MyFitnessPal vs Calsa: Free Tier or Checkable Numbers

MyFitnessPal vs Calsa comes down to what you want to pay for. MyFitnessPal logs food and exercise with no subscription, but its barcode scanner, Meal Scan photos, voice logging and data export sit in Premium. Calsa is a subscription with a trial, and every plan includes the scanner, photo logging and export. I read both apps’ public pages.

MyFitnessPal vs Calsa: how do they compare in one table?

Calsa publishes this blog, so read my comparison as an interested party’s and check it against the pages linked below. The MyFitnessPal column comes from its App Store listings, help center and pricing article. I never opened its paid screens. The Calsa column comes only from Calsa’s published feature list, and it names no Calsa prices.

	MyFitnessPal	Calsa
Price	Premium and Premium+, with App Store rows for four countries in the pricing section	Three plans, with price, trial length, first charge date and how to cancel shown before anything else
Free version	Food and exercise logging, your own foods, macros and a printable report, with ads	No free version. Trial length and first charge date show before you pay
Trial	A “7 days, risk-free” pass on the Premium page, and “on occasion” in the pricing article	Length shown before the first question
Barcode scanner	Premium	Every plan, UK and Australian products included
Photo logging	Meal Scan, Premium	Every plan: names the foods, suggests grams, you confirm the portion
Voice	Premium	Type or say it in every plan
Source behind a number	A database of “20.5M+ foods”; I found no source per entry	Each entry shows where its calories come from and the math
Export	Premium: three CSV files in a zip, sent by email	Everything, on any plan
AI chat	Coach, Premium and Premium+, iOS only	Every plan, labeled as AI, with memory you can see and delete
Cancel	On the platform where you subscribed	The way you subscribed, in one tap
Where it runs	iOS, Android, web and Wear OS	Web, iPhone, iPad and Android, no watch app

Everything in the left column is a fact from a page I link somewhere below. The rows are short on purpose, and the sections after this one open up each of them.

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

In MyFitnessPal

The free version lets you search the food database, build your own foods, meals and recipes, and log exercise and weight. That is the list on the free-version page. A packaged food you can’t find by name is a problem, because the scan button is a Premium feature. Quick Add takes calories on the free version too, though macros in Quick Add are Premium.

Paying changes the day more than you’d think. Premium adds the barcode scanner, Meal Scan with the phone camera and voice logging. Meal Scan works on iOS and Android and in English. The help center’s comparison table also lists food timestamps, multi-day logging, macros by gram and by meal, and calorie goals by meal.

Above that sits Premium+. It’s built for planning more than logging, with a meal plan builder, meal prep mode, diet preferences and grocery lists, and per its help article those work only in the iOS and Android apps.

In Calsa

Calsa takes the same food several ways, and none of them depends on the plan. You type or say what you ate with grams, and several foods fit in one line. A photo gets the foods named and grams suggested, and you confirm the portion. Oil and dressing get a line of their own.

For packaged food there’s the barcode scan, and when nothing matches you photograph the nutrition label instead. Search takes several foods at once and puts the ones you usually eat at that meal first. Open any past day, tap “Copy to today”, and you can repeat one meal, the whole day or only the foods you pick.

Entries land in the meal that fits the time you ate. A half-finished entry survives the app closing. Logging works offline, and your last seven days open offline too, which helps on a train or in a basement canteen.

Where do the numbers come from?

MyFitnessPal’s US listing cites “20.5M+ foods, including restaurant dishes”. That’s a size, not a source. I found no line on the pages I read that says where a given entry’s calories come from, so I can’t tell you how a duplicate in the database gets sorted out. Compare a few entries with the label yourself.

On Calsa the origin sits on the entry. Each one carries the source of its calories and the math, the per-100-gram value times the grams you ate. An amount you haven’t confirmed is marked “estimate”. Log the same entry twice and you get the same number, and a past day never changes without telling you. Spot a wrong shared food and you can send a correction, which changes the entry once it’s reviewed. Foods you add yourself stay private to your account.

How much does MyFitnessPal cost, and what stays free?

Prices in four countries

The pricing article puts US Premium at $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year, and US Premium+ at $24.99 a month or $99.99 a year. The App Store rows below are what each storefront listed. Apple shows ten purchases per page and no billing period, so some rows may be hidden and the names are all I have to go on.

Storefront	“Monthly Premium”	“Yearly Premium”	“Annual Premium”
United States	$9.99 to $19.99	$49.99 to $79.99	$79.99
United Kingdom	£7.99 to £15.99	£39.99	£64.99
Canada	$13.99 to $27.99	$69.99	$114.99
Australia	$14.99 to $29.99	$79.99	$129.99

Why one name carries two prices, or why a “Yearly” and an “Annual” row sit side by side, the store page doesn’t say. Premium+ prices appear on the website for each country: £19.99 a month or £79.99 a year in the UK, CAD 36.99 a month or CAD 144.99 a year in Canada, and AUD 39.99 a month or AUD 159.99 a year in Australia. I found no website price for Premium alone outside the US.

The arithmetic on the US website prices is simple. Twelve monthly payments come to 12 × $19.99 = $239.88, which is $159.89 more than the $79.99 year. The annual Premium+ price of $99.99 is $20.00 above annual Premium. The longer read on what each tier adds is in MyFitnessPal Premium.

