A great fitness app can help if you’re looking to lose weight and improve your health. We looked at Noom Vs. MyFitnessPal to see how they compare and which one is best suited to help you reach your health goals.
Noom
Pros
- More than just a food diary app, Noom offers features to change behaviors
- Also works as an overall health app, helping you keep track of key health metrics – not just lost weight
- No food rules, but it offers food suggestions
- Encourages intuitive eating
- Easy-to-use app
- Offers a free trial
Cons
- The month-to-month plan is expensive
- Some say that personal coaching is lacking
- The coach is not a registered dietitian
- Integrates with fewer devices than MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal
Pros
- One of the most popular calorie-tracking apps for years
- Has a massive database of foods
- Offers a free version if all you need is an activity and food log
- Integrates with many different fitness and health devices
Cons
- Must pay for the premium option if you’re interested in more than logging food and activity
- It is mostly a tracking app without many features that help develop healthier habits
- Many reviews claim that the food-logging app is inaccurate
Weight Loss Programs
Neither Noom nor MyFitnessPal is a weight loss program in the traditional sense, like what you might get if you were signed up with a weight loss service like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. Rather, they’re both weight loss apps that offer food, health, and fitness trackers, along with additional tools to help you reach your target weight.
MyFitneesPal
Rather than being a standalone diet for weight loss, MyFitnessPal works more like a tool to complement your dietary lifestyle, whether that includes following a particular diet or simply working toward eating healthier. MyFitnessPal will give you a daily calorie allotment, which is the target you should aim for (based on their metrics), which should be followed if you want to enter a calorie deficit and lose weight.
MyFitnessPal supports sustained weight loss through food tracking. There’s not a lengthy list of food rules to follow, but you are encouraged to track everything you eat or drink for the best results.
The idea is that by consistent tracking, you learn to spot dietary trends that prevent you from losing weight and also gain a more realistic picture of what you’re eating and drinking.
It’s surprising how much those little bites of food from your kids’ plates or the taste testing done while cooking add up. Plus, in today’s world of super-sized portions, how many of us have an accurate idea of what a single serving of pasta looks like? This is where an app like MyFitnessPal really helps with getting a realistic view of food intake.
MyFitnessPal doesn’t just track calorie intake. There are also other important tracking tools, such as hydration, fitness, and macronutrients.
On the flip side, some say that the daily calorie allotment that MyFitnessPal suggests is too low and promotes a less-than-healthy relationship with food by encouraging an unhealthy obsession with tracking everything.
There’s also the fact that you’re not following a structured diet, which can be both a positive and a negative. Some people need more structure to see results.
Noom
Noom also isn’t a diet with strict dos and don’ts that need to be followed. Like MyFitnessPal, you are supplied with a daily target when you sign up with Noom, and the app offers features including additional health tracking options and workout routines.
While Noom offers plenty of tools to guide you and help you reach your target weight, it’s not just another diet that sets you up to fail. Noom’s approach to weight loss has as much to do with getting behind the “why” as it does with food tracking, food intake, and fitness.
One of the key differences between Noom and MyFitnessPal is that Noom offers science-backed lessons and education that can develop a healthier relationship with food – one that is based more on healthy, intuitive eating rather than emotional or boredom eating.
If you’re someone who has difficulties sticking to a healthy eating plan in times of stress, depression, or boredom, then Noom can really help you get to the bottom of that.
Weight Loss Programs Winner
At the end of the day, Noom offers more of a diet-like structure than MyFitnessPal, although neither of them really plays into diet culture the way other fad diets do.
Both encourage you to keep track of how many calories you consume in a day and workout routines, but Noom makes your overall health, including other physical aspects of health and mental health, the priority.
Noom also connects you to a coach, and while this coach only checks in with you once or twice a week, it’s still a bonus to have someone to be accountable to and someone who can answer questions and provide guidance.
Apps
apps are key factors in deciding between the two. Both work as calorie-counting apps, but each also offers features in addition to that.
MyFitnessPal
The MyFitnessPal app is arguably one of the most popular health apps and has been for years. They offer a free version of their fitness app that focuses mainly on tracking calories and fitness. You log what you eat (yes, every bite!) and how much you move.
MyFitnessPal asks some questions, does some calculations, and then generates a target for