Kriterion vs MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is the app most people mean when they say “a calorie tracker.” It built the category, and its database is enormous. That size is also its biggest weakness. Here is where Kriterion does things differently, not just more.
No ads, and every number sourced The same screen in MyFitnessPal carries advertising on the free tier, and its entries are mostly user-submitted. Here macros are free rather than gated, and every food is marked with where its figures came from — a government lab, a manufacturer's own panel, a published menu. The figures shown are from a seeded demo account, not a real person.
| Kriterion | MyFitnessPal | |
|---|---|---|
| Ads on the free tier | None, on any tier. There is no advertising in the app at all | Yes, throughout logging and browsing, on the free tier |
| Food data source | Over a million entries: UK government lab data (CoFID), USDA, Open Food Facts and real UK chain menus — each one marked with where it came from | Mostly user-submitted, with no source shown. Duplicate listings for the same food with different numbers are a long-standing, widely reported problem |
| Calorie target | Measured from your own logged intake against your weight trend, with a published margin of error | A standard formula from your stats. It doesn't adjust itself as your data comes in |
| Macro tracking | Included on the free tier | Gated behind a paid tier |
| Menstrual cycle tracking | Built in, feeding readiness and training guidance directly | Not offered |
| Training | Sets, reps, RIR, readiness, a HIIT timer with spoken interval cues | Basic exercise logging; not built for structured strength training |
| Data leaving your phone | One thing: the food search term you typed or scanned. Label and scale photos are read entirely on-device and never leave your phone | Not documented to the same level of detail |
| Community & brand recognition | New. No install base, no friends feature yet | The largest food-logging community there is, with a name everyone already knows |
The problem isn't crowdsourcing. It's unchecked crowdsourcing.
A crowdsourced database's strength is coverage: someone, somewhere, has probably already logged your exact meal. That is genuinely valuable, and Kriterion uses crowdsourced data too — Open Food Facts is one of its four sources.
The weakness is not that people contribute. It is that in most apps nothing checks what they contribute and nothing records where it came from, so the same product ends up listed several times with different calorie counts and you have no way to tell which one was measured.
Kriterion takes contributions and corrections too — you can report a food as wrong, report a barcode pointing at the wrong product, or photograph the packet's own nutrition panel as evidence. The difference is what happens next. A label photo is checked on your device against the existing record, and if the panel doesn't match the food, nothing is submitted and you're told why. Anything that does go through is queued for review rather than overwriting the entry, so it can never outrank a lab measurement. And every entry shows its source, so you can always see whether a number came from a government lab or from somebody's best guess.
A target that reacts to you, not a formula
MyFitnessPal's calorie goal comes from your height, weight, age and activity level, run through a standard equation, and stays put until you change your stats yourself. Kriterion starts the same way, then replaces that estimate with one measured from your own logged intake and weight trend as soon as there's enough data to trust it — and shows you the margin of error on that number rather than presenting a guess as fact.