over a target, with no warnings or red numbers.

Logging is quick too. Its Google Play listing names AI photo, meal description, speech-to-text, barcode and nutrition-label scanning against a verified database of more than 1.36 million entries, and the app is free of advertising. In the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s six-app study it had the second-lowest calorie error, 4.8%.

The price is the usual reason to look elsewhere. MacroFactor lists $11.99 a month, $47.99 for six months or $71.99 a year in the US, which it presents as $5.99 a month, all after a 7-day trial; its App Store listing says plainly that there is no free subscription tier. The separate MacroFactor Workouts app turns that into an $89.99 yearly bundle. MacroFactor’s FAQ also says the app is not available on a desktop computer yet.

So the cheaper alternative worth having is not just any calorie counter. It is one that keeps a target that learns from you, and ideally makes the logging that feeds it easier.

Which MacroFactor alternatives cost less?

Here are seven alternatives, ordered from the lowest yearly price to the highest, with MacroFactor placed where its price falls for reference. Prices are in US dollars, taken on 28 October 2026 from each company’s pricing or help pages and its US App Store or Google Play listing.

For a MacroFactor user, the second column is the one that matters. Four apps here move your target with your weigh-ins: MacroFactor, Carbon Diet Coach, MyNetDiary on its Premium tier and PlateLens on its free plan. Against MacroFactor’s $71.99, PlateLens PRO saves $37 a year, MyNetDiary Premium saves $12 and Carbon adds $28; paying MacroFactor month by month comes to $143.88 a year.

Two listings deserve a caveat. Lose It!’s help center quotes $79.99 a year for Premium, yet its App Store page carries several Premium prices starting at $9.99, and FatSecret’s App Store page shows two or three prices per billing period, of which this table uses the lowest.

What else separates the alternatives?

With the target settled, day-to-day friction decides whether you keep going: how fast a meal goes in, whether anything answers your questions, and whether you can measure more than body weight.

MacroFactor bundles all of its logging into the subscription, so judge each cheaper app by what it gives before any payment. On that basis, photo entry is a paid extra everywhere except PlateLens, and so is AI voice entry (MyNetDiary’s free tier keeps simple voice entry), and no other app in this comparison offers a 3D body scan.

Why is PlateLens the best all-round MacroFactor alternative?

Because it keeps the part of MacroFactor people pay for and drops the bill. Switch on Dynamic expenditure in Your expenditure and PlateLens checks your logged meals and weigh-ins shortly afterwards, then every Sunday once the week has closed. It needs meals on at least four days and one weigh-in a week, moves your expenditure by at most 5% per update, and Why it changed spells out each move. Every 14 days it reviews your targets and suggests new ones; nothing changes until you choose Apply New Targets, and you can add a resting metabolism you had measured. All of that is on the free plan.

The log that feeds it takes seconds. A photo of the plate, a spoken note or a typed line (“chicken burrito bowl, no rice, extra beans”) becomes a meal with calories and macros, in about 2.1 seconds on average; packaged food goes in by barcode or catalogue search, and anything wrong is fixed by telling Fix it what changed. If you raise or lower your calories, protein, carbs and fat follow in proportion and stay editable in grams, as the targets guide explains.

Questions go to the AI coach, which reads your meals, weigh-ins and scan results, checks in at your local meal times and can explain, for instance, why this week’s target moved. Free accounts get a daily message allowance.

The other thing MacroFactor users ask for is a way to see a recomposition when the scale stalls. PlateLens’s 3D body scan runs in its iPhone and Android apps: prop the phone up, turn slowly as the voice guide asks, and the app returns an interactive 3D model with estimated measurements of the chest, upper and lower waist, hips and more, and an estimated body-fat percentage when available. Track one measurement across scans, compare two side by side, give a measurement a goal and watch a preview illustrate it on your model, or export a scan as a PDF. Camera photos are removed once processing ends, and each plan, the free one included, comes with a 3D body scan allowance; the 3D body scan guide shows the steps.

For the calorie side, the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s pre-registered validation study weighed 180 meals and found ±1.1% mean error for PlateLens’s photo mode and 4.8% for MacroFactor; Foodvision Bench, an open-source leaderboard on GitHub, has also reproduced PlateLens’s result on 231 weighed meals. Those are averages across meals, not a promise for any single meal or for macros, and they matter because a learned target can only be as good as the intake it learns from.

Beyond the phone, PlateLens has an Apple Watch app and a web app, plus optional alcohol tracking and glucose readings from Apple Health or Health Connect next to your meals. PRO, at $9.99 a month or $34.99 a year with a 3-day trial for new users, raises the daily allowances and opens the detailed vitamin, mineral and fiber views and nutrition reports; meals logged on the free plan keep their nutrient estimates in the meantime.

