FatSecret vs MyNetDiary: Which Free Tracker Wins?

Sergey Oreshko - Co-founder and CEO of MyNetDiary

FatSecret built two decades of goodwill on being completely free. Its Premium now costs $59.99 a year, the same as MyNetDiary's. We compared both food tracking apps tier by tier, and the free gap is wider than the price tags suggest.

For most of two decades, FatSecret's pitch was the simplest in the category: everything free. That era is over. FatSecret Premium now costs $59.99 a year in the US App Store, the exact annual price of MyNetDiary Premium, which turns the FatSecret vs MyNetDiary question into something more interesting than a price check. What does each food tracking app actually deliver at every price tier, including zero?

The short answer: MyNetDiary for most people. With both Premiums at $59.99 a year, the contest is the free tier, where MyNetDiary includes barcode scanning, voice logging, and up to 108 nutrients, with no ads and no account required, against FatSecret's free scanner, ads, account wall, and 18 nutrients. FatSecret has some other advantages, and they are specific ones.

I have been building MyNetDiary since 2005, and for most of those years FatSecret was the free tier everyone measured against. This comparison takes that reputation seriously enough to check it, line by line, against what both apps publish today.

Is FatSecret really completely free?

Not anymore, and the reputation deserves an honest accounting. FatSecret's core remains free: the food diary, calorie and macro tracking with goals and detailed reporting, the barcode scanner, the exercise diary, the weight tracker, and its community. But as of July 2026, FatSecret Premium costs $14.99 a month, $28.99 a quarter, or $59.99 a year in the US App Store, and several convenience features live behind it.

FatSecret earned the free reputation honestly, and pieces of it still hold. The scanner stays free. So do the community, the reminders, the photo album, and sharing your diary with a health professional of your choice. Fitbit and Garmin connect free as well.

What moved upmarket is the modern convenience layer. Per FatSecret's own Premium page and store listings, Premium is where you get Smart Food Scan (photo food logging), Smart Assistant (dictate or type a meal to log it), water tracking, dietitian-created meal plans, advanced meal planning, and custom meal headings. None of that is scandalous; it is the same freemium shape most of the category uses. It just is not "completely free," and the annual price now matches MyNetDiary's exactly, while the monthly price runs $6 higher.

What do you get free in MyNetDiary?

MyNetDiary's free tier is the full tracking core: free barcode scanning, complete macro and nutrient tracking, voice logging, a water tracker, a shopping list, food sharing with family and friends, and the community, with no ads anywhere and no account required to start. MyNetDiary now provides more at zero dollars than the app that built its name on zero dollars. The voice logging and water tracker above are Premium features in FatSecret, and the shopping list and family food sharing have no FatSecret counterpart at any tier.

The data is not downgraded either; free users log against the same verified database paid users get. For how it stacks up across the wider field, see the best free calorie tracking apps compared.

The free barcode scanner is worth dwelling on, because scanner paywalls are the single most common reason people abandon a tracker. MyNetDiary's is a free barcode scanner with accurate nutrition data behind it, drawing on the same verified entries at every tier. Offline logging works too, so a dead spot in a grocery store does not end the day's tracking.

Here is a clean way to compare any two free tiers. Call it the actually-free test, four questions that separate a free price from free value: Is the barcode scanner free? Are there ads? Is an account required to start? Does free tracking go beyond the standard nutrition label?

MyNetDiary passes all four. FatSecret passes one. Its scanner is free, but we verified in the app itself that the free plan carries ads and an account is required to start, and its 18-nutrient tracking, the FDA-style label set, fails the depth question, as the next two sections show. Every answer here was checked in both apps on July 30, 2026; our five-minute method for vetting any calorie tracker shows how to run the same checks on any tracker before you commit.

Which app has the more accurate food database?

Accuracy starts with a question you can verify. Where does the data come from, and who checks it? MyNetDiary publishes its answer. The database holds 2M+ foods, staff-verified, built on USDA FoodData Central and the University of Minnesota NCC Food and Nutrient Database, the USDA and NCC research-grade sources used in clinical nutrition research, with 2,500-3,500 foods reviewed and updated daily.

FatSecret's store listing describes its data as "the world's highest quality food and nutrition database." That is a claim, and it may reflect real effort, but FatSecret's official materials disclose no verification pipeline, no reviewer, and no update cadence to check it against. Its food pages mix USDA-derived generic entries with brand data and member-submitted content, member recipes and member photos included.

Verification is not an abstraction; it shows up in the details. When we spot-checked FatSecret's flagship generic entry for bananas during this comparison, the page listed its last update as February 2008.

