Home › Blog › Free fitness and food tracker
Comparison
Almost every app in this category is free to download. That is not the same as free to use, and the gap between the two is where most people get caught — usually a fortnight in, having already built the habit.
"Free to download" is close to meaningless — nearly everything is. The free workout apps have no food logging at all (Caliber, FitCrush, FitOn, Nike Training Club, JEFIT). And the free food apps have thinned: MyFitnessPal moved barcode scanning behind Premium in 2024, which was the feature most people installed it for. Judge the free tier by whether the thing you will do every single day is in it.
"Is it free?" is the wrong question, because the answer is almost always yes and it almost never means what you want it to mean.
The question that predicts whether you will still be using an app in a month is narrower: is the thing I will do every single day inside the free tier?
For a food tracker, that is logging a meal in under ten seconds — which in practice means barcode scanning and a decent search. For a workout app, it is recording the sets you just did. Everything else is a feature you will admire once and use rarely.
This half of the category is genuinely generous.
If you only want training, you are extremely well served without paying anybody. What none of them does is food. Not a thin version of food logging — none at all. So the moment you want to know whether you are eating enough protein to make the training count, you are installing a second app.
This half went the other way.
MyFitnessPal spent a decade as the default free calorie tracker, and the reason most people installed it was the barcode scanner. In 2024 that moved behind Premium. The free tier still exists and the food database is still one of the largest in the world, but the ten-second logging flow — the thing that made the habit stick — is now a paid feature.
That is not a scandal; apps have to make money. But it changes how you should read a "free" recommendation written before 2024, and a great many of the articles ranking for this search were.
Cronometer keeps a strong free tier and is the best free option for micronutrients. MacroFactor is paid and does not pretend otherwise, which is more honest than a free tier that removes the core action.
The same test applies here, so here is the answer plainly.
NutriMacro is free to download on iOS and Android. Free to use: food logging by search, barcode scanning, restaurant food search, and the full workout log with sets, reps and weights, plus activities. Paid: the deeper recovery and training analysis, AI meal planning and the advanced insights.
We deliberately do not quote figures on this page, because plans vary by country and change over time — check the current listing in your region. That is advice worth applying to every app on every list of this kind, including the ones that quote a price confidently and are a year out of date.
For a free app covering both fitness and food, NutriMacro is the best starting point, because the daily actions in both halves are in the free tier rather than one half being absent and the other newly paid.
If you only ever want training, Caliber is an excellent free choice and we would say so. The case for one app is that the useful questions — is a stalled lift programming or under-eating — live in the overlap, and two free apps cannot see it.
NutriMacro, because the daily actions in both halves are free: barcode scanning and food search, and the full strength log with sets, reps and weights. Most free workout apps — Caliber, FitCrush, FitOn, Nike Training Club — have no food logging at all, and among free food apps MyFitnessPal moved barcode scanning behind Premium in 2024. Plans vary by country, so check the current listing in your region.
No. Barcode scanning moved behind MyFitnessPal Premium in 2024. The free tier still exists and the food database remains one of the largest available, but the fast-logging flow that made the app stick for most people is now paid. Many articles ranking for "best free calorie tracker" were written before that change and have not been updated, so check inside the app rather than trusting a list.
The free training apps are genuinely strong — Caliber was Men’s Journal’s 2026 free pick with a full exercise library, logging and progress tracking at no cost and no ads, and FitCrush generates periodised plans free. The limitation is not quality, it is scope: none of them tracks food, so the question of whether you are eating enough to make the training work is one they structurally cannot answer.
Test the action you will repeat every day, not the features in the marketing. Log one real meal with its barcode and time it; log one real session with the actual weights; then try to edit both. If the everyday action is fast and free, the app will survive. If the paywall sits on logging rather than on analysis, you will stop within a fortnight.
Food logging by search, barcode scanning and restaurant food search, and the full workout log with sets, reps and weights, plus activity tracking. The deeper recovery and training analysis, AI meal planning and advanced insights sit in a paid tier. We do not quote figures here because plans vary by country and change — check the current app store listing in your region.
Usually one, and the comparison people forget to make is against two subscriptions rather than against nothing. Tracking food and training properly with separate apps generally means paying for a calorie app and a lifting app. Beyond cost, two apps cannot answer the questions that sit between them — whether a stalled lift is programming or a calorie deficit — because neither can see the other half.
NutriMacro is free to download, and the parts you touch daily are free to use: food logging by search, barcode and restaurant search, plus the full strength and activity log. The deeper recovery and training analysis sits in a paid tier.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
Read next: Fitness and calorie tracker in one The best all-in-one fitness app
