The short answer#
MyNetDiary’s own pitch is accuracy, and it is a fair one: a staff-verified database of over two million foods with up to 108 nutrients per entry, built on research-grade sources, with thousands of foods reviewed daily. It is ad-free and it has been at this for a long time.
If database quality is your deciding factor, they win. We read Open Food Facts, which is open, public and contributed by people photographing packets — better on European packaged goods than most people expect, and patchy elsewhere.
The interesting difference: what happens at the gaps#
Every food database has holes. The question is what an app does when it hits one.
MyNetDiary’s answer is to close the holes with staff — verify entries, review thousands a day, curate. That is the expensive answer and it works.
Ours is to say so. When a record is missing a field, SmartCrunch reports the value as unknown rather than zero, shows how many of the day’s entries each total was computed from, and declines to show a total at all below half coverage.
Neither approach is wrong. The failure mode we were designing against is the third option — the one where a missing value silently becomes a zero and a day with poor data reads as a clean day. That happens more often than either of the first two.
Where MyNetDiary is better#
- Database size, verification and nutrient depth — 108 nutrients per entry against our four.
- Android and web.
- Meal Scan, exercise logging, and a much broader feature set.
- Sync across devices, which follows from having an account.
Where SmartCrunch differs#
- The calorie budget is derived from your own weeks, not from a profile form — with published thresholds and refusals.
- No account. The diary is on the phone, which is also why it does not sync.
- The free tier is the whole engine, with no daily caps and no locked history.
- One screen, no tab bar.
Price#
Measured on the US App Store on .
| MyNetDiary | SmartCrunch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | yes, ad-free | yes, ad-free, no caps |
| Monthly | ~$8.99–$9.99 listed | $9.99 |
| Annual | ~$59.99–$69.99 listed | $49.99 |
| What Premium buys | more nutrients, analyses, planning, coaching tools | one feature: photo and sentence estimation |
Which to choose#
Choose MyNetDiary if you eat a lot of restaurant and branded food, want nutrient depth, or want the reassurance of a curated database.
Choose SmartCrunch if you want the daily number derived from your own data, no account, and an app that tells you what it does not know rather than filling the gap.
Claims about MyNetDiary 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 MyNetDiary; the name is used only to identify the product discussed. Corrections: support@smartcrunch.org.
Read next
- Why a nutrition app should say “I don’t know” Counting a missing value as zero makes a day of packaged food look cleaner the less you know about it. The fix is to report how much of the day the number covers.
- How to read a food label The two mistakes that matter are reading a per-100 g figure as a portion, and reading a missing field as a zero. Everything else on a label is arithmetic.