MyFitnessPal Alternatives With Free Barcode Scanning
In October 2022, MyFitnessPal moved barcode scanning — the single feature most people opened the app for — behind its Premium subscription. Three and a half years later it is still there. If you are looking for a calorie tracker where you can point your camera at a tin of beans without being asked for a card, this is the current state of play.
What MyFitnessPal actually changed
The change was narrow and it is worth being precise about it, because a lot of the anger online is aimed at the wrong thing.
MyFitnessPal did not paywall calorie tracking. The free tier still lets you log food, search a very large database, set a calorie goal, and see a daily total. What it paywalled was the barcode scanner: the camera flow where you scan a product's UPC/EAN code and the app fills in the nutrition panel for you.
That distinction matters because scanning is not a convenience feature for most people — it is the workflow. Logging a packaged meal by hand means finding the right database entry among fifteen user-submitted duplicates with different serving sizes, then checking the numbers against the label anyway. Scanning takes two seconds and is right. Removing it does not make the free tier slightly worse; it makes it a different, much more tedious app.
Cronometer if you care most about data accuracy. FatSecret if you want the closest free-tier replacement for old MyFitnessPal. Open Food Facts if you want the underlying database with no company attached. HUD+ if you want scanning plus AI photo logging in one app. Details below.
How I judged these
I build a calorie tracker, so I have opinions and a conflict of interest. Both are declared. Here is the scale I used, applied identically to my own app:
- Free barcode scanning. Does it work without a subscription, without a trial clock, and without a daily scan cap?
- Database quality. How often does a scan return the right product with the right numbers? Region matters enormously here — a database that is excellent in the US can be threadbare in Australia or the UK.
- Correction path. When a scan is wrong, how much work is it to fix, and does your fix persist?
- Paywall pressure. How often does the app interrupt you to sell something? This is the difference between an app you keep and an app you delete in week three.
- Data export. Can you get your logs out as CSV without paying?
Two things I deliberately did not weight heavily: social feeds, and integrations with wearables. Both matter to some people and neither has anything to do with whether the scanner works.
The seven alternatives
Cronometer — the accuracy pick
Android · iOS · WebCronometer is the app to use if you have ever squinted at a MyFitnessPal entry and thought "that cannot be right." Its core database is curated from lab-analysed sources rather than user submissions, and it tracks roughly eighty micronutrients rather than just the big three macros. Barcode scanning is available on the free tier.
The tradeoff is deliberate: because Cronometer is stricter about what enters its verified database, its coverage of regional supermarket own-brands is thinner than MyFitnessPal's crowd-sourced pile. You will scan more products that come back empty. When that happens you add the item from the label yourself, and because the app is built around accurate data, that entry is then genuinely accurate.
The free tier carries ads and gates a handful of features (custom charts, some reporting) behind Gold. The scanner is not one of them.
FatSecret — the closest free replacement
Android · iOS · WebIf what you want is 2021-era MyFitnessPal without the subscription prompt, FatSecret is the closest thing on the shelf. Free barcode scanning, a large community-contributed food database, meal-by-meal logging, weight tracking, and a food diary you can share with a coach or dietitian.
It has the same weakness that crowd-sourced databases always have: duplicate entries with inconsistent serving sizes, and the occasional entry where someone has typed the per-100g numbers into the per-serve field. You learn to sanity-check anything that looks suspiciously low.
The interface is dated in a way that some people find reassuring and others find grim. It is not trying to be a lifestyle brand, which is a large part of its appeal.
Open Food Facts — the database itself
Android · iOS · Open dataOpen Food Facts is a non-profit, openly licensed food products database built the way Wikipedia is built — contributors photograph labels and the data goes into a public dataset that anyone can query or download. Its own app scans barcodes and shows you the nutrition panel, ingredients, additives and Nutri-Score.
Two caveats. First, it is a product lookup tool more than a calorie diary; the logging and goal-setting experience is much thinner than a dedicated tracker. Second, coverage is uneven by country because it depends on who has been photographing labels in your supermarket — excellent in France and much of Europe, patchier elsewhere.
It is worth knowing about regardless, because a lot of the apps in this list quietly use Open Food Facts as one of their data sources.
HUD+ — scanning plus photo logging
AndroidThis one is mine, so treat the description as a spec sheet rather than a review. HUD+ combines barcode lookup with AI meal scanning — photograph a plate and get an estimated calorie and macro breakdown, which is the part that fills the enormous gap barcodes leave: home-cooked food, restaurant meals, anything without a label.
The honest limitation of photo logging, in every app that does it including this one, is that a camera cannot see portion mass. It can identify chicken thigh and rice with good reliability; it is estimating how much of each is on the plate. Treat it as a fast, roughly-right log rather than a scale replacement, and correct the portion when it matters.
