The short answer#
If you are eating keto or low-carb by net carbs, use Carb Manager. It tracks net carbs free and unlimited, carries thousands of keto recipes, meal plans, a fasting tracker and challenges. SmartCrunch counts total carbohydrate and does not compute net carbs at all — not as a paid feature, not anywhere.
That is the comparison. The rest is for people who are not doing keto.
The net carbs thing, precisely#
Net carbs are total carbohydrate minus fibre and some sugar alcohols. For someone managing ketosis, that subtraction is the number that matters, and an app that does not do it is unusable for the purpose.
SmartCrunch does have a low-carb preset among its diet types, and it tracks carbohydrate for every food. What it does not have is the net calculation, a keto plan, keto recipes or a keto food list. Anyone telling you otherwise is reading a different app.
It does save your own dishes: build one once from food you have already logged, name it, and it logs again in one tap. That is a different product from Carb Manager’s 5,000 recipes — theirs tells you what to cook, ours remembers what you cooked.
Where SmartCrunch differs, for everyone else#
- The calorie number is derived rather than assumed. Carb Manager, like most trackers, sets your targets from a profile form. Ours prefers to solve maintenance from your own weeks and publishes the conditions under which it refuses to.
- The free tier is the whole engine, with no daily caps and no history window. Ours charges for one convenience feature; theirs charges for recipes, plans and premium analytics.
- No account. The diary lives on the phone.
- Four honest micronutrients with coverage reported next to them, rather than a broader set with silent zeroes.
Where Carb Manager is better#
- Net carbs, free and unlimited. The headline.
- 5,000+ recipes, meal plans, challenges, fasting.
- Android and web.
- Photo logging is part of their free-to-try offer; ours is the paid feature.
Price#
Measured on the US App Store on .
| Carb Manager | SmartCrunch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | yes, including net carbs | yes, no caps — but no net carbs |
| Monthly | ~$8.49 | $9.99 |
| Annual | ~$29.99–$59.99 | $49.99 |
| What Premium buys | recipes, meal plans, analytics, challenges | one feature: photo and sentence estimation |
Which to choose#
Choose Carb Manager if you eat keto, low-carb by net carbs, carnivore or paleo, or if recipes are why you are downloading a tracker.
Choose SmartCrunch if you count total calories towards a goal weight, want the daily number derived from your own data, and do not need the diet framework around it.
Claims about Carb Manager were checked against its public pages on and are not warranted to stay current — prices and features change without notice, and the vendor's own site is authoritative. SmartCrunch is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Carb Manager; the name is used only to identify the product discussed. Corrections: support@smartcrunch.org.
Read next
- How to track macros Set protein first, let fat and carbohydrate fill the rest, and check that the three add back up to your budget. Everything else is preference.
- How many calories should I eat to lose weight? The ten-second number is an average of people shaped like you. Your own logged weeks give a better one — and this explains how, and when not to trust either.