February 2008. A banana has not changed since then, to be fair, but labels, brands, and serving conventions have, and a disclosed daily review cadence is the difference between a database that is maintained and one that is accumulated. That is the substance behind verified nutritional data as MyNetDiary uses the term: a described process you can hold to account. Our team reviews thousands of foods every day; I check that queue often enough to know what the process costs, which is exactly why so few apps commit to one. The full argument for why database quality beats database size is its own article, and the database itself is documented here.

To be precise about what this section does not claim: we have not run a food-by-food accuracy audit of FatSecret, so we do not say MyNetDiary is more accurate. We say one database's accuracy process is disclosed and checkable, and the other's is not. For nutrition data, that difference is the whole game.

How many nutrients does each app track?

MyNetDiary tracks up to 108 nutrients per food entry, in the free tier, including omega fatty acids, amino acids, and the full vitamin and mineral set. FatSecret tracks 18 nutrients per food entry, the standard label set. Its public web food pages show the same label-style panel.

The gap is nutrient completeness, the number of nutrient fields actually populated per food entry, and it is the metric that separates trackers that look identical in screenshots. In FatSecret there is no B-vitamin, magnesium, zinc, or omega-3 tracking, and nothing at the amino acid level. If your reasons for tracking include iron and B12 on a plant-forward diet, vitamin D through a northern winter, or protein quality rather than protein grams, the label panel runs out exactly where your questions begin.

Take a concrete dinner. Log a salmon fillet with a spinach salad. Both apps will give you the calories and macros. Only one will also show the omega-3s, folate, magnesium, and zinc on that plate, and it shows them without a subscription.

What does Premium add in each app?

At $59.99 a year each, the Premium tiers are priced identically and built differently. FatSecret Premium, per its store descriptions, adds Smart Food Scan photo logging, Smart Assistant quick logging, water tracking, dietitian-created meal plans, advanced meal planning, and custom meal headings. MyNetDiary Premium adds a substantially longer list, and its monthly path costs $8.99 to FatSecret's $14.99.

Photo food logging is the one Premium feature the two apps share; the difference sits underneath, where MyNetDiary's Meal Scan is grounded in the verified database, with a "Hints" text field for details a photo cannot show and a portion-confirmation workflow. MyNetDiary Premium then adds intermittent fasting, recipe import, auto-logging, body measurement tracking across 12 types, medication tracking, blood glucose tracking, custom trackers, Advanced AutoPilot metabolism adjustment, and GLP-1 Companion, nutrition-first support for people on GLP-1 medications. FatSecret offers no equivalents to that list at any price.

One pricing quirk deserves its own paragraph. MyNetDiary Premium Plus costs $14.99 a month, the exact figure FatSecret charges monthly for its base Premium, and it buys an AI layer FatSecret does not attempt: AI Coach for on-demand nutrition coaching, AI Restaurant Menu Scan, which reads a restaurant menu and recommends dishes against your remaining calories and macros, and Suggest Meals for AI-generated meal ideas. FatSecret's nearest neighbor is the set of dietitian-created meal plans in its Premium tier; its published lists show no coaching assistant, no menu reading, and no AI meal suggestions.

At a glance

When is FatSecret the right choice?

FatSecret: broad international support in 26 languages and a large long-running community. Those are its honest headlines, and for some people they decide the comparison. The app is available in 26 languages, and the list is still growing; Arabic arrived on iOS in June 2026, Thai and Vietnamese in April. If tracking in your first language is the difference between logging and not logging, that reach matters more than any nutrient count.

The community is the other durable asset. It has run for the better part of two decades, with active groups, member recipes with precalculated nutrition, and member food photos woven through the food pages. Device sync sits quietly in FatSecret's column too. Fitbit and Garmin connect in its free tier, Google Fit and Samsung Health on Android as well; MyNetDiary connects Fitbit, Garmin, and Withings. Neither list should decide this comparison. And the scanner stays free, which is more than several bigger names can say.

Which should you choose?

Choose FatSecret if one of its 26 languages is your first language and English-only tracking has been the barrier, if its community and groups are what keeps you logging, or if a simple free calorie counter with a barcode scanner, ads included, is genuinely all you want.

Choose MyNetDiary for everything past that line. If you want real nutrition depth in a free tier rather than a label-style panel, with no ads and no account, the free comparison is not close. If you expect to go paid, the same $59.99 a year buys far more in MyNetDiary, with the cheaper $8.99 monthly path, including fasting, body measurements, glucose and medication tracking, Advanced AutoPilot, and GLP-1 Companion, none of which FatSecret sells at any price. A step up to Premium Plus adds AI Coach, AI Restaurant Menu Scan, and Suggest Meals for what FatSecret charges monthly for its base tier. And if the accuracy of the numbers is why you track at all, choose the database whose verification process you can actually read.

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