Yazio vs Calsa: Fasting and Recipes or Sourced Numbers

Yazio vs Calsa is a choice between a broad app with a tier at no cost and a paid diary that shows where each number comes from. Yazio’s free version covers a food diary, a barcode scanner and a 16:8 fasting timer, while recipes and weekly analysis sit in Pro. Pick Yazio for fasting, recipes and meal plans. Pick Calsa if you’d rather check the math behind every entry.

How does Yazio vs Calsa look side by side?

Everything about Yazio below comes from its App Store pages, website, help center and terms, which I read. I never opened its paid screens. Calsa publishes this blog, so my side of the table is an interested party’s, and each cell is worth checking against the page it links to.

	Yazio	Calsa
Starting point	A free version plus Pro; the app is always free of charge when installed through a store (terms)	Paid from the start, with price, trial length and cancel path shown before any question
Ways to log	AI photo (website), barcode and manual search; voice logging not named (US listing)	Type or say it with grams, photo, barcode, nutrition-label photo, quick add, chain restaurants
Food database	4 million+ searchable items, per the listing	Each entry shows its source and the math, per-100-gram value × grams
Fasting	Timers and plans such as 16:8, 5:2 and 6:1 (home page)	None
Recipes and plans	2,900+ recipes on the listing, 3,000+ on the home page; recipes and custom meal plans in Pro	No recipe library and no weekly meal plans; ideas come from your own diary
Chat	Max, the AI assistant, answers in the help chat	An AI chat labeled as AI, that sees your diary
Data export	No in-app export button found; a machine-readable copy under the privacy policy	Everything, on any plan
Platforms	iPhone, Android, and a web purchase of Pro	Web, iPhone, iPad and Android on one subscription

Each app starts somewhere different. Yazio gives you a lot at no cost and sells the rest. Calsa asks for a subscription and then puts every feature of tracking in every plan, with the AI chat as the only thing that changes between plans. There’s no free tier.

The pitch differs too. Yazio’s home page talks up fasting, recipes and a calculators menu for BMI, ideal weight, calorie intake and calories burned. Calsa leans the other way. It has no streaks or badges, so a missed week costs you nothing, and it lets you hide calories, nutrients and weight altogether.

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

A day in Yazio

Open the diary and you can log meals, activities, water and body weight, per the help tutorial. The App Store listing adds custom calorie goals, macros, a water tracker with reminders and custom meals to the free side. You can scan a barcode, search the database, or photograph a plate for AI photo tracking, as the website describes it.

If you fast, the timer sits in the same app. The free version includes the 16:8 tracker, and Pro opens the other schedules, 20 trackers in all. Pro also adds Fitbit and Garmin sync, and a help article covers the Fitbit link. The listing also names step and activity tracking, a smart grocery list and meal planning.

One detail is easy to miss. The listing says you get instant access with no signup required. That’s handy for a first look. It says nothing about what happens to your diary later.

A day in Calsa

You type or say what you ate in one line, with grams, and several foods fit in it. Speech turns into text on your phone. A photo names the foods and suggests grams, and you confirm the portion. Oil and dressing get a line of their own.

Packaged food gets a barcode scan in any plan, and UK and Australian products are included. If a barcode finds nothing, photograph the label. If you only know the calories, quick add takes that number and nothing else.

Repeating a day is quick. Open an old day, tap “Copy to today”, and choose a meal, the whole day or only the foods you pick. Each entry lands in the right meal by the time you ate it, and the Today screen shows what’s left after every entry. Logging works offline, and your last 7 days open offline too.

Where AI shows up

Yazio puts AI in its store title, which calls it an AI calorie tracker. The website describes AI photo tracking. The help tutorial names Max as Yazio’s AI assistant, always ready to help in the chat, which reads like a support assistant. I found no page that says whether photo tracking is free or Pro, so test it before you pay for anything.

The AI in Calsa is a chat that says it’s AI. It sees your diary, goal and weight trend, and its numbers come from the food database, not from a guess. You can inspect its memory, edit or delete single facts, or turn it off. Type that the rice weighed less and the entry changes after you tap. Menu and fridge help, the weekly review and ideas for the week come with the Calsa and Calsa Premium plans, and the monthly review and read-aloud answers are Premium only.

Where do the numbers come from, and what should you check?

Yazio’s listing makes two claims about its database. It says there are 4 million+ searchable items, and it says the database covers 95% of all food items. I can’t test either one. The pages I read don’t show where a given entry comes from.

So run a simple test. Scan five packaged foods from your cupboard, then hold each result against its label. Do the same with a meal you cook often. How to choose a calorie counter app lists the other checks worth running on any database.

Calsa’s approach is to show its work. Each entry lists where its calories come from and the math, the per-100-gram value times your grams. Anything you haven’t confirmed carries the label “estimate”. Enter the same food twice and the number matches both times, and past days don’t shift under you without a notice.

