Macronote vs MyFitnessPal: A Different Approach to Meal Tracking

The database problem

MyFitnessPal has 14+ million foods in their database. Sounds good, right?

The problem: most are user-submitted, unverified, and often wrong. Search “banana” and you'll find entries ranging from 50 to 200 calories. Search a restaurant meal and you'll find dozens of conflicting entries, most added by anonymous users with no source cited.

Macronote's approach: We don't use a user-submitted database. We pull from official sources — restaurant nutrition pages, verified food databases — and tell you exactly where each number comes from.

The search problem

Logging a Nando's meal in MyFitnessPal:

1. Open app
2. Tap “Add Food”
3. Search “Nando's chicken”
4. Scroll through 47 results
5. Guess which one matches your order
6. Repeat for each side
7. Give up and estimate

Logging in Macronote:

1. Type “Nando's half chicken with spicy rice”
2. Done

Feature comparison

Who should stick with MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal isn't a bad app. It might be the better choice if:

• You already have years of data there and don't want to start fresh
• You mainly eat packaged foods with barcodes — MyFitnessPal's barcode scanner works well for those
• You use the social and community features
• You're happy with the current search-and-scroll workflow

Who Macronote is for

• You eat out regularly and hate searching databases for restaurant meals
• You want to know where nutrition data actually comes from
• You value speed — logging a meal should take seconds, not minutes
• You want to describe food naturally instead of picking from a list
• You've given up on calorie counting before because it was too tedious

The transparency difference

The fundamental difference isn't features — it's philosophy. MyFitnessPal gives you a number and trusts you to accept it. Macronote gives you a number, tells you where it came from, and lets you verify it yourself. We think that matters, especially when you're making decisions about what to eat based on those numbers.