Lifesum vs Calsa: Meal Plans or Sourced Numbers

Lifesum vs Calsa is a choice between a basic diary at no cost, with scores and meal plans around it, and a paid tracker with none of those. Lifesum’s Premium adds AI tracking, your own calorie goals and meal plans. Calsa is a paid subscription after a trial, and puts photo, voice and typed logging, goals and the source of each number in every plan. I read Lifesum’s pages and four App Store storefronts.

Lifesum vs Calsa: how do they compare line by line?

Calsa publishes this blog, so read my side-by-side as an interested party’s. Everything about Lifesum below comes from its US App Store listing, its Premium page and its help center. I never opened its paid screens. Where a page says nothing, the table says so.

	Lifesum	Calsa
Price	Premium sold as 1-month, 3-month and annual subscriptions, with two or three prices per name on each storefront	Three plans: Calsa Start, Calsa and Calsa Premium. Price, trial length and first charge date come before any question
Free version	“Free to download and use with limited features”. The Premium page marks Life Score, body measurements, fitness trackers and statistics as Limited	Not listed. A trial comes first, then a subscription
Trial	No official page I opened states a length	Shown on screen before any question
Photo, voice and typed entries	AI tracking, listed under Premium	Every plan. Photos name the foods and suggest grams, and you confirm the portion
Your own calorie and macro goals	Premium	Every plan. A goal below the safe floor isn’t saved
Scores and ratings	Life Score, plus food, meal and day ratings	None: no good or bad foods, no health score
Source behind a number	Not shown on the pages I read	Each entry shows where its calories come from and the math
Meal plans	Premium, with a shopping list	None. Ideas come from your own diary
Water	Water tracker named in the store text	Every plan, with the fluid in the food you log counted too
Health sync	Apple Health and Health Connect	Apple Health and Health Connect
Export	Seven days from the website, the rest on request	Everything, on any plan
Cancelling	Through the App Store, Google Play or the website, three days before renewal	The way you subscribed, in one tap
Platforms	iPhone, Android and web	Web, iPhone and Android

What does a normal day of logging look like in each app?

Picture one ordinary day: oatmeal and a banana in the morning, a packaged lunch, then dinner from your own pan.

Logging in Lifesum

The store listing names five ways to log: photo, voice, text, barcode scan and quick tracking. It doesn’t say which of them the free version includes, so a packaged lunch by barcode is the route to test first.

Dinner is where the AI route sits. The Premium help article lists AI tracking access first among what Premium buys, and it also lists creating your own foods, recipes and meals. Saving favorites is a Premium row on the Premium page as well.

Logging in Calsa

Breakfast is one typed line, “oatmeal 250 g, banana”, the Calsa counterpart of Lifesum’s AI tracking, available in every plan. Say it instead of typing and your phone turns the speech into text. A photo of the plate works too: Calsa names the foods, suggests grams, and you confirm the portion. Cooking oil and dressing are logged on separate lines.

Lunch is a barcode scan, with a photo of the nutrition label as the fallback when nothing matches. Dinner can be a recipe you built from its ingredients, or from a photo of it, in raw or cooked weight. Foods you add stay private to your account.

Corrections are quick. Change the grams in place, or select several entries and move, repeat or delete them together, with undo. “Copy to today” repeats a meal, a whole day or only the foods you pick. A half-finished entry survives the app closing, and the last 7 days open without a connection.

Where do the numbers come from?

The Lifesum pages I read don’t say which database sits behind an entry, so I can’t name its sources, and I won’t guess.

On each Calsa entry the source is shown with the math, “per 100 g × grams”. Anything you haven’t confirmed carries the word “estimate”. The same entry logged twice gives the same number, and past days don’t change without telling you.

For either app, choose five packaged foods you eat often, log each by barcode and compare the calories per 100 g on the entry with the pack. The guide to choosing a calorie counter app lists more checks of this kind.

What AI does each app have?

Lifesum’s AI is about logging. The store name calls it an AI calorie counter, and the Premium help article lists AI tracking first among what Premium buys. I found no chat or coach on the pages I read.

There is a chat in Calsa too. It reads your diary, goal and weight trend, and takes its numbers from the food database. Its memory is open to you: see, edit or delete what it remembers, or turn memory off. It is labeled as AI, never messages you first and gives no diagnoses or treatment advice. All tracking is in every plan, and the plans differ in what the chat can do: Calsa and Calsa Premium add a weekly review and ideas drawn from your diary, and Calsa Premium adds a monthly review and answers read aloud.

How much do Lifesum and Calsa cost in the US, UK, Canada and Australia?

Each Lifesum storefront lists several prices under the same plan name. These are every price I read, with each storefront linked to its page.

