Berry Best vs MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is the default. It has been the default for well over a decade, and for a lot of people it is still the right answer. This page is not going to pretend otherwise. What it will do is set out exactly where the two apps differ, what each one costs, and the specific situations where one clearly beats the other.

All prices below are US dollars as shown to a US visitor on 2026-08-15. Both apps price regionally and run promotions, so check what your own store shows before deciding.

The short version

Use MyFitnessPal if you eat mostly packaged food, want the largest crowd-sourced database in the category, and are happy to pay for the tiers that unlock scanning.

Use Berry Best if most of your meals are cooked dishes rather than barcodes — nasi lemak, char kuey teow, mixed rice from the stall downstairs — and the thing that keeps making you quit is how long logging takes.

What each one costs

MyFitnessPal sells two paid tiers. Premium is $79.99 for an annual subscription, displayed as $6.67 a month. Premium+ is $99.99 annually, displayed as $8.34 a month, or $24.99 if you pay monthly. Both advertise a 7-day free trial, described as available if you are eligible.

What sits behind that paywall matters more than the figure. On MyFitnessPal's own comparison, barcode scan and Meal Scan are paid features on both tiers — they are not part of the free plan. So is an ad-free logging experience, custom macros and goals, voice logging, multi-day logging, the intermittent fasting tracker, downloadable progress reports and priority support. Premium+ adds a custom meal planner, over 1,500 recipes, grocery delivery syncing, automated ingredient lists, and automatic meal-plan logging.

That is a coherent product. It is also a product where the two features most people install a calorie tracker for — scanning a barcode and scanning a plate — are the ones you have to pay for.

The database question

MyFitnessPal's strength has always been breadth. If you eat a packaged product sold in a Western supermarket, someone has almost certainly entered it, and the barcode will find it.

The cost of that breadth is composition. A crowd-sourced database accumulates duplicates, misspellings and entries with wrong serving sizes, and there is no practical way for you to tell a careful entry from a careless one at the moment you are choosing between six results named the same thing.

That cost lands hardest on cooked local food. "Nasi lemak" is not one dish — it is a category whose calorie count swings by hundreds depending on whether it came with fried chicken, an egg, extra sambal, or santan-heavy rice. Picking the closest-looking database row is guesswork dressed up as precision, and it is the single most common reason people's logs drift away from reality.

How the logging actually feels

This is the difference that decides whether you are still tracking in six weeks.

MyFitnessPal's fastest path is the barcode. Point at the packet, get the entry, adjust the serving. For packaged food it is genuinely excellent. For a plate of mixed rice with four dishes on it, there is no barcode, and you are back to searching, choosing, and estimating portions by eye — four separate times.

Berry Best's fastest path is the photo. You photograph the plate, the AI identifies what is on it, and you correct anything it got wrong. There is no search step and no results list to arbitrate. When the meal is a home-cooked or hawker dish, that is the difference between a fifteen-second log and a two-minute one, and two minutes is what people stop doing.

MyFitnessPal has its own Meal Scan feature and describes it as "log your whole meal in a flash. Just point, scan, and go." The workflow is the same idea. The differences are that it sits on the paid tier, and that neither vendor publishes accuracy data for South-East Asian dishes — so this page will not claim one is more accurate than the other. What it will say is that Berry Best was built around local food from the start, and that the photo path is the primary path rather than a premium addition.

Feature comparison

	Berry Best	MyFitnessPal
Primary logging method	Photo of the plate	Barcode or database search
Photo logging tier	Core feature	Paid (Premium and Premium+)
Barcode scanning	Not the focus	Paid (Premium and Premium+)
Local / hawker dish coverage	Built for it	Crowd-sourced, uneven
AI coaching conversation	Yes	Not in the same form
Custom macro goals	Yes	Paid
Ad-free	Yes	Paid
Annual price	Free to start	$79.99 Premium / $99.99 Premium+

When MyFitnessPal is the better choice

There are real cases, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

You eat mostly packaged food. Protein bars, cereal, ready meals, supermarket staples with barcodes. That is exactly what MyFitnessPal's database is best at, and barcode scanning on a packet will beat photographing it.

You need a specific integration. MyFitnessPal has had a decade to build connections to other fitness platforms, and if your training log or your smartwatch already writes to it, moving costs you that history.

You have years of data in it. A long, complete log is genuinely valuable, and continuity is worth more than a faster entry flow.

You want meal planning built in. Premium+ ships a planner, a recipe library and grocery syncing. If that is the feature you want, buy it.

When Berry Best is the better choice

Most of your meals are cooked, not packaged. If your week is nasi campur, roti canai, home cooking and the occasional teh tarik, the barcode path never fires and the database path is guesswork.

You have quit tracking before because it took too long. The honest failure mode of calorie tracking is not inaccuracy — it is abandonment. Cutting a two-minute log to fifteen seconds is a bigger lever than any database improvement.

You want to ask questions, not just record numbers. Berry Best's coach answers in conversation: what to eat to hit your remaining protein, whether that portion was reasonable, what to do after a heavy weekend.

You want to start without a subscription decision. Berry Best is free to start on iOS and Android.

Try it without switching

You do not have to migrate anything to find out. Log a week in both, on the food you actually eat, and see which one you were still using on day seven. That is the only benchmark that matters.

If you want the numbers first, work out your calorie target with the TDEE calculator, split it with the macro calculator, and read how photo-based calorie counting works. If you would rather see the whole category before choosing, the alternatives round-up covers five trackers including this one, and Berry Best vs Cronometer is the comparison to read if micronutrients are what you care about.