So far, Cronometer is almost as good as MyNetDiary was before the recent changes. Some basic research suggests it is the current favorite among most people.
Core Feature Comparison
| Feature | Cronometer | MyNetDiary | MyFitnessPal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best For | Athletes, clinical diets, and strict micronutrient counting | General weight loss, diabetics, and fast, frictionless logging | Large social circles, recipe inspiration, and restaurant menus |
| Food Database | ~1.1M verified items (USDA/NCC) | Over 2M staff-verified items | ~20M+ items (largely crowdsourced/user-generated) |
| Barcode Scanner | Free (no premium required) | Free | Premium only |
| Free Tier | Basic app with ads | Ad-free, highly capable | Ad-supported, basic tracking |
Feature Breakdown for Trend Tracking
1. Cronometer (The Analytical Choice)
- Custom Biometrics: Create personal metrics (e.g., "Bloating Scale 1-10", "Brain Fog") to track alongside your food.
- Advanced Charting: Overlay any two variables—such as charting your iron intake against your daily energy levels over a 90-day period.
- Gastrointestinal Tracking: Includes specific, built-in features to monitor caffeine, alcohol, and symptom flare-ups.
2. MyNetDiary (The Visual Choice)
- Pre-made Dashboards: Offers excellent, clean charts for weight, blood glucose, and standard macronutrients (carbs/fats/protein).
- Limited Custom Correlation: Tracks standard health metrics beautifully, but lacks the deep, multi-variable correlation tools needed to spot subtle, custom cause-and-effect trends.
3. MyFitnessPal (The Baseline Choice)
- Basic Premium Graphs: Shows general macro and calorie trends over time.
- Data Hurdles: The massive amount of unverified, user-generated food data creates "noise" that can heavily skew your weekly and monthly nutrient trend lines.
A couple of things I would change/add to be more like the old MyNetDiary:
- Medications need to be either added as a food or a biometric. There ought to be a separate grouping for medications. Digging pills from other lists seems unnecessary. Especially if you take a lot of pills every day.
- An optional note field on biometric and medication entries would be less confusing. You can add a note like the comment entry in MyNetDiary, but you need to match it on the timestamp to know they go together. Having it in the entry form or having labels, again like MyNetDiary, would make seeing what hurt or why you took a medicine a lot easier.
Otherwise, it is very much like the old MyNetDiary with similar device support, charts, and logging of food and measurements. It also adds fasting, though I don't need that. The biometrics are not sortable, but they do auto-sort by most recently used, which makes it pretty simple to find all your morning options near the bottom of the list in the morning and the evening ones at night.
Both are $59.99/yr.
One of the things I am looking forward to trying is having AI look for possible things that might affect how I feel.
Research on this yields:
Cronometer is the best choice for discovering cause-and-effect relationships due to its highly accurate, lab-verified food database and advanced data correlation tools.
To find true correlations (e.g., how a specific food affects your energy, sleep, or digestion), your data must be flawless. Crowdsourced apps often have massive errors in their food libraries, which ruins data analysis. Cronometer manually verifies every single entry, making its data reliable enough for clinical studies.
Here is how the three apps compare specifically for tracking trends, causes, and effects:
| Feature | Cronometer | MyNetDiary | MyFitnessPal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data Accuracy | Highest (Lab-verified entries only) | High (Verified, but some crowdsourcing) | Lower (Massive, user-generated database) |
| Custom Biometrics | Yes (Track symptoms, mood, pain, etc.) | Limited (Mainly standard health metrics) | No (Strictly weight and basic measurements) |
| Trend Analytics | Advanced (Chart overlays for any variables) | Moderate (Standard progress charts) | Basic (Calorie and weight graphs) |
| Export Formats | CSV & Data Share (Full raw data access) | PDF reports (Visually clean, less flexible) | Premium CSV (Basic daily summaries) |
How to Use Cronometer for Cause-and-Effect Tracking
To effectively map out your health trends, combine Cronometer's AI logging with its custom tracking features:
- Use the AI Logger for speed: Snap photos or type descriptions using the natural language AI to keep your log complete. Missing days or meals will break your trend lines.
- Create custom biometrics: Do not just track weight. Go to the biometrics tab and add custom scales for energy levels, bloating, skin breakouts, or sleep quality on a scale of 1 to 10.
- Overlay charts in the dashboard: Use the desktop web portal to build custom charts. You can plot Vitamin D intake vs. Sleep Quality or Sugar Intake vs. Energy Crashes over a 30-day or 90-day window to visually spot the exact moments a cause triggers an effect.
- Sync external hardware: Connect wearable devices (like Apple Health, Oura, or Garmin) to automatically pull in biometric effects like resting heart rate or sleep stages alongside your food data.
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