Storefront	“1 Month”	“3 Months”	“6 Months”	“1 year”	“Lifesum Premium” (no period named)
United States	not listed	$29.99, $39.99	$69.99	$99.99, $119.99	$21.99, $29.99, $44.99
United Kingdom	£7.99, £14.99	£16.49, £39.99	not listed	£34.99, £99.99	£7.99, £34.99
Canada	$13.99, $19.99	$29.99, $39.99	not listed	$62.99, $119.99	$13.99
Australia	$14.99	$34.99, $39.99	not listed	$69.99, $99.99	$14.99

The storefronts don’t say why one plan has two prices. Canada and Australia list local dollars. Lifesum’s own upgrade page, with its currency selector on euros, lists 14.99 EUR for a month, 39.99 EUR for three months and 99.99 EUR for a year. The website’s prices in US, Canadian and Australian dollars and in pounds are not in my notes.

Inside one name the spread is wide. UK annual rows run from £34.99 to £99.99, a gap of £65.00. Canada’s gap is $57.00, Australia’s $30.00, the US’s $20.00. One UK three-month row, at £39.99, costs more than the cheapest annual row on the same storefront. Per month, a US year at $99.99 comes to $8.33 and at $119.99 to $10.00. Four US three-month terms at $39.99 add up to $159.96, $39.97 above the top annual row.

Which row applies to you isn’t stated on the storefront, so read the line above the buy button before you confirm. No official page I opened states a trial length. Lifesum’s store text only says Premium bills as a 1-month, 3-month or annual auto-renewing subscription.

Plans in Calsa come monthly or yearly, the first period costs the same as the ones after it, and your price doesn’t change while the subscription is active. Calsa’s price, trial length and first charge date appear before the first question, so I haven’t copied a figure here that could go stale.

What is free in each app, and what is not?

The store listing says Lifesum is “free to download and use with limited features”. The Premium page marks four rows “Limited”: Life Score, tracking of body measurements, fitness trackers and statistics. It doesn’t say what the limit is, and I read those labels as the free column’s wording from the table order, which I couldn’t confirm.

Per the Premium help article, Premium holds AI tracking, your own calorie and macro goals, meal plans, your own foods, recipes and exercises, extra nutrient detail such as sodium, fiber and cholesterol, and the full recipe collection. The Premium page adds net carb tracking for the US market, adjusting burned exercise calories, food, meal and day ratings and meal plans with a shopping list.

In Calsa, the subscription buys the full tracking: photo, voice, barcode, label reading, your own recipes and foods, goals by weekday, the weight trend and the Apple Health or Health Connect link. When a subscription ends you can still read, export and delete everything, and your history waits if you return.

What happens to your data, and how do you cancel?

Export is the thinnest part of Lifesum’s help center. The export article describes a website export of the past 7 days of nutrition data, labeled Beta. Your full history of food, exercise, weight, body measurements, recipes and account data comes only on request to support. Anyone planning to leave in a year should ask for that file early and see how long it takes.

Every Calsa plan includes a download of all your data, and you can delete the account from the app or the web, with the timelines spelled out.

Lifesum’s cancellation article asks you to cancel at least three days before renewal. On iPhone the path is Account, Subscriptions, Lifesum, Cancel Subscription, Google Play has its own route, and a purchase made on the website is cancelled there. Refund requests go in within 14 days, and Apple or Google handle store refunds.

Cancelling in Calsa works the way you subscribed, in one tap. No screen tries to talk you out of it. A reminder comes before the trial ends and again before a renewal, and refund windows are spelled out before you pay.

Where is Calsa weaker, and who should pick Lifesum?

Where Calsa is weaker: Lifesum’s basic diary costs nothing, and Calsa asks for a subscription after a trial. Lifesum also sells meal plans with a shopping list, an intermittent fasting plan and a three-week weight loss plan, and a Life Score. Calsa has none of them, and no manual workout entry or watch app either.

Choose something else if you want meal plans with a grocery list, a fasting plan, a score or food ratings, or a diary at no cost to start with.

Which reader fits which app?

Anyone who cooks from a plan and wants the shopping list built for them belongs with Lifesum. Calsa doesn’t write meal plans, only ideas based on what you already logged.

Photo logging every day is where Calsa fits better, since the photo step, your own goals and the source of each number are all included in every plan. With Lifesum, AI tracking and your own goals sit in Premium.

Some people like a rating on every food, meal and day, and Lifesum offers those. Others find that a score on a Tuesday hides which entry moved it. Calsa uses words like “in range” or “below goal” and never a color verdict, which suits the second group.

Shoppers in Britain can scan UK products in Calsa on every plan, since its barcode scans include UK and Australian products.

More pairings sit under choosing a calorie app, and my Lifesum review covers its free version in more detail.

How do you move from Lifesum to Calsa?

Ask for your data before you cancel anything. The website export gives only the past 7 days, so email support for the full history of food, exercise and weight, which the help article says is available on request.

Calsa imports history from a CSV file and shows a preview before anything is saved. I haven’t tested how Lifesum’s files line up with it, so import one week first and look at the preview. If the columns fit, bring in the rest.

Run both apps for a week, logging the same meals, and compare the totals. Then cancel Lifesum at least three days before the renewal date. Calsa runs on one account across web, iPhone and Android, with a reminder before it renews.