Losing weight is difficult for many of us, which is why so many turn to weight loss programs and apps for guidance and support. We took a look at two fairly popular weight loss apps – Lifesum Vs. Noom, to see how they compare in terms of features, costs, dietary approach, support, and more.
Noom
Pros
- Science-backed weight loss app
- Coaching and community support
- More accurate nutritional information
- Daily lessons
- Help you monitor important health metrics, like blood sugar
- Eat what you want – no real rules
Cons
- No free version
- Requires you to be self-led in making good choices
- Costly
Lifesum
Pros
- Good food database – more than just a calorie counter
- A Barcode scanner makes it easy to count calories
- Offers more recipes and is always adding new ones
- Offers fun challenges
- Affordable
Cons
- No free version
- No community support or coaching
- Doesn’t dive into the “why” or bad habits
Weight Loss Programs
Noom
Unless you’re someone who has managed to escape all the ads, you probably already know that Noom is modeled off of a science-backed approach to weight loss. What Noom doesn’t offer is a singular strict diet plan. Instead, Noom will ask you a set of questions that will help guide them to creating a plan that’s best suited for you.
From our experience, this plan is more of an outline. Noom will suggest how many calories to consume and offer food lists and recipes, along with exercises, but you’re the navigator. This makes Noom a good choice for people that want more control as they work toward their ideal of a healthy lifestyle.
This also means that Noom isn’t great for people who want or need a more rigid structure in their weight loss plan. If you fall into this category, a complete weight loss program – something like Weight Watchers – might be more your speed.
One feature that sets Noom apart from other weight-loss and calorie-counting apps is the daily lessons that are included when you subscribe to the Noom app. If being committed to daily lessons makes you balk at the idea of trying Noom, don’t let it. The lessons are short, easy, and enlightening, and you don’t absolutely need to do them every day – you can work at your own pace instead.
What these daily lessons accomplish is helping you better understand your personal psychology behind weight gain and what it takes for you to lose weight. We found this to be especially beneficial in learning how eating habits are influenced by mood, our environment and how attitudes about food and health are ingrained.
Like us, you might already know that these aspects of life influence your relationship with food and exercise habits, but these lessons really help pinpoint the why and how so that sustainable weight loss becomes more achievable.
Lifesum
Lifesum is similar to Noom in many ways, although this app doesn’t dive deep into the science of weight loss the way Noom does. Instead, it just offers all the features you need for a self-led change in lifestyle and eating habits.
Lifesum starts you off with a pretty detailed assessment of your health, goals, and preferences and then helps you formulate a plan from there, but at the end of the day, you’re completely in control. For example, we’ve read reviews that said the suggested daily calorie intake that Lifesum suggests is far too low for healthy weight loss. However, you have the ability to adjust that number to a level that feels more comfortable, healthier, and effective for your health journey.
Overall the goal of Lifesum is to help you manage weight – whether that be losing, gaining, or maintaining, by showing you how to eat healthier. They offer up to four healthy recipes per day, depending on your meal plan. There’s also a food database where you log foods and keep track of your daily caloric intake, plus exercise tracking.
One feature that we like about Lifesum is that they already have several popular dietary lifestyles pre-programmed into their app. Lifesum has specific diet options for the keto diet, low-carb eating, vegan, paleo, and eating like Denise (a Denise Moberg meal plan), among others.
Weight Loss Programs Winner
As mentioned, when looking at Noom vs. Lifesum, the two are similar in helping people lose weight in many ways. They both involve calorie counting and tracking your calorie intake, keeping a fitness or exercise diary and have their own approach to helping people improve their physical health.
What we like most about Noom is that they take it one step further by also including the important dynamic between physical and emotional health, and they address the science behind eating healthy and living your healthiest life. Because of this, we believe that Noom can lead to later and, more importantly, longer-lasting, sustainable weight loss.
Apps
Noom
Lifesum
With both Lifesum and Noom, the app is what the entire program is built around. This means that the quality and features of the app are basically everything when it comes to how well their programs work and whether or not you’ll find them usable and adaptable to your lifestyle.
Noom App
The Noom App has become one of the most popular weight loss and fitness apps, coming up on the tail of MyFitnessPal. In our opinion, they’ve fine-tuned many of their app features to make them easier to use and tailor them more to what their customers are looking for with support along their weight loss journey.
The Noom App is more than just a simple doof diary or calorie counter. There are multiple health and wellness tools that are integrated within the app, offering a very comprehensive approach to weight loss and wellness.
In addition to calorie counting/food logging and such, Noom also offers features like blood pressure and blood sugar tracking, and their famous science-backed lessons, community, coaching, and other premium features that not all fitness and nutrition apps offer.
