What is the best alternative to MyFitnessPal?

For accuracy of the calorie target, MacroFactor — it measures maintenance from your own weight trend instead of predicting it from an activity dropdown. For nutrient rigour, Cronometer. For a free swap with a similar feel, Lose It. If your training volume changes week to week, the target is the thing to fix, and only the adaptive trackers fix it.

Why is my MyFitnessPal calorie goal wrong?

Because it is predicted, not measured. It takes your height, weight, age and an activity level you chose once from a dropdown, and runs a population formula. Individual maintenance varies by roughly plus or minus 200 to 300 kcal a day around any such prediction, and the dropdown cannot represent a training load that changes weekly. It is not a bug; it is the method.

Is there a free alternative to MyFitnessPal Premium?

Cronometer's free tier is the strongest — full macro and micronutrient logging with a verified database, and no paywall on the basics. Lose It's free tier is closer in feel to MyFitnessPal. Neither free tier gives you an adaptive calorie target, because that method needs sustained data and is what the paid products charge for.

Does MyFitnessPal account for exercise properly?

It adds back an estimated exercise calorie burn, which is the least reliable number in the app. Estimated burns from a phone or a treadmill routinely overstate by 20 to 30 percent, and eating them back is the most common reason a deficit stops working. Adaptive trackers avoid this entirely by never adding exercise calories in the first place.

What has the best food database if I leave MyFitnessPal?

Nothing matches it on raw size or barcode coverage, and that is worth being honest about. Cronometer's database is smaller but verified. MacroFactor's is well curated and large enough for most diets. If your diet is varied and includes a lot of packaged or regional foods, database size may genuinely be the deciding factor.

MyFitnessPal Alternatives That Fix the Calorie Target

The one structural problem

MyFitnessPal predicts your maintenance calories. It takes your height, weight, age, sex and an activity level you picked from a dropdown once, and runs a population regression.

Two things follow from that, and neither is fixable with a better database.

Individual variation swamps the prediction. Real maintenance sits roughly plus or minus 200 to 300 kcal a day around any formula's output for a given person. A 2,600 kcal target might be your actual 2,350 or your actual 2,900, and the app has no way to find out which.

The dropdown cannot represent a moving training load. "Moderately active" is one value. A week with two long runs and four lifting sessions and a week with a taper are not the same metabolic week, and there is no setting between them. Why this breaks specifically for people running both halves.

Then it compounds the error by adding exercise calories back. Estimated burns from phone sensors and cardio machines routinely overstate energy cost by 20 to 30 percent, and eating that back is the single most common reason a carefully planned deficit produces no weight change. What running actually costs, measured.

The alternatives, by what they fix

Fixes the target: MacroFactor

Derives maintenance from your own trend weight against your own logged intake. No formula, no dropdown, no exercise calories added back. Adding thirty miles a week is absorbed automatically because both the weight and the intake moved.

This is the correct method and MacroFactor implements it best. What you lose is database size and the free tier. Full head-to-head.

Fixes the data quality: Cronometer

MyFitnessPal's database is huge because it is user-submitted, which is also why a third of the entries are wrong. Cronometer distinguishes lab-verified foods from crowd-sourced ones and carries eighty-plus micronutrients.

Best free tier in the category. Still predicts your calorie target from a formula, so the core problem survives the move. Where Cronometer's rigour helps and where it stops.

Fixes nothing but feels familiar: Lose It

Similar interface, similar model, cleaner execution, cheaper premium. If your complaint is the ads and the upsells rather than the arithmetic, this is the low-friction swap.

Fixes the entry friction: a template-first logger

If your diet is a rotation of the same meals, search is the wrong primary flow. Saving the day you usually eat and replaying it in one tap turns five searches into one tap. Base leads with this; the trade is that a varied diet is worse served.

The target is wrong because the app cannot see the training. Fixing the target adaptively — as MacroFactor does — solves the calorie number without solving the attribution: you learn that your expenditure rose, not whether it was the endurance block or the extra walking, and nothing changes on the training side in response.

The comparison

	MyFitnessPal	MacroFactor	Cronometer	Lose It	Base
Calorie target method	Predicted	Measured	Predicted	Predicted	Measured
Adds exercise calories back	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No, expenditure is the target
Database size	Largest	Large	Medium, verified	Large	Adequate; templates first
Barcode scanning	Best	Yes	Yes	Yes	Open Food Facts, optional
Micronutrients	Yes	Yes	Best in class	Limited	18, with coverage reporting
Free tier	Yes, limited	No	Yes, strong	Yes	Beta
Set and rep logging	No	No	No	No	Yes, with RIR
Endurance prescription	No	No	No	No	From your own threshold
Shows its formulas	No	Documented	Partly	No	Every derived number

The honest recommendation

Stay if your diet is varied and packaged, you use barcodes constantly, and you are willing to treat the calorie target as a starting guess you adjust by watching the scale yourself. That is a legitimate way to use it, and plenty of people get lean doing exactly that.

Switch to MacroFactor if you want the target to be right without you doing the adjustment manually.

Switch to Cronometer if you have a specific nutrient question and want data you can trust.

Switch out of pure nutrition tracking if the reason the target keeps being wrong is that your training changes every week and no food app can see it. That is a different category of tool.

Before paying for anything, check your current target against your own numbers — the calculator prints the arithmetic, so you can see how far off a predicted figure is for your training week.