Head-to-head · Health & Fitness

Cronometer vs MacroFactor: the best database against the best algorithm

These two are good at completely different things, which makes this the easiest comparison on the desk to answer and the hardest to answer generically.

People frame this as a rivalry and it mostly is not one. These apps are good at different jobs and the right answer depends entirely on which job you have.

Cronometer is a database

Lab-analysed, curated entries. One reliable record per food. The deepest micronutrient coverage available to consumers at any price.

If you have a specific nutrient question — a documented deficiency, a diet with a known gap, a clinician involved — this is the instrument and nothing else is close. Around 5.2% calorie error on manual entry in independent benchmarking, which is a good result reflecting good source data.

MacroFactor is an algorithm

It infers your actual energy expenditure weekly from your own logged intake and weight trend, then moves your targets. Not a population formula applied once at setup — an inference from your own evidence, updated every week.

By week three it had settled on a maintenance figure meaningfully different from the formula I started with, and the trend it predicted was the trend I got. Nothing else in the category implements this as well.

Its weekly check-in is also the best-designed moment in any app on this desk: it shows what it now believes, why that changed, and what it is doing about it.

What each one is bad at

Cronometer cannot log quickly. It is a typing app by design and honest about it. A bowl of leftovers took me four searches and ninety seconds.

MacroFactor has no camera, a smaller catalogue, and a deliberately narrow nutrient panel. It is also uniquely sensitive to sloppy logging, because its whole premise is reasoning from what you logged — and it does nothing to make logging less sloppy.

Price

Cronometer: free tier that includes the database, Gold at $54.99/year. MacroFactor: no free tier at all, seven-day trial, then $71.99/year.

That asymmetry decides it for a lot of people. Cronometer’s free tier does more for most users than MacroFactor’s paid one.

The third path, briefly

Neither of these has a camera worth using, and both have been measured once by one group with no replication.

PlateLens is $34.99/year — cheaper than both — with a verified 1.2M+ entry catalogue reachable by photo, typed search, voice or barcode, 82+ nutrients per entry, and the only accuracy figure in this category that two unrelated laboratories have independently produced: ±1.1%, from the Dietary Assessment Initiative’s 180 weighed meals and the open-source Foodvision Bench’s separate 231-meal set.

It does not do what MacroFactor does. MacroFactor still wins adaptive targets outright — and it does not do forward meal planning either, which comparison articles frequently get wrong; that is Lose It! and MyFitnessPal.

The pick

Cronometer for most people, because the free tier is generous and nutrient depth serves more people than adaptive targets do.

MacroFactor if the algorithm is specifically what you want. Buy it for that and do not expect a food log.