The short answer#
FatSecret’s pitch is that it is free, and that is true and unusual in this category. It carries a large food database, a global community, Apple Watch support with complications, and two-way Apple Health integration.
Both apps are usable without paying. What differs is the shape of the free tier and where the daily number comes from.
Where FatSecret is better#
- Community. Ours has none. No feed, no groups, no leaderboard, on purpose.
- Apple Watch app and complications. We have widgets and Siri, but no Watch app.
- Database breadth, particularly US brands and restaurant items.
- Android and web.
- Exercise logging.
Where SmartCrunch differs#
The daily number is derived. FatSecret, like nearly every tracker, sets your target from a profile. Ours prefers to solve maintenance backwards from your own logged weeks and weigh-ins, and publishes the four conditions it insists on before it will — falling back and naming the fallback when they are not met.
No account, and the diary does not leave the phone. FatSecret is built around an account and a synced profile with a community attached. Ours has no sign-up at all. That means no sync and no cross-device backup, which is a real cost and is stated as one.
No advertising and no analytics. Nothing about your use is measured or sent anywhere.
Honest gaps. Four micronutrients, each shown with how much of the day it was computed from, rather than totals that treat a missing figure as a zero.
Price#
Measured on the US App Store on .
| FatSecret | SmartCrunch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | yes, the core is free | yes, the whole engine |
| Premium | listed around $9.99 monthly / $49.99–$69.99 annually | $9.99 / $49.99 |
| What Premium buys | ad removal, extra analyses, planning | one feature: photo and sentence estimation |
Which to choose#
Choose FatSecret if you want a free tracker with the widest possible food coverage and other people in it.
Choose SmartCrunch if you want the budget to be re-derived from your own weeks rather than assumed once, and would rather have no account than a synced one.
Claims about FatSecret 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 FatSecret; the name is used only to identify the product discussed. Corrections: support@smartcrunch.org.
Read next
- Maintenance calories, explained Maintenance is the intake at which your weight holds. Every calculator predicts it from a population; your own logged weeks can measure it instead.
- How to count calories without it taking over your life Weigh things, log before you eat, accept that you are under-recording. Precision on the parts that matter beats precision everywhere.