Tracking calories isn’t just about cutting numbers. It’s a way to elevate performance, improve health, and reach fitness goals faster. But, too much focus on calories alone can lead to inaccurate results, leaving many to wonder why they struggle to lose weight or build muscle despite their diligence. This often happens because tracking doesn’t consider individual differences and unique metabolic needs. Determining your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the first step to successful calorie tracking. From there, you can better understand how many calories to aim for daily to reach your goals. In this article, we’ll compare two popular apps that calculate TDEE and track calories: MacroFactor vs. MyFitnessPal. By the end, you'll know which is the best app to track macros can help you reach your fitness goals faster.
Cal AI’s calorie tracker is a helpful tool for achieving your objectives. The app not only accurately calculates TDEE based on individual differences, but it also adjusts targets as you progress. This ensures you have the most precise information to guide your tracking and help you reach your goals.
MacroFactor is a nutrition-tracking app that doubles as a nutrition coach. Its sophisticated algorithms analyze users’ data and update their nutritional targets to keep them on track with their goals. MacroFactor stands out from other nutritional apps by asking users about their:
The app then recommends calorie and macro targets for the upcoming week. After a week of tracking, MacroFactor analyzes the data to ensure the targets produce the appropriate results based on your goal. If not, the app updates its targets. The recommendations become increasingly accurate if you diligently input the necessary data:
MacroFactor’s suggestions are based on the latest scientific findings and are updated regularly as new literature emerges, which shouldn’t be surprising, given the owners’ backgrounds. Another stand-out feature is the “AI describe” function to log your food, which allows you to log foods using dictation. This makes food logging much more straightforward and is why MacroFactor has the fastest food logger on the market.
MyFitnessPal, launched over a decade ago, is the market's most popular and well-recognized calorie and macronutrient tracking app. It’s known for its extensive food database and ease of use.
When MyFitnessPal hit the app store in 2009, it was a game-changer for those who wanted to start logging their food to work toward their health and fitness goals. Nowadays, MyFitnessPal competes with other apps that have emerged with similar (if not better) capabilities. MyFitnessPal asks basic questions to estimate your nutritional needs and automatically calculates the following:
Then, users can log their food using its large database and work toward hitting the recommended targets. The two major drawbacks to MyFitnessPal are 1) its database has tons of inaccurate entries that users need to look out for, and 2) its calorie recommendations tend to be lower than is recommended.
MyFitnessPal has a free version with enough features for users to track their nutrition. With the free version, you can update your calorie and macro targets to the nearest 5% but not the gram. To access all the app’s features (including the barcode scanner) and to ditch the ads, you’ll have to pay for a premium membership.
Both MacroFactor and MyFitnessPal have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Starting with MacroFactor, the pros include the following:
Pros of MyFitnessPal include:
Cons include:
MacroFactor has a large and precise food database that helps users accurately log their nutrition. Each entry in the MacroFactor food database is verified and has a detailed nutritional breakdown that includes:
MyFitnessPal has one of the biggest food databases available. Nevertheless, since entries can be crowdsourced from users, it’s notorious for its many inaccurate entries. While experienced users can spot inaccurate entries, beginners are often left logging incorrect foods, hindering progress toward their goals.The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor allows users to track all the essential nutritional metrics, including:
The app can function as a simple macro tracker for casual users and an ultra-detailed nutritional tracker for those eager to dive into the nitty-gritty.MyFitnessPal users can track them:
The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor asks new users about their gender, physical size, activity level, strength training experience, and cardio habits to calculate calorie and macronutrient targets. The app also allows users to tweak their preferred protein intake (e.g., high or moderate), weight loss rate, and more to ensure the targets are tailored to the user.
The initial nutritional recommendations are accurate, but they don’t end there. MacroFactor updates the user’s calorie and macronutrient targets based on input data. The app works like a nutrition coach, taking the guesswork out of the equation.MyFitnessPal asks basic questions to understand the user, including gender, age, physical size, and activity level and then provides some nutritional recommendations (calories & macros) based on the user’s goal.
