MacroFactor vs MyFitnessPal: how they differ, and who each suits

MacroFactor vs MyFitnessPal comes down to one question: where should your calorie target come from? MyFitnessPal starts from a formula. MacroFactor works it out from what you eat and how your weight moves, then adjusts it every week.

So which should you use? Pick MacroFactor if you like data, will log every meal in full, and don’t need a free plan. Pick MyFitnessPal if you want a free plan, a very large food database and a long list of connected devices. Every feature and price below comes from each company’s own site and official app store listings, read on October 31, 2026. We didn’t test either app ourselves.

Key takeaways

• MyFitnessPal sets your goal with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation plus or minus 500 calories a day for each pound a week you want to gain or lose. MacroFactor back-calculates your burn from your food log and weight trend and updates targets weekly.
• MacroFactor’s method needs complete logs. Its own site calls partial tracking its “Achilles heel”: a dinner you eat but don’t log pulls the estimate down.
• As of October 31, 2026, MacroFactor has no free plan ($11.99 a month or $71.99 a year). MyFitnessPal has a free plan, and Premium costs $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Both offer a 7-day trial.
• Both log by photo, voice and barcode. In MyFitnessPal those are Premium tools.
• We found no study that tested the two apps head to head. The better tracker is the one you’re still using next month.

Which one should you pick?

The rest of the post gives the reasons, so you can check them against how you eat.

How do MacroFactor and MyFitnessPal differ at a glance?

As of October 31, 2026, this is what each company says about its own app.

Sources: MacroFactor’s app page, its US App Store listing, Google Play listing and help center; MyFitnessPal’s home page and Premium page. Where a company’s own pages disagree, the table shows both figures.

How does each app set your calorie target?

This is the real difference between them, so it’s worth a minute.

MyFitnessPal: an equation, then simple arithmetic

MyFitnessPal’s home page says it estimates your resting burn with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. Then it adds or subtracts “500 calories per pound of weight change per week desired”.

The equation is a sound choice. A 2005 systematic review in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association (PMID 15883556) found Mifflin-St Jeor “the most reliable” of the equations it compared. The same review warned of “noteworthy errors and limitations” when an equation is applied to one person. That’s the catch with any formula: it predicts a group well and you less well.

The 500 calories a day rule has a known limit too. Over a week, 500 a day is 3,500 calories, the old “3500 kcal per pound rule”. In a 2011 paper in The Lancet (PMID 21872751), Kevin Hall and colleagues wrote that this rule “ignores dynamic physiological adaptations”: as your weight changes, so does the energy you burn.

The NIH’s free Body Weight Planner is built on that research.

MyFitnessPal’s pages, read on October 31, 2026, don’t say whether it updates your goal on its own as your weight changes.

MacroFactor: worked out from your own log

MacroFactor builds the estimate from your data instead. Its FAQ calls the estimate “a deterministic calculation” from two inputs: what you ate and how your weight trend moved.

The site gives its own example. Say you’ve eaten about 3,000 calories a day, and your trend shows a surplus of about 200 a day. Your burn is about 3,000 minus 200, or 2,800 calories. Each week, at a check-in, the app recalculates and adjusts your calorie and macro targets for the week ahead.

Two details are worth knowing. MacroFactor calls its updates “adherence neutral”: they follow what you actually ate, not how closely you hit last week’s numbers. And its App Store listing promises no “warnings, red numbers, or shaming” when you go over.

The trade-off: complete logs

The method depends on complete logs. MacroFactor’s site says it plainly: partial tracking is its “Achilles heel”. If you log breakfast and lunch but not dinner, the app reads that day as lower intake. Your estimated burn, and your future targets, go down.

So MacroFactor rewards complete logging, and MyFitnessPal’s formula doesn’t depend on it. If you log every meal, MacroFactor’s number is built from your own data. If you often leave meals unlogged, a formula target may serve you better.

What does MacroFactor do best?

The target. If you’ve ever followed a calorie goal for a month and wondered why nothing moved, a number built from your own log and scale is the appeal. Its Google Play listing sums it up: each week it “compares your calorie and macro intake with your weight trend”.

Three more things stand out:

• Logging tools come with the plan. AI photo logging, Describe (type or say what you ate), a barcode scanner, a nutrition label scanner and a recipe importer that takes a link or a cookbook photo.
• No ads. The site says “We will never serve ads or use ad networks to track you.”
• Flexible plans. It offers coached, collaborative and manual modes, low-carb to carb-focused diets, and different macros on different days.

The trade-offs are the price and the database. There’s no free version, and its database is “more than 1.36 million verified food entries”, a smaller count than MyFitnessPal’s (MacroFactor counts verified entries; MyFitnessPal’s figure is its total).

Its help center also notes that Describe searches “a database of common foods, not the full database of branded foods”. And there’s no web or desktop version: “Not right now”, says its FAQ.

What does MyFitnessPal do best?

Range, and a free way in. MyFitnessPal’s home page cites “over 18 million global foods”, as of October 31, 2026. If you eat a wide range of foods, that breadth helps.

The free plan is real. It covers calories, macros, vitamins and minerals, weight, exercise and water. You search for foods by hand, and the shortcuts are paid: barcode scan, Meal Scan (photos) and Voice Log are all Premium, along with custom macro goals by day and ad-free logging.

