Disclosure: written by the developer of one of the two apps. Sections where Cal AI is stronger are stated explicitly, and there are several. Every claim below carries the date it was measured, and where it is a claim about Cal AI it links to Cal AI's own words or to Apple's listing rather than to my opinion.
Short answer: Cal AI is the safer pick if you want the most popular photo calorie app, a barcode scanner, a food database and a huge community around it. Kaloro is the better pick if you cook at home, want to see and correct what the AI assumed about oil and portion, or want a Turkish-language interface.
| Kaloro | Cal AI | |
|---|---|---|
| US App Store ratings (24 September 2026) | New (released 11 Sep 2026), few ratings | 366,070 · 4.8★ |
| Interface languages Apple lists | 6 | 15 |
| Input methods | Photo (camera or library) or typed by hand | Photo, barcode, text description, food database |
| When the photo is wrong | Shows assumed oil and portion; two chips to fix them | Edit the detected ingredient list |
| Cooking oil | A cooking chip on every result | The word "oil" does not appear in its US store description |
| Turkish interface | Yes | No — not among the 15 languages Apple lists |
| Onboarding | Short profile setup; paywall can be closed | Long questionnaire ending at the paywall |
| Accuracy stated publicly | None claimed; a range and its cause are explained instead | about 80% accurate, on its own site |
| Free trial | 7 days on the weekly plan; logging by hand is free, plus one free photo scan a day for the first three days | 3-DAY FREE TRIALadvertised on its site |
| Photo storage | Never stored; discarded in the same request | See Cal AI's privacy policy |
| Minimum iOS | iOS 17 | iOS 18 |
| Guardrails | No target below 1,200/1,500 kcal, no faster than 0.75 kg/week, 18+ only | Not stated in the listing |
CalAI is about 80% accurate. No food tracking app is perfect, and calories and nutrition values can vary.I do not publish a comparable figure for Kaloro, because I have not run a study that would justify one. Theirs is the more committal statement.
Türkçe dil desteği ve Türk yemekleri olmamasına rağmen fotoğraf ile Türk yemeklerini gayet iyi tanıyor ve ortalama kalori hesabını gayet iyi yapıyor— "even without Turkish language support it recognises Turkish dishes quite well from the photo." That is a user contradicting my sales pitch, and it belongs on this page.
Every Kaloro result says what it assumed — "1 plate, about 400 g, normal oil" — and gives you a cooking chip and a portion chip to correct it. The reason those two specific chips exist is that those are the two things the research says go wrong.
Measured against food weighed on a scale, the better two of three vision models tested (ChatGPT and Claude) had a 35.8% mean absolute percentage error for energy, and all models exhibited systematic underestimation that increased with portion size
(Fridolfsson et al., Current Developments in Nutrition, 9 September 2025). A study of 114 survey meal photographs found the model named the food well — good precision (93.0%)
— but underestimated 11 of 16 nutrients, with weight agreement fine on small meals and poor on medium and large ones (O'Hara et al., Nutrients, 7 February 2025).
And the fat is simply invisible: fat carries about 9 kcal per gram (the standard factor in FAO's food-energy guidance), so a 14 g tablespoon of olive oil is about 126 kcal that will never appear in a photograph (FAO, Food energy: methods of analysis and conversion factors, 2003). Cal AI's US store description does not contain the word "oil". In a scan of 79 photo-calorie listings on 24 September 2026, only 2 mentioned cooking oil or butter at all and only 1 — SnapCalorie — offered a way to adjust for it.
On 24 September 2026 I read the 500 most recent public US reviews of Cal AI, covering 30 May to 22 September 2026. Of those, 253 were one or two stars and 161 were five stars. By theme: 66 mentioned portion size, 49 said inaccurate or an equivalent, 41 described the onboarding questionnaire or the paywall, 35 mentioned a refund or cancellation problem — and only 2 mentioned oil, butter or what the food was cooked in.
The gap between 66 and 2 is the reason Kaloro exists. People feel the error; almost nobody names its cause. The two who did:
"It's WAY low on calories with every meal. Remember it doesn't know what you cook with so all butter and oil is not accounted for. It's not just these guys, but conceptually…"1★, Cal AI, US App Store, 27 August 2026
"This app is genuinely terrible at guessing portion sizes. What should be an 800-900 calorie meal says it's 400 every single time."1★, Cal AI, US App Store, 28 August 2026
Balance, from the same 500:
"This app has been a game changer for me to track food. It's also allowed me to learn about macros and make more informed food decisions."5★, Cal AI, US App Store, 16 September 2026
Until today this page said that in Cal AI's Turkish reviews the two most common complaints were miscounted local food and the lack of a Turkish interface
. Half of that was overstated and I am fixing it rather than quietly deleting it. Apple's public Turkish review feed for Cal AI returns 72 reviews, spanning 30 May 2024 to 16 September 2026. Counting them on 24 September 2026: 8 of 72 ask for Turkish language support, 8 mention price or subscription, and only 1 mentions Turkish dishes — and that one is a five-star review saying recognition works well. The Turkish-interface gap is real and measurable. "Miscounted local food" was not supported by the sample, and it is now removed.
Kaloro was built around home-cooked food. Mercimek çorbası, kuru fasulye, menemen, mantı, lahmacun, pide and karnıyarık are recognised by name rather than as "lentil soup" or "beans", and the whole interface is available in Turkish. Apple's listing shows no Turkish among Cal AI's 15 interface languages, and 8 of its 72 Turkish reviews ask for it.
41 of the 500 recent US reviews describe a long questionnaire followed by a subscription screen, and 35 describe trouble with a refund or cancellation. Kaloro asks a few profile questions, shows the price, and lets you close the paywall and keep logging for free. That is a design choice I can promise because I wrote it, not a claim about anyone else's intentions.
A Kaloro photo is sent for analysis and discarded in the same request: never written to a database, a file store or a log, never used for training. For Cal AI, read their privacy policy — I am not going to characterise someone else's data handling from the outside.
Both use a vision model to estimate calories and macros from a photo, both let you set daily targets, both have a weekly view, and both will be wrong on a home-cooked plate unless you tell them about the oil. Neither is a measurement device. The difference is whether the app asks.
Worth saying plainly: correcting an assumption is not the same as being right. Kaloro's chips narrow a range; they do not deliver a laboratory value, and a kitchen scale beats both of these apps on any day you are willing to use one.
Pick Cal AI if you eat a lot of packaged or restaurant food, want barcodes and a database, want the app your friends use, or need one of the 15 languages it ships in.
Pick Kaloro if you cook, if you want a Turkish interface, if you have been burned by a questionnaire-then-paywall app, or if you would rather correct two chips than trust a bare number.
Rating counts, interface-language counts and minimum iOS versions from the US App Store via Apple's public iTunes lookup API on 24 September 2026. Review themes from reading Apple's public customer-review feeds — the 500 most recent US reviews and all 72 available Turkish reviews of Cal AI — on 24 September 2026; the counts are mine, not Apple's, and a theme count is a keyword pass with every match read by hand, not a survey. Cal AI's pricing changes with offers, so none is quoted. The 79-listing store-description scan is described in full on the best AI calorie counter apps page. Corrections: necatidogrul7@gmail.com — this page has been corrected once already and the correction is left visible above.