Some of the main features you’ll find with the Noom App include
- Food logging
- Calories In and Calories Burned
- Nutrition and macronutrient intake
- An impressive food database
- Exercise routines
- Fitness Tracking
- Blood sugar monitoring
- Blood Pressure Monitoring
- Carb manager
- Recipes
- Daily Lessons
- Goals
- Community
Lifesum App
The Lifesum App offers a clean, intuitive interface that we found easy to use. All of the essential features are there, and there isn’t a lot of fussing that needs to be done to use any of them. The basic features of the Lifesum App include the following:
- Food Tracking
- Barcode Scanner To Make Tracking Food Intake Easier
- Calorie & Macronutrient Tracking
- Exercise Tracking
- Healthy Habit Tracking
- Hydration Tracking
- Body Weight & Body Measurement Tracking
- Food Database
- Recipe Database – 100s Or Recipes To Choose From
- Meal Plans – Includes Special Diets Like Keto, Paleo, Low-Carb, And Vegetarian
- Daily Ratings
- Weekly Score
- Integration With Top Fitness Devices
Apps Winner
In all honesty, if it weren’t for a couple of standout features of Noom, these two would be tied for the title of best health app. In the comparison of Noom Vs. Lifesum, it’s the daily lessons and approach to managing mental health that really stand out. Yes, they both have a food log and can keep track of the nutritional value of the food you consume, but Noom just offers a more comprehensive health and nutrition app.
Both smartphone apps are available through the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Community Support
Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight knows that it’s about so much more than just counting calories and being more physically active, at least when it comes to long-term success. There’s a human component to it, and having a support network or someone that you can share your frustrations and victories with, who will also hold you accountable, is key to success in so many ways. Here’s how Noom Vs. Lifesum stacks up in terms of community support.
Noom Community Support
A support system is a significant aspect of how Noom’s platform works. When you sign up with Noom, you’ll be in contact with your personal health and nutrition coach about once a week. From our experience, this feature is what you make of it. Some say that the coach just does a quick check-in, but if you put out there what you need or where you’re struggling, you’ll get the feedback and assistance that you need.
In addition to personal coaching, Noom also has an in-app community network to help connect you with other Noom users. The downside of this is that you only have access to the community while you’re a Noom subscriber. So, once you no longer pay to subscribe, you need to say goodbye to that group and find support elsewhere.
Lifesum Community Support
We think that Lifesum does a good job of offering many of the features someone needs for successful weight loss. If we had to pinpoint one area where they really fall short, it would be this one. The Lifesum weight loss app doesn’t offer much at all in terms of a community support network or personal coaching. At best, you might be able to find some non-affiliated support groups online.
Community Support Winner
If you need a high level of support, encouragement, and accountability, you might honestly prefer a more in-person type of weight loss program like Weight Watchers. Unfortunately, Lifesum doesn’t offer much at all in this category, which allows Noom to win by default. That said, Noom’s community and coaching aspects are decent, but you need to take the initiative to get the most out of them.
Menu & Food
Noom
Lifesum
For many weight loss and diet plans, the primary focus is on food. With both Noom and Lifesum, there are other components, but they both are built around helping people learn how to incorporate more healthy foods while saying goodbye to all of the junk. Both apps seem to be built on the concept of nutrient density – meaning that you should eat to consume the most nutrients while choosing foods that are lowest in calories. The two often go hand in hand.
Neither Noom nor Lifesum offers pre-made meals, but they do offer meal plans, diet plans, and guidance on what to eat.
Noom & Food
Noom doesn’t tell you what, how much, or when to eat. That is completely up to you. What Noom does is provide you with the tools you need to make the best choices for a healthy diet. If you’ve found that intermittent fasting works well, you can do that with Noom. You can follow a high-protein diet plan, vegetarian, Mediterranean, or any other healthy diet plan. No matter which you choose, Noom strongly supports clean eating.
How Noom helps you with this is by showing you how to eat for nutritional density. Noom provides a list of red foods, yellow foods, and green foods. Green foods are the ones that offer the most nutritional content with fewer calories. In comparison, red foods are the highest in calories with the poorest nutrition.
To give you an idea of how this works, you can eat a cup of potato chips and “spend” about 150 calories. That’s not bad for a snack, but we all know potato chips are nothing but fat, sodium, and empty calories – plus, you’ll likely still be hungry. For the same 150 calories, you can eat about five cups of broccoli.
This would leave you much more full and provide tons of nutrition. Of course, you’re probably not going to eat five cups of broccoli, but you get the point. Whole, natural foods allow you to eat more, eat more nutritiously, and save on the calorie budget at the same time.
Noom also offers a recipe database that you can scroll through to find easy new dishes to help make your weight loss journey more enjoyable.
Lifesum & Food
Like Noom, Lifesum doesn’t really tell you what to eat in the sense that it’s not going to try to make you fit into a dietary plan that just doesn’t work for you. You can try different ways of eating through new challenges that typically last 1-3 weeks. Ever thought of being a vegetarian but want to try it out? You can do a vegetarian challenge for a week and see how it fits. Lifesum does a really good job of offering various diet plans for all lifestyles.
Lifesum also offers a good-sized food database and will help create personalized meal plans that are easy to follow.