It also connects to more devices. The home page lists Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, Samsung Health, Health Connect and smart scales. MacroFactor syncs with Apple Health and Health Connect, but its help center says it doesn’t use a wearable’s estimate of calories burned.

Premium costs more than MacroFactor: $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year, against $11.99 or $71.99. MacroFactor’s own site makes that same point. First-time Premium users get a 7-day free trial.

What does research say about each app?

We found no study that put MacroFactor and MyFitnessPal head to head. One peer-reviewed study included both, among many apps.

In a 2024 study in Nutrients (PMID 39125452), researchers who screened Australia’s app stores logged set 3-day menus in 16 food-logging apps. MacroFactor (version 2.6.8) and MyFitnessPal were among them. They compared each app’s totals with the researchers’ own food records.

For a Western-style menu, 14 of the 16 apps came out higher on energy, by a mean of 1,040 kJ (about 250 calories). For an Asian-style menu, 13 of 16 came out lower, by a mean of 1,520 kJ (about 360 calories).

The paper gives per-app results only in its figures. It also tested 2024 versions on Australian foods, before MacroFactor added photo logging. So read it as a caution about every database app, not a verdict on either one.

The same study found MyFitnessPal’s photo feature tied with two other apps for the highest accuracy at naming the foods in a picture (97%, 38 of 39). That was about recognizing foods, not counting calories.

Its authors concluded that automatic energy estimates from food photos were inaccurate. For more on that, see how AI calorie counters work, and where they miss. For MyFitnessPal’s own numbers, see is MyFitnessPal accurate?.

Which one is easier to keep using?

Neither, if logging feels like a chore. Research on tracking keeps finding the same thing: people log less as the weeks go by.

In a 2019, 12-week trial in JMIR mHealth and uHealth (PMID 30816851), 105 adults used MyFitnessPal for weight loss. The group that used the app on its own logged its diet on a median of 2.9 days a week. A 2021 review of 39 trials in Obesity (PMID 33624440) found that few programs kept people self-monitoring on 75% or more of days.

That matters more for MacroFactor than for MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal’s formula target isn’t built from your food log, so a gap doesn’t feed into it. A gap in MacroFactor feeds into next week’s target, which is why its weekly check-ins include coaching modules for partial logging and logging breaks.

A few habits help in either app:

• Log at the table, not at night from memory.
• Estimate when you’re unsure. A rough entry beats a blank one, especially in MacroFactor.
• Save the meals you repeat, so breakfast takes one tap.

Tracking isn’t right for everyone. If you have a history of disordered eating, talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian before you start counting.

The better tracker is the one you still open on a busy Thursday in week five.

Where does Getfiit fit?

We make Getfiit, so weigh this section with that in mind. It’s an AI nutrition and fitness coach that lives in WhatsApp, so there’s no new app to install. You send a photo, a voice note or a sentence, and it replies with calories, protein, carbs and fat.

It’s built for the person who drops out of both apps above: the one who cares about the numbers but stops opening an app to log them. It sets daily calorie and macro targets from your goal and profile, and it checks in at a time you pick. Here’s an illustration of a log, not a measured result:

9:41

Getfiit

online

Today

breakfast12:38

Looks like avocado toast with two poached eggs and a flat white. Was the toast drizzled with oil or buttered?12:39

a little olive oil12:40

Logged, with a teaspoon of olive oil. Reply to the entry or tap Edit if anything's off.12:41

It doesn’t scan barcodes, and it doesn’t sync with a watch or a scale. If you want an adaptive target built from a complete log, MacroFactor is made for that. If you want the larger database and the longer device list of the two, that’s MyFitnessPal.

As of October 31, 2026, Getfiit costs $19.99 a month after a 3-day free trial, and you can cancel anytime. See how it works.

Frequently asked questions

Is MacroFactor better than MyFitnessPal?

Not across the board. MacroFactor is better suited to someone who logs every meal and wants a target that adapts. MyFitnessPal is better suited to someone who wants a free plan, a bigger database and more device syncs. We found no study that compared the two directly.

Is MacroFactor free?

No. As of October 31, 2026, MacroFactor has a 7-day free trial and then costs $11.99 a month, $47.99 a half year or $71.99 a year in the US. Its site says there “will never be” a free version.

Which is cheaper, MacroFactor or MyFitnessPal?

MyFitnessPal’s free plan costs nothing. Among paid plans, MacroFactor is cheaper: $71.99 a year against $79.99 for MyFitnessPal Premium, and $11.99 a month against $19.99, as of October 31, 2026.

Does MacroFactor use my Apple Watch or Fitbit calories?

No. Its help center says it doesn’t use a wearable’s estimate of calories burned to calculate your expenditure or set targets. It does connect to Apple Health and Health Connect, and it can import your step count.

What if I’m weighing other trackers too?

See MyFitnessPal alternatives for a wider list, or the head-to-heads for Cronometer and Lose It. If macros are new to you, start with how to track macros without weighing everything.

Your next step

Pick one and use its 7-day trial on an ordinary week, not your best one. Log every meal you can, and notice which days you didn’t log. If the gaps win, the method is the problem, not you. Browse our other tracker comparisons or see a faster way to log.