How do the other MacroFactor alternatives compare?

MyNetDiary: adaptive targets in Premium

If you want MacroFactor’s weekly recalculation and are happy to pay a little less for it, MyNetDiary is the nearest fit: its Advanced Autopilot uses your logged food, exercise and Trending Weight line to update calories and macros once a week. That sits in Premium, at $59.99 a year. The free tier keeps a staff-verified database of more than 2 million foods, barcode scanning and simple voice entry, with no advertising according to its App Store page; Meal Scan photos are Premium, and AI Coach and AI voice entry need Premium Plus at $99.99 a year.

Cronometer: micronutrient detail

Some people came to MacroFactor for the nutrient breakdown more than the algorithm. Cronometer is the specialist there, with curated, lab-analyzed food data and vitamin and mineral tracking against your own targets on its free Basic plan. Its plan page lists no target that follows your weight, and photo and voice entry, Crono Coach and long-range charts belong to Gold, $59.99 a year or $10.99 a month. See the MacroFactor vs Cronometer comparison and the Cronometer alternatives guide.

FatSecret: a simple diary with a community

FatSecret’s free food diary sets calorie and macro goals, scans barcodes and comes with an active community. FatSecret Premium adds Smart Food Scan for photos, Smart Assistant for voice or text entries, meal plans from its dietitians and water tracking, from $10.49 a month on the US App Store.

MyFitnessPal: the biggest food search

MyFitnessPal is about breadth: more than 20.5 million foods in its App Store description, restaurant meals included. Free accounts log nutrition, weight and exercise with ads, while the tools MacroFactor users expect, barcode and Meal Scan, Voice Log, gram-based macro goals and the AI Coach, are Premium at $79.99 a year or $19.99 a month, above MacroFactor’s price. The MacroFactor vs MyFitnessPal comparison goes into the details.

Lose It!: a calorie budget first

Lose It! starts free users with a personalized calorie budget, a weight-loss plan and community features, and keeps photo logging, AI Voice, barcode scanning and macro tracking for Premium, which its help center prices at $79.99 a year while App Store offers start at $9.99.

Carbon Diet Coach: check-ins, at a higher price

Carbon Diet Coach, co-founded by Layne Norton, PhD, is the closest to MacroFactor in method: you log food and weight, check in each week and get an adjusted plan, with balanced, low-carb, low-fat, keto or plant-based settings and a planner for high and low days. Its food search runs on FatSecret’s database. It costs more than MacroFactor: $99.99 a year, $59.99 for six months or $11.99 a month.

When is MacroFactor still worth $71.99 a year?

When you want the coaching modes and you are happy to pay for them. If you run planned cuts and bulks, like choosing between Coached, Collaborative and Manual programs, want its macro programming for different days or plan to use MacroFactor Workouts as well, the subscription buys a mature tool without advertising. It is harder to justify if price is the obstacle, because a weekly learned expenditure with suggested targets is also on PlateLens’s free plan, and the MacroFactor pricing guide lays out every plan and the trial terms.

How do you switch from MacroFactor without losing your trend?

1. Note your current calorie and macro targets and your latest trend weight in MacroFactor before the subscription ends.
2. In the new app, enter the same goal and start from those targets rather than a fresh estimate.
3. Keep weighing in on your usual days; in PlateLens, weigh-ins can sync from Apple Health or Health Connect, and the first learned value comes from the first complete week that meets the minimums.
4. Give it two or three weeks of steady logging before you judge the new target.

For the method behind weekly expenditure estimates, see how PlateLens’s adaptive algorithm works and three ways to find your real TDEE.

Frequently asked questions

Where are these prices and features from?

All rival prices and features were checked on 28 October 2026 against the company’s own pages or its US store listing:

• MacroFactor: App Store, Google Play, the subscriptions article in its help center and the FAQ on its app page.
• Carbon Diet Coach: App Store listing and joincarbon.com.
• MyNetDiary: free-plan page and App Store listing.
• Cronometer: Gold plan page and App Store listing.
• FatSecret: Google Play and App Store listings, plus its Premium page.
• MyFitnessPal: Premium page. Lose It!: App Store listing and help center.
• PlateLens: the pricing page and the support guides linked in this article.
• Accuracy: the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s study (pre-registered, 180 weighed meals, published 8 April 2026) and the Foodvision Bench leaderboard (231 weighed meals) report average calorie error, not a guarantee for a single meal or for macros.