Beyond food it covers water, weight, exercise, a recipe library and home screen widgets, which is the set of things people usually end up wanting a second app for.
Lose It! — if you want the polish
Android · iOSLose It! is the most designed app in this list and the onboarding is genuinely good — it gets you to a sensible calorie target quickly without a lecture. Barcode scanning is available without a subscription; the photo-recognition feature (Snap It) and the deeper analytics sit in Premium.
It pushes its subscription harder than Cronometer or FatSecret do. Whether that is tolerable depends on how much the polish is worth to you. If you are the kind of person who abandons a tracker because it feels unpleasant to open, that polish is worth more than it sounds.
Yazio — strong in Europe
Android · iOSYazio is German-built and it shows in the database: European supermarket products, including own-brands, scan far more reliably than they do in US-centric apps. If you shop at Lidl, Aldi, Rewe, Tesco or Sainsbury's, this is a meaningful advantage over anything on this list.
Barcode scanning is in the free tier. Fasting timers, recipes and meal plans are the PRO pitch. The upsell is present but not aggressive.
MacroFactor — the one worth paying for
Android · iOSIncluding a paid app in a list about free scanning needs justifying, so here it is: if you are going to end up subscribing to something anyway, subscribe to this rather than to MyFitnessPal Premium.
MacroFactor's distinguishing feature is an adaptive expenditure model — it uses your weight trend and your logged intake to estimate your actual maintenance calories, then adjusts your targets, instead of handing you a formula-derived number on day one and never revisiting it. That is a real methodological improvement, not a marketing angle. Its food logging and scanning are also quick and well built.
There is no permanent free tier. If free is a hard requirement, skip it.
Side-by-side comparison
| App | Free scan | Photo logging | Strongest region | Free CSV export |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cronometer | Yes | No | US / global | Paid |
| FatSecret | Yes | No | US / AU | Limited |
| Open Food Facts | Yes | No | Europe | Full dataset |
| HUD+ | Yes | Yes | Global | Yes |
| Lose It! | Yes | Premium | US | Paid |
| Yazio | Yes | No | Europe | Paid |
| MacroFactor | Trial | No | Global | Yes |
| MyFitnessPal | Premium | Premium | US | Paid |
Subscription tiers move around. Every row above reflects the position at time of writing in September 2026 — if you are reading this much later, check the app's own pricing page before switching, because the pattern in this industry is for free features to migrate upward over time.
Which one should you pick
Sorted by what you actually care about:
- You want the numbers to be right. Cronometer. Accept that you will hand-enter more products.
- You want your old workflow back, free. FatSecret. It is the least-changed thing available.
- You shop in Europe or the UK. Yazio, for database coverage alone.
- Most of your food has no barcode. A photo-logging app. Barcodes solve packaged food and nothing else, and for a lot of people packaged food is a minority of what they eat.
- You are prepared to pay for one thing. MacroFactor, for the adaptive expenditure model.
One piece of advice that applies whichever you choose: switch once, then stop. The main cost of app-hopping is not money, it is the broken history — and the history is the part that actually tells you anything.
Why free barcode scanning is hard to build
It is worth understanding why this feature keeps ending up behind paywalls, because it is not purely greed.
Scanning a barcode is trivial — it is a camera and a well-solved decoding library, and you could add it to an app in an afternoon. The expensive part is what happens next: turning a thirteen-digit number into a trustworthy nutrition panel. That requires a product database with real coverage of the supermarkets your users actually shop at, in every country you ship to, kept current as manufacturers reformulate and repackage.
There are three ways to get one, and all three cost something:
- License it. Commercial food data providers charge per lookup or per seat. This scales linearly with your free users, which is exactly the shape of cost that makes finance departments paywall a feature.
- Crowd-source it. Cheap, and you inherit every typo forever. This is why MyFitnessPal has fifteen entries for the same tin of tuna.
- Use open data. Open Food Facts is free and genuinely good, but coverage varies by region and you have to do real work on top of it to deduplicate and fill gaps.
Most apps end up blending all three, and the blend is the actual product. When someone tells you their scanner is better, what they mean is that their data pipeline is better — and that is the thing worth testing on your own shopping before you commit.
The practical test takes five minutes: install two candidates, walk to your kitchen cupboard, and scan ten things you actually eat. Whichever app gets more of them right on the first try is the correct app for you, regardless of what any list — including this one — says.
HUD+
Barcode lookup and AI meal scanning in one Android app, plus water, weight, exercise and 100+ recipes. Free scanning, no trial clock.
See HUD+