Protein Tracking Apps Compared: Database Depth, Paywalls and What You Keep

Every protein tracker performs the same arithmetic. It adds grams. Nothing about that step distinguishes one app from another, and no app has a proprietary advantage in addition.

What differs is everything either side of it: how a food gets into the log in the first place, and what you still have a year later. Those two questions are where the real decision lives, and they have very different answers depending on how you eat.

Disclosure: this article is published by Reign Creative LLC. We make one of the three apps discussed below — Protein Diet Tracker — so we have a direct commercial interest in you installing it. We have written the comparison to be useful if you install something else instead, and we say plainly below where the other two do things ours does not.

Everything stated here about another company's product was read on that company's own website on 3 September 2026, and is limited to what we could verify there. Feature packaging and pricing in this category change often. Confirm anything that matters to you with the vendor before you decide.

Start with how you eat, not with the feature list

Three questions predict your answer better than any feature table.

Does most of your food come out of a package, or out of a pan? This is the big one. A barcode is a unique identifier for a manufactured product; it is useless for the chicken thighs you roasted on Sunday. If your week is protein bars, yoghurt pots and ready meals, scanning is a genuine time saving repeated several times a day. If your week is cooking, you are going to be entering foods by hand either way.

Do you want two numbers or forty? Some people want protein and calories. Some people want to see iron, B12 and magnesium next to them. These are different products, and an app built for the second is heavier to use than an app built for the first.

What do you want to still have in a year? A tracker only becomes interesting once it has months in it. Where those months live — on your device, or on a company's servers behind a subscription — is worth deciding on purpose rather than by accident.

What each app is built around

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal's own site describes it as tracking calories in foods along with "macros, vitamins, and other micronutrients," plus weight goals, exercise and water intake. With connected devices it also covers steps, calorie burn and sleep. Its home page additionally names GLP-1 dose and side-effect tracking.

The named tools on that page are Meal Scan (photo recognition), Voice Log, Barcode Scan, an Intermittent Fasting Tracker, an AI Nutrition Coach, and BMR and BMI calculators. Read as a set, that is a product organised around a very large food database and around getting entries into it by as many routes as possible — type, scan, speak, photograph.

For a reader whose diet is heavily branded and packaged, that is the strongest argument in this article, and it is not our app's argument.

Cronometer

Cronometer's own pages describe tracking food, exercise, biometrics and notes, with macronutrients and micronutrients, water, blood sugar, weight, and sleep and workout data from connected devices. Its features page groups this as Track Food, Track Exercises and Biometrics, Track Any Diet, Meals & Recipes, Reports & Charts, Integrations, Data Security and Accurate Database.

The positioning is nutrient depth. Where MyFitnessPal leads with the number of ways to enter a food, Cronometer leads with the detail of what comes back out. If your reason for tracking is that you want to see whether a restricted diet is leaving gaps in your micronutrients, that emphasis matters.

Protein Diet Tracker

Ours is the narrow one. Protein Diet Tracker rolls meals and snacks into daily totals for protein, carbohydrates, fat and calories on a single screen. It logs workouts and body weight in the same record as the food, so training and intake share one history, and it keeps nutrition history and progress trends so a week can be read as a week. Daily goals are ones you set; the app measures the day against your numbers and does not calculate them for you.

It is free to download on Google Play, supported by ads, with optional in-app purchases. No account is required and entries are stored locally on your device rather than on our servers.

Here is what it does not have, stated as plainly as we can: no barcode scanner, no large searchable branded-food database, no wearable or device integrations, and no micronutrient breakdown. It is a fast manual log for people who eat roughly the same things and want the total. If that description does not fit you, one of the other two will serve you better.

Where the paid line falls

This is the detail most likely to surprise you a month in, because each vendor draws it somewhere different. The table below reports only what each company's own pages stated on 3 September 2026.

Two things are worth pulling out of that.

First, setting your own macro targets is not universally free. MyFitnessPal lists "Custom macros and goals" under Premium on its Premium page, and its home page repeats the point. Cronometer lists custom macro and micronutrient targets in its free Basic tier. Neither arrangement is wrong; they are different business decisions. But if the whole reason you are tracking is a specific protein target, that difference is not a detail.

Second, free reporting windows differ. Cronometer's pricing page describes Basic reports and charts as covering a seven-day window, with unlimited historical data under Gold. If you specifically want to look back over months without paying, that is the sentence to check on their current page.

The database question, without flannel

A large branded-food database with barcode scanning is a real advantage and we do not have one. It is worth being precise about who it helps.

It helps most if you eat manufactured food, because the entry you scan is the exact product you ate, right down to the brand's own reformulation. It helps least if you cook, because the moment you make a stew you are entering ingredients by hand into whatever app you chose, and a database of two million branded snacks does not shorten that.

There is also a free way to check any food yourself, whichever app you use. USDA's FoodData Central is described on its own site as "USDA's comprehensive source of food composition data," it is free to search, and the data are in the public domain under CC0. When you want to know whether an app's entry for a generic food is sensible, that is the reference to compare against.

Our own view, and it is a view rather than a fact: for protein specifically, most people's intake is dominated by a small number of repeated foods. Once those are set up, the size of the database stops mattering and the length of the entry path starts mattering. That is the bet our app makes, and it is a bet that is wrong for plenty of people.