Disclosure: I develop Kaloro, which is number 10 on this list. It is placed last because it has the fewest ratings. The list is ordered by rating count, not by my opinion.
The model is not the problem. Every app here uses a capable vision model, and on a restaurant plate or a packaged snack they all land close enough. Where they all fail is home cooking, and they fail the same way: the photo cannot see the oil in the pan, the butter stirred in at the end, or whether the plate is small or large. That is worth 20–50% of the calories in a home-cooked meal, and it is invisible to every camera.
So the question to ask of an AI calorie counter is not "how accurate is the AI" but "what happens when the photo is wrong?" Three answers exist:
| App | US ratings | What it does with the photo | Pick it if |
|---|---|---|---|
| MyFitnessPal | 2,356,665 · 4.7★ | Largest food database and barcode scanner; photo scan is a Premium add-on | You eat a lot of packaged food and want the biggest database |
| Lose It! | 776,419 · 4.8★ | Snap It photo logging on top of a big database | You want a classic tracker with photo as a bonus |
| Cal AI | 362,744 · 4.8★ | Photo-first, plus barcode and text description; long onboarding quiz before the paywall | You want the most popular photo-first app and do not mind a hard paywall |
| Lifesum | 150,656 · 4.7★ | Meal plans and diets with an AI photo option | You want diet plans more than a scanner |
| Yazio | 50,506 · 4.7★ | European database, fasting timer, photo scan | You are in Europe or Turkey and eat packaged food |
| Appediet | 47,017 · 4.8★ | AI photo counter with a meal-plan angle | You want a cheaper Cal AI-style app |
| Foodvisor | 17,382 · 4.6★ | One of the first photo counters; dietitian chat | You want human coaching alongside the scan |
| SnapCal | 12,566 · 4.8★ | Lightweight photo counter | You want something simple and fast |
| SnapCalorie | 6,562 · 4.7★ | Photo counter with a research background in volume estimation | You care about portion volume estimation |
| Kaloro (author's own app) | new, few ratings · —★ | Photo counter that shows its assumptions and lets you correct oil and portion; Turkish home cooking | You cook at home and the number keeps coming in low |
Packaged food, barcodes, restaurant chains: MyFitnessPal or Lose It. The database matters more than the camera.
Photo-first and you want the most popular option: Cal AI. Be aware that the onboarding is a long questionnaire that ends at a paywall; that is the most common complaint in its recent one-star reviews.
Europe or Turkey, mixed packaged and fresh food: Yazio, which has the best regional database. Its Turkish-language support is thinner than its database.
You cook at home and the numbers keep coming in low: Kaloro, or any app that lets you correct oil and portion rather than just the ingredient list. This is the case I built Kaloro for, so weigh that accordingly.
No photo can measure the oil you cooked with. Any app that claims a single accuracy percentage for "food photos" is quoting a restaurant-plate benchmark. On home cooking the honest answer is a range, and the app should show you which end of the range it picked.
Rating counts and averages are from the US App Store via Apple's public iTunes lookup API, read on 12 September 2026, rounded to one decimal. Feature descriptions are from each app's own store listing. Nothing here was sponsored. Corrections: necatidogrul7@gmail.com.
Download on the App StoreFree to download · iPhone · iOS 17 or later