Food journaling has never been easier with food-tracking apps for smartphones and tablets. Some of the best food-tracking apps use your phone’s camera to scan food label barcodes to track calories, macronutrients, and protein amounts in the foods you eat.

Share Progress With Friends: MyFitnessPal

With more than 6 million foods in its database and more than 4 million food barcodes, MyFitnessPal makes it easy to log breakfast, lunch, dinner, and afternoon snacks. With powerful metrics, My FitnessPal gives insights on calories, fat, protein, carbs, sugar, fiber, cholesterol, and vitamins. It’s easy to plan your meals in advance and stay on track with your nutritional goals. 

  • Connect with friends.

  • Get motivation from the My Fitness Pal community.

  • Smartphone interface can be clunky to use.

  • Difficult to enter meals quickly.

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Eating Out, Meal, Alcohol, and Snack Tracker: Ultimate Food Value Diary

The Ultimate Food Value Diary by Fenlander Software Solutions is also an exercise tracker app that helps track your workouts, diet, weight, and measurements. This food app uses calorific values to calculate food values using the standard macronutrients of protein, carbs, fat, and fiber.

  • The Meal Maker feature allows you to group items together for an automatic portion calculation.

  • Excellent customer support.

  • Unable to import a traditional recipe.

  • Doesn’t recognize barcodes from the UK.

Empower Your Plate With Data: MyPlate

We all start out with the best intentions when it comes to eating. But hunger, life, crazy schedules, and cravings often get in the way. MyPlate by Livestrong.com is a food-tracking app that lets you create customized goals for macro and micronutrients while providing a comprehensive dietary analysis of the food you’re taking in. 

  • Daily summaries to help you stay within calorie limits.

  • Useful for athletes who want to gain weight.

  • Entering home-cooked meals is tedious.

  • Each recipe ingredient must be entered individually.

Learn What’s Lurking in Your Food: Fooducate

Regarding eating, it’s not only the calories but the quality of your food that counts. Fooducate, by Fooducate LTD, provides a comprehensive database of 300,000 foods in supermarkets.

  • Takes the guesswork out of finding healthy foods.

  • Tracks workouts as well.

  • Serving sizes are based on liters, not cups.

  • The app can be expensive for full features.

Scan the barcode with your smartphone camera to get an in-depth nutritional analysis of added sugars, trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, food coloring, genetically modified organisms (GMO), additives, preservatives, and artificial sweeteners. Personalize your tracking by entering your weight, age, and fitness goals. The iOS and Android apps have slightly different names, but both are made by the same company.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words: See How You Eat

Rather than typing a daily log of your meals, snap a photo instead. See How You Eat, by Health Revolution Ltd, is an app built on the belief that seeing what you eat can help you make positive dietary changes.

  • Simple, quick, and easy way to make a food journal.

  • Share photos on social media.

  • Lack of photo editing capabilities.

  • No calorie counter.

This food-tracking app does exactly what it says. It lets you document your meals visually, without any complicated calorie or macronutrient support. You can also easily share photos on social media.

Keep It Simple and Make It Useful: Stupid Simple Macro Tracker

If you’re confused about how to count your macros, Stupid Simple Macro Tracker by Venn Interactive can help. More than tracking what you eat, this app tracks your fat, protein, and carb levels. Customize your own macro levels and tag them with food icons to make it fast and easy to log your daily macros. 

  • The food bank feature lets you conserve calories for special events.

  • Intuitive interface.

  • Can sometimes be slow to load.

  • Limited free features.

Get a Quick Summary of Your Nutrition: Lifesum

Lifesum is a food-tracking app built on the idea that observing small habits can make a difference toward meeting nutritional goals. With a comprehensive list of recipes and meal plans, Lifesum also includes barcode scanning and macro tracking to see your daily nutrition and calories. 

  • The beautifully-designed interface makes the app easy to navigate.

  • Tons of recipes to inspire different eating habits.

  • Some of the nutritional values can be inaccurate as they are user-created.

  • Premium features are expensive.

The Easy Way to Track Your Food: Healthi

Once you start tracking your food, you’ll quickly begin to see that what you think you’re eating rarely matches up to what you are actually eating. Healthi (formerly iTrackBites) uses a point system to help you see how close you are to your nutritional goals.

  • Tracking points is easier than tracking calories.

  • Supportive online community.

  • Unable to manually enter your food; it must be pre-loaded into the app.

  • No way to add your own recipes.

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