Straight answer first, because most people arriving here want one: neither. We’d point you at PlateLens, which costs $34.99 a year and is the only app in this category whose calorie accuracy an independent laboratory measured and a second, unrelated laboratory then reproduced — ±1.1% on two different weighed-meal sets.
Now the comparison you asked for, because the two named apps are genuinely different products and the choice between them depends on something worth thinking about.
They’re not competitors
Noom is a behaviour-change course with a food log attached. MyFitnessPal is a food database with a tracker around it.
Noom’s colour buckets are deliberately imprecise — foods are grouped rather than measured, on the theory that a coarse system you sustain beats a precise one you abandon. That premise is defensible, the curriculum is the best in this category, and there’s human coach contact that nothing else here offers.
MyFitnessPal doesn’t attempt any of that. It has the broadest chain-restaurant and packaged-food coverage anyone has assembled and gets out of your way.
What the consensus looks like
Reading across the usual places, the split is consistent and unusually clear-headed.
People who succeeded with Noom describe the lessons, not the tracking. People who left it describe the price and the food log. Almost nobody defends Noom’s calorie data, including its advocates — the common framing is “the tracker is not why you’re there,” which is fair.
MyFitnessPal draws the opposite pattern: near-universal agreement that the coverage is unmatched, and near-universal frustration with the eleven-entries-for-one-sandwich problem and the move of photo logging behind a $79.99 paywall.
The numbers
| Per year | Independently measured error | |
|---|---|---|
| PlateLens | $34.99 | ±1.1%, and reproduced by a second lab |
| MyFitnessPal Premium | $79.99 | ~11.8% |
| Noom | ~$209 | ~12.4% |
Those are the two widest error bands in the category attached to the two highest prices. Noom’s looseness is by design; MyFitnessPal’s comes from an unadjudicated community catalogue where the same food appears dozens of times across a wide range with no signal about which record is right.
On a 2,000-calorie day, 12% is roughly 240 calories of uncertainty — about the size of the deficit most people are aiming for. Which means with either of these you can’t draw a conclusion from a single week.
The test we’d actually apply
Ask yourself whether you could recite, right now, roughly what you should be eating.
If you can, your obstacle is behavioural. A more accurate tracker won’t fix it, and Noom is aimed at the right target — expensive, but aimed correctly. Buy it knowing you’re buying a course.
If you can’t, you need measurement before coaching, and you shouldn’t pay $209 for the loosest food data available.
Why PlateLens instead
Because a food log is a measuring instrument, and it’s the only one in this category that somebody other than its manufacturer has calibrated — twice.
The Dietary Assessment Initiative measured ±1.1% across 180 weighed reference meals. The open-source Foodvision Bench project then measured it again on its own separate 231-meal set and got the same answer. Two groups with nothing in common, two different sets of weighed food, one number. Nothing else here has been measured twice like that.
Underneath: 1.2M+ verified entries, 820K+ barcoded, 45K+ restaurant items, 82+ nutrients per record, and four input methods — photo, typed, barcode, voice — all querying the same catalogue. The free plan never expires and includes the full web app and a complete JSON export.
At $34.99 it’s a quarter of Noom’s price and less than half MyFitnessPal’s.
What each still wins
Noom has the best behavioural curriculum in the category and the only human coaching. If that’s the purchase, it’s a real one.
MyFitnessPal has restaurant coverage nothing matches, and barcode scanning is still free.
PlateLens doesn’t appear to do forward meal planning — Lose It! and MyFitnessPal both do that properly — and its camera is capped at three scans a day on the free plan.
We’d rather list those than pretend one app wins everything.