These recommendations are known to be lower than necessary, especially for those selecting “weight loss” as their goal. Nevertheless, the app allows users to change their nutritional targets if they feel that the information provided is inaccurate. MFP does not update the targets for the user after the initial recommendation, so all changes must be made manually.The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor is deemed the most customizable macro tracker on the market because users can change almost everything they want. The app allows users to change their calorie and macronutrient goals and shift their calorie intake daily.
For instance, you can eat more food one day, and the app will instantly re-calculate your nutritional targets for the rest of the week to accommodate the higher intake. The app also allows users to set their preferred protein intake by choosing low, moderate, high, and extra-high. Similarly, users can select their desired weight loss rate, ranging from 0.1 to 1.5 percent of body weight weekly.
MyFitnessPal does allow for some customization, mainly with its calorie and macronutrient targets. Still, users on the free version can only adjust their macronutrients to the closest 5% instead of down to specific grams. Apart from that, the app doesn’t offer much customization.The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor is not meant as an educational app because it doesn’t have daily lessons; nevertheless, the app is well designed for beginners by having detailed explanations of all its metrics and why they matter.
For instance, MacroFactor has a calorie floor feature, which represents the limit of how low the app’s calorie recommendations can get during a weight loss phase. This educates users on the minimum number of calories they should eat while dieting. Without this feature, beginners may not know there is a limit to how low they can drop their calories without sacrificing their health.
MacroFactor also teaches people a lot about the nutritional composition of foods beyond calories and macronutrients. Those interested can dive into the nitty-gritty and learn about their favorite foods’ protein quality, micronutrients, and other details.MyFitnessPal is also not an educational app. Nonetheless, it can give users some insight into nutrition by teaching them about the nutrient composition of different foods and what to eat to reach their calorie and macro goals.The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor is a macro-tracker that doubles as a nutrition coach. Users can pick from three coaching styles depending on how much control they want to have:
The only coaching option for MyFitnessPal is for the user to share their food diary with their coach. Doing so would allow the coach to provide feedback and recommend changes to clients to keep them on track with their goals.
The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor has a recipe creator feature, allowing users to input and save their favorite recipes for later. Nevertheless, the app doesn’t have a library where people can explore recipes. MyFitnessPal has a Recipe Discovery feature that allows users to find various recipes based on a category or hashtag. For instance, someone following a vegan diet can find multiple relevant and nutritious recipes inside the app by searching for vegan recipes. The app also displays the nutritional information per serving for each recipe so users know how the recipe will affect their targets.The Winner: MyFitnessPal
MacroFactor will ask you about your activity level and exercise habits during sign-up to better understand your nutritional needs. It also integrates with Fitbit devices, which combine your BMR (the calories your body expends to keep you alive) and activity level to calculate your total caloric expenditure. That said, MacroFactor generally doesn’t change your nutritional targets, especially in response to one-off bursts of activity (say, going hiking one day). It analyzes other data, such as your body weight and fat percentage, to update its recommendations as necessary.
MyFitnessPal lets users log their physical activity, and based on this activity, it estimates the caloric expenditure. It allows users to ignore or add it to their daily total. Adding the calories back in is the default setting, so you must turn this feature off. For instance, if you go hiking on Sunday and burn 500 calories, the app will add the burned calories to your daily target (+500 cal).
Those trying to maintain or gain weight should add calories burned back to their intake; nevertheless, those who are dieting should turn this feature off to make it easier to lose weight. The issue is that many beginners trying to lose weight may not realize the app is adding calories burned back to their daily targets. The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor offers a free 7-day trial. After the trial, users will have to pick from three subscription options:
MyFitnessPal has a free basic version of the app or a premium version. For those wanting to try the premium version before committing, there is a 30-day free trial. Beyond that, it costs:
The Winner: MacroFactor
MacroFactor has a modest 4.6-star rating with close to 1,900 reviews on Google Play and 4.7 stars with 1,200+ reviews on the App Store. MyFitnessPal has a 4.1-star rating with 2.6+ million reviews on Google Play and 4.7 stars with 1.7+ million reviews on the App Store. The Winner: MyFitnessPal
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