Restaurant dishes use the numbers the chain itself publishes. A wrong shared entry can be reported, and it changes after review. Foods you add yourself stay private to your account, and recipes use raw or cooked weight. Pick kcal or kJ, grams or ounces, and kg, lb or stone.

What does Yazio cost on each storefront, and what is free?

Start with what costs nothing. According to the terms, the app is always free of charge when installed through a store, and paid use needs your explicit consent in the app. The tutorial lists the diary, the 16:8 timer and a daily analysis on that side. Recipes, the other fasting trackers and the weekly and monthly analysis are Pro. The listing adds custom meal plans, in-depth food analysis, mood and symptom tracking, long-term trend insights and an ad-free experience to Pro.

Paying is messier. Each storefront lists up to ten in-app purchases, and many share a name. These are the rows I read, grouped by printed name.

Storefront	“12 Months” and “12 months”	“3 Months”	“Semi-Annual”	“YAZIO PRO”
United States	$23.90 to $47.90	$23.99	$34.99	$11.90 to $32.99
United Kingdom	£14.99 to £47.90	£14.99 to £23.99	£24.99	£9.99 to £39.99
Canada	$26.99 to $109.99	$35.99	$34.99	$9.99 to $54.99
Australia	$29.99 to $114.99	$29.99	$39.99	$14.99 to $59.99

The store pages don’t say why one name carries several prices. Inside the 12-month name, the gap is $24.00 in the US, £32.91 in the UK, $83.00 in Canada and $85.00 in Australia. Per month, a US 12-month row is $1.99 at $23.90 and $3.99 at $47.90. In Canada the range is $2.25 to $9.17 a month, so one name can cost more than four times as much per month.

Shorter terms cost more per month. A US 3-month row at $23.99, paid four times a year, comes to $95.96, which is $72.06 above the cheapest 12-month row. A semi-annual row at $34.99, paid twice a year, comes to $69.98. Rows named only “YAZIO PRO” print no period, so I can’t convert them.

On trials, the terms say Yazio may temporarily offer a trial subscription for a period it sets. The privacy section mentions a seven-day trial subscription for web purchases. No storefront page states a trial length, so read the confirmation sheet before you tap.

Calsa’s pricing is flatter. It has three plans, Calsa Start, Calsa and Calsa Premium, and every one has all of the tracking. Plans run monthly or yearly only. The first period costs the same as the later ones, and your price doesn’t change while the subscription is active. A reminder comes before a trial ends and before a renewal.

Where is Calsa stronger or weaker, and who should pick which?

I’d weigh this section more than the table, since I have a stake in it. Everything I list for Calsa is a built feature, and everything I list for Yazio sits on its pages.

Where Calsa does well is in how it treats you around the numbers. The price, trial length and first charge date show before any question. Cancelling works the way you subscribed. When a subscription ends, you can still read, export and delete everything. Calsa has no third-party ads or trackers in any plan, and a goal below the safe calorie floor isn’t saved. Past entries stay put.

Where Calsa is weaker: it has no free tier, while Yazio lets you log at no cost. It has no fasting timers, no recipe library, no weekly meal plans or shopping lists, no manual workout entry and no watch app yet. It has no direct Garmin or Fitbit link either. If those devices sync to Apple Health or Health Connect, their data reaches Calsa from there.

Choose something else if you want a tier at no cost, fasting timers, recipes, meal plans or a Fitbit and Garmin sync.

Some readers will land clearly on one side. If you fast, Yazio has the timer and Calsa doesn’t. Someone who cooks from a recipe library will like Yazio’s, since Calsa builds recipes only from ingredients you enter or from a photo, and that’s a real gap. If you want to see the math on every entry and switch off the numbers on a hard week, Calsa fits. A reader who wants to try tracking before paying anything should start with Yazio’s free version, and that’s a fair reason.

If the free version is your main question, Yazio reviews goes through it and Pro row by row.

How do you switch from Yazio to Calsa, and how do you cancel?

Ask for your data first. I found no in-app export button in the help pages I opened. The privacy policy grants a right to data portability, meaning a copy of your data in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. You can also delete the app account in the app settings, per the terms. Do the copy before you delete anything.

A CSV file can bring a history into Calsa, with a preview before anything is saved. I haven’t seen what Yazio sends, so don’t assume it loads cleanly. If it doesn’t, log one normal week fresh and keep the old record for reference.

Cancelling depends on where you bought. The terms let you cancel at any time, effective at the end of the chosen term. A web purchase is cancelled from the button in the site footer, in the app, or by email to [email protected]. A store purchase is cancelled in that store’s subscription settings, and a separate help article covers refunds through Apple Support.

On the Calsa side, one subscription covers web, iPhone and Android. You can delete your account from the app or the web, with the timelines spelled out first. More pairings sit on the choosing a calorie app page. Set a reminder for your Yazio renewal date, then log a normal week in Calsa before it arrives.