The trial

A trial is harder to pin down. The Premium page offers a pass for “7 days, risk-free”, but the copy I got was priced in Turkish lira, so I can’t say it applies in the US. The pricing article says a free trial of Premium or Premium+ is offered only on occasion, with length and availability varying by account. The US App Store text says to start the free Premium trial. Read the length off the checkout screen and write down the end date.

Free and paid side by side

Feature	Free	Premium	Premium+
Food and exercise logging, weight and progress	Yes	Yes	Yes
Your own foods, meals and recipes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Printable report, diary sharing	Yes	Yes	Yes
Third-party ads	Shown	Removed	Removed
Barcode scanner, Meal Scan, voice logging	No	Yes	Yes
Data export	No	Yes	Yes
Macros by gram, goals by meal, different goals by day	No	Yes	Yes
Intermittent fasting	No	Yes	Yes
AI Coach	No	Yes	Yes
Meal plans, grocery lists	No	No	Yes

The listing also names features outside its Premium section: a water tracker, a community, and connections to 40+ fitness trackers, smartwatches and health apps. It mentions GLP-1 tracking with dose logging and reminders as well. The Is MyFitnessPal free article goes through the free-versus-paid split in more detail.

Where is Calsa stronger than MyFitnessPal?

What a paid plan includes is the widest gap. Every Calsa plan has the barcode scanner, photo logging, voice entry and export, where MyFitnessPal keeps the scanner, Meal Scan and export in Premium. If you’d rather not pay for the plumbing and only for extras, that matters.

Numbers come next. Calsa shows the source and the math on each entry, and past days stay put. Goals follow the same pattern. Different goals for different days are Premium at MyFitnessPal, while Calsa gives every plan weekday goals and a one-tap mark for a training day. Edit calories or macros and the other one adjusts to match.

Data is the third. You can download everything from Calsa on any plan. When a subscription ends, you can still read, export and delete your whole diary, and your history waits if you come back. Calsa uses no ad networks, tracking SDKs or pixels, in any plan. MyFitnessPal’s free app shows ads.

Both apps have an AI chat that reads your diary. MyFitnessPal’s Coach answers from your food diary for today and the last couple of weeks, your goals, saved meals and recipes, the food database and your step data, and it’s available on iOS in English in six countries, per its announcement. Calsa’s chat is in every plan and says it’s AI. It never messages you first and takes its numbers from the food database. What it remembers is yours to see, edit or delete, and memory can go off entirely. Some chat features, like the monthly review and answers read aloud, sit in the top plan.

One more difference is about breaks. Calsa has no streaks, so a missed week costs nothing, and you can hide calories, nutrients and weight and bring them back when you want.

Where is Calsa weaker, and who should stay with MyFitnessPal?

Where Calsa is weaker: MyFitnessPal’s version without a subscription logs food and exercise, and Calsa starts with a trial and then a paid plan. Calsa has no manual workout entry, where MyFitnessPal logs workouts and Premium adds workout routines. It has no watch app, no social feed, and no weekly meal plans or grocery lists (MyFitnessPal’s Premium+ tier). It doesn’t log medication doses, where MyFitnessPal’s listing mentions GLP-1 tracking with dose logging. Activity reaches Calsa only through Apple Health or Health Connect.

Choose something else if you want to log with no subscription, enter workouts by hand, wear a Wear OS watch, follow a weekly meal plan with grocery lists or keep a community around your diary. MyFitnessPal lists all of those.

Some readers are easy to place. If you eat mostly at home, rarely scan anything and just need calories and macros on a phone, the free version of MyFitnessPal covers that and costs nothing but ads. A reader who trains from a written routine will like its workout side. Grocery lists and grocery delivery in some countries come only with Premium+.

A different reader suits Calsa. You scan or photograph most of what you eat and don’t want those features priced as upgrades. You want each number traceable and your history exportable without paying. Maybe you’ve quit trackers before because a broken streak felt like failing.

If you can’t decide, scan five packaged foods you eat each week in both apps and compare each result with its label. The other checks I’d run work on any tracker.

How do you move from MyFitnessPal to Calsa?

Export first, while Premium is active. The export page says Premium and Premium+ members get one zip holding three CSV files: meal nutrition, progress and exercise. It lands in the inbox you signed up with. You pick the date range. A free account can print a report or share the diary but gets no CSV, so if you’ve dropped to the free version already, resubscribe for a month before you leave.

Then turn off renewal on the platform where you bought it, following the cancellation steps. On iOS the path is Settings, your name, Subscriptions, MyFitnessPal, Cancel Subscription. On Android it’s Play Store, Payments and subscriptions, Subscriptions. On the web, Auto-Renewal in Subscription Settings goes from On to Off. Premium runs to the end of the paid period, and a cancellation made less than 24 hours before renewal may still renew.

Calsa takes a CSV import of your history and shows a preview before anything is saved. I haven’t opened a MyFitnessPal export, so I can’t tell you what the preview will read from it. Try it on your real file before you rely on it. For a wider look at where people go next, there’s the MyFitnessPal alternative guide, a Cal AI comparison and more comparisons in this category.

Give the new app a week of the same meals as the old one. The paid period you’ve already bought runs out on its own, so the week costs nothing extra.