Lifesum vs. MyFitnessPal: Which One Should You Choose?

We’re all somewhere along the way to achieving good health. Some of us are already on track to attaining the body we’ve always dreamed of, while others are just embarking on this transformative journey to lose weight.

While optimum health can be achieved through diet and exercise, it can be challenging to keep the motivation going and track everything yourself. And that’s where health and fitness apps come in.

Diet apps, like Lifesum and MyFitnessPal, make it easy to monitor your progress and ensure you stick to your weight loss goals. With these apps, you can log your food and water intake, use a calorie counter, add recipes, track weight loss, and get meal planning ideas. 

In this Lifesum vs. MyFitnessPal review, we’re going to take a look at both apps to see how they work, how they could benefit you, and whether they are worth the money. Keep reading to learn more about both health and fitness apps.

Lifesum vs. MyFitnessPal: Which One Is a Better Nutrition App?

Both Lifesum and MyFitnessPal are food-tracking apps that can help you take control of your eating habits and follow a healthier and more balanced diet. Both contain a food diary to help you track your calorie intake and support your weight loss efforts.

When it comes to exercise and fitness, we recommend using MyFitnessPal. The integrations it offers will make it easier for you to establish and maintain an exercise routine. 

You can sync the app with several others, including MapMyRun, to track information like the overall distance, elevation gain, and number of calories burned. The best part is that when you do that, it will deduct those calories from your daily total intake, giving you the most accurate data possible to lose weight in a smart way. 

We’d also recommend MyFitnessPal due to the solid community support it offers. Users might gain a lot from reading other people’s success stories, encouragement, or even advice on how to use the app more effectively.

On the other hand, Lifesum doesn’t provide as much help with exercising, but it does let you manually enter your workout and track how many calories you burn. 

If you’re more into healthy living and lifestyle than fitness, Lifesum can be the best option. It offers you the basic information required to develop a healthy diet. You can choose from a variety of meals, diet plans, and advice on how much to consume at each meal, as well as track your water intake.

Comparing Lifesum vs. MyFitnessPal

Learn more: Best nutrition apps on the market

What Is Lifesum?

Lifesum is a calorie-counting app designed to help you improve your diet, consume essential nutrients, and drink enough water. 

The app focuses on informing you about the foods you consume, promoting healthy eating for both weight loss and weight maintenance. So you can use it if you want to eat more healthy foods or drop a few pounds.

Lifesum, as a calorie-counting app, also helps you calculate your calorie intake throughout the day and how much water you’ve had, so you can know whether you’re well-hydrated.

You can simply log your meals and snacks using Lifesum’s database of foods and drinks from thousands of different brands. If you can’t find the item you’re looking for, you can use a barcode to add your own to the database. 

Additionally, you can bookmark meals that you frequently eat so that you can quickly record them in your daily meal journal. You can also log your daily exercise routine for an accurate count of calories burned.

Lifesum also provides you with a “Life Score,” which is ‌a number used to assess how healthy you are. To generate this score, the app asks you ‌41 questions about your eating and exercise habits. 

A higher score shows a better lifestyle. This is an excellent approach to evaluating all of your health-related behaviors to see if you’re on the right track or need to improve.

You can also use Lifesum if you don’t want calorie or macronutrient recommendations but just want cooking inspiration because the app offers many recipes to choose from.

What Is MyFitnessPal?

MyFitnessPal is a fitness and nutrition app that serves as a diet and fitness tracker which allows you to set weight gain or weight loss goals, track your calorie intake, keep a food diary, and view the nutritional facts of the foods you consume. 

It’s more than just a calorie-counting app as it keeps track of both your vitamins and minerals, as well as your proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

MyFitnessPal also allows you to track your exercise routine, which can help you stick to your fitness goals, such as working out more or performing more strength training. You can also log your daily water intake, which can help you stay hydrated. 

This app also offers a health-conscious community section. You can find and follow friends here, share your food and exercise diaries, and get accountability for your goals, inspiration, and motivation. This community is also a great place to get advice on how to maintain a particular diet, lose weight, and form healthy eating habits.

MyFitnessPal is full of educational articles with great exercises, recipes, and wellness tips. This health app is also connected to several popular smartphone apps and activity-tracking devices, such as Fitbit, Lumo Lift, and Polar Loop. These devices can monitor your activity levels, calorie burn, and more.

Read further: MyFitnessPal review

What Are the Similarities Between Lifesum and MyFitnessPal?

Lifesum and MyFitnessPal, as calorie-counting apps, share several similarities and functionalities that help people take control of their health. Here are some of the key similarities between the two.

#1 Food and nutrition tracking

Both LifeSum and MyFitnessPal provide food-tracking features where you can log your meals, drinks, and snacks throughout the day in your food diary. You can also view detailed nutritional information for each food item you log. 

This includes data on macronutrients like carbs, proteins, and fats, micronutrients like vitamins and minerals, and calories. This can help you make informed dietary decisions.

#2 Food database

Both apps have extensive databases of foods and drinks from thousands of different brands, making it easy and quick to log your foods and snacks. While Lifesum doesn’t specify the exact number of foods in its database, MyFitnessPal offers over 11 million items.

The apps also provide barcode scanners, which you can use to add your food items to the database if you can’t find them in the system. 

You can also save your favorite meals that you consume frequently so you can add them to your daily food calendar. 

#3 Meal planning

Lifesum and MyFitnessPal enable users to plan their meals in advance. With these apps, you can create your meal plan for the day, week, month, or even longer. This will help you stay organized and on track with your dietary goals. 

#4 Exercise tracking

Both apps allow you to log different types of exercises and physical activities. You can add in any strength training you do in the gym, and the apps’ system will estimate how many calories you’ll burn over a session.

The apps can also monitor your steps and record them throughout the day. They will then take your steps and turn them into calorie reduction. This can help you know how many calories you’ve burned. 

What Are the Differences Between Lifesum and MyFitnessPal?

While these two apps have similarities, they both have their unique features and approaches. MyFitnessPal is a better choice for athletes and fitness professionals, while Lifesum is a better alternative for sustainable living.

MyFitnessPal can be your best app if you’re looking for a health and fitness app that offers many free features. The app only charges for a small number of extra features in comparison to Lifesum, which does not include meal planning or recipes in its free version.

If your needs are about sustainable living and lifestyle over fitness, Lifesum can be a great option for you. It has everything you need to make little dietary adjustments that produce amazing outcomes.

MyFitnessPal should also be your app of choice if you want an effective calorie counter that allows for flexibility and an easy way to track your food. While Lifesum offers a structured approach to dieting, it could be too restrictive for some users.

If you’re also interested in getting in shape and raising your fitness levels, MyFitnessPal can be a great choice as it provides a variety of routines, from circuits to HIIT and muscle training. Lifesum allows you to track your exercise, but it doesn’t provide any workout plans.

Although both applications include communities of users who are on the same track, MyFitnessPal may be a better choice if this is your consideration. You will have a better chance of finding people who are experiencing the same difficulties as you because of the app’s larger user base. 

Lifesum vs. MyFitnessPal: Pricing

Both Lifesum and MyFitnessPal offer users a free version, but both offer a premium version, too. To find out more about the cost of both, take a look below.

What is the price of Lifesum?

Per month, Lifesum costs $14.99, or $29.99 for three months, and $99.99 for a whole year. The Lifesum free version offers only the basic features, but users will get access to all features with a subscription.

What is the price of MyFitnessPal?

MyFitnessPal costs $9.99 per month for the premium features, or users can pay $49.99 per year. Most users opt for the free calorie counter, as the free app has many useful features.

FAQs

Comparing the Best Nutrition Apps on the Market

How We Tested Lifesum and MyFitnessPal

When we review the best weight loss apps for our readers, we rate each of them in 4 categories: quality, effectiveness, price, and brand reputation. Below, we have summarized the meaning of each.

Quality

When it comes to apps designed to improve your health, it is essential that they’re of good quality. For calorie-counting apps, it should be easy to count calories, it should contain a large selection of foods in the database, and the app should not glitch. If the app is not of good quality, it will not benefit you.

Both Lifesum and MyFitnessPal pass this test. While Lifesum focuses on whole life changes, MyFitnessPal focuses more on exercise and fitness, which are all beneficial. Both apps also have a huge number of food items in the database.

Effectiveness

The effectiveness of health apps is determined by their ability to help you lose weight, maintain a better diet, and track your habits. If you’re paying for an app to improve your health, you want it to be effective, which is why we rate all our apps in this section.

Lifesum and MyFitnessPal are unquestionably effective apps for tracking calories and supporting healthier habits. But MyFitnessPal is much better because it offers a little more for free, which can go a long way toward achieving your goals without paying much.

Price

The price of an app should make it accessible and affordable. We believe good health is a right for everyone, so the app cost is incredibly important to us. If an app is more expensive, it needs to offer more value to users to be worth the price.

While these two are reasonably priced, they both offer free plans, which you can start with before spending your money.

Brand reputation

Though good brands don’t always create good products, it is much more likely that they will. And a product from a brand with a good reputation is easier to trust than a product from an unknown one. We tend to review well-known and popular products in the industry to help our users find the best product for them.

Conclusion

While Lifesum and MyFitnessPal may have some differences, they both have great tools to help improve your health and lose weight. 

Both apps may provide you with the health tips and information you need to change your diet or increase your activity level. All these are possible, whether you want to use some features for free or go with a full premium version.

If the free and premium versions of these apps do not meet your needs, you can try other weight loss apps that have also gained popularity for their macro tracking and food logging abilities.