Menu & Food Winner
We think we’re going to give Lifesum the nod here. Both help users lose weight through a healthy dietary approach, but we like how Lifesum is designed to work intuitively with your preferred dietary lifestyle.
Pricing
Noom
MONTHS | PRICE PER PLAN |
1 | $60 |
2 | $119 |
3 | $149 |
4 | $159 |
5 | $164 |
6 | $169 |
7 | $174 |
8 | $179 |
9 | $185 |
10 | $189 |
11 | $195 |
12 | $199 |
Lifesum
PLANS | PRICE PER PLAN |
Monthly | $10.00 |
Annually | $99.96 |
The old saying that you get what you pay for is true, especially when it comes to health and fitness tracking apps. There are free apps out there and apps that you can download a free version or paid version of, but those are usually lacking in the best features to help you reach your goal weight. It would be great if either Noom or Lifesum offered a free version, but unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
Noom Cost
Noom’s costs vary significantly based on how long you choose to subscribe. We like that you can choose to sign up for any number of months you want, up to a year. If you need to sign up for five months to lose some weight before a vacation or event, you can do it without needing to pay for a typical six-month subscription.
What we’re not crazy about is the disparity between the cost of Noom for a single month and the average monthly cost if you pay for an entire year at once.
If you sign up for the monthly auto-renewal, you’ll be paying $70 per month, which we think is steep for an app, no matter how good it is. But, if you want and can afford to pay for a full year at once, the cost is $209 per year, which averages out to a little over $17 a month. This is a HUGE difference. It leads you to think that Noom could charge less for their monthly auto renewal if they wanted to. Unfortunately, their pricing structure just doesn’t work well for those who are on the most limited budgets and can’t afford to plop down an annual renewal rate.
Lifesum Cost
Lifesum offers a pricing structure that works similarly to Noom’s, with a discount incentive for signing up and paying for a longer subscription term. You don’t get as many subscription options as you do with Noom, with Lifesum only offering a three-month, six-month, or twelve-month subscription. The difference is that Lifesum costs significantly less.
With the three-month subscription, you’ll pay $10 per month. If you subscribe for an entire year, the cost is $8.33 per month.
Pricing Winner
While Noom offers some great features that are worth more money, Lifesum wins hands-down when it comes to affordability. Comparing the one-year subscriptions to each, Noom costs over $200, while Lifesum costs about $100.
Reviews & Results
Noom
Lifesum
When looking at the reviews and results for both apps, it’s important to remember that both Noom and Lifesum are primarily self-led, without a lot of accountability or in-person tools. They lay out what you need to succeed, but at the end of the day, the success you get from either depends highly on the effort that’s put into it.
Noom
Noom’s science-backed approach adds an extra layer or dimension to their success rate. By helping their users understand the emotional and mental aspects of taking control of their health, Noom does a good job of setting people up for long-term success, and it shows. For an app-based program, Noom has a decent success rate.
On TrustPilot, Noom has earned a solid four stars with more than 60k reviews. The overwhelming majority of reviews are four or five stars, with only 4% giving the app one star and another 4% giving the app two stars.
Lifesum
Lifesum is a few years younger than Noom, and while they have been around for about a decade, it hasn’t been until more recently that they’ve really started to gain traction – probably because it doesn’t have an excessive amount of bells and whistles that many of us think we need when we really don’t.
Lifesum works for people who are reasonably good with accountability or have access to weight loss or healthy living support in their personal lives. Reviews for Lifesum aren’t as numerous as they are for Noom, but we’re hoping to start seeing more and hearing more success stories in the near future.
On TrustPilot, Lifesum’s reviews aren’t great. They have an average of 2.1 stars, but there are only 40-something reviews – and we all know that people are more likely to leave a review if there’s something they don’t like than if they’re overall pleased. So, you might need to take some of those reviews with a grain of salt.
Packaging Winner
Noom offers a process that helps to dive deeper into understanding why eating habits are developed and how to change them. This leads to a higher success rate than just logging food on a calorie counter and keeping track of fitness. Noom scores significantly higher on review platforms, but we have to be fair to Lifesum and admit that some of that is likely due to the fact that they just don’t have that many reviews.
Winner
Noom
When looking at the complete picture, Noom wins the battle of Noom Vs. Lifesum. Noom offers a more thorough approach to weight loss, plus accountability and support. Still, both Noom and Lifesum are more than your typical exercise and food diary app, and each has its features that stand out. In fact, we’d say they both rank among the best weight loss apps. We wish they both offered a free version so potential users could get a better idea if they’re a good fit, but that isn’t an option at this time.
Choose Noom if you:
- You want a better understanding of why you eat the way you do
- Do you like the idea of daily lessons
- You need at least a base level of community and accountability
- Don’t follow a specific dietary program
- Don’t mind spending extra for Noom’s features
Choose Lifesum if you:
- You want a simple health and fitness app that’s easy to use
- You like the idea of mini challenges
- You have a preferred specific dietary lifestyle or want to try something new
- You like to have meal plans designed for you
- You want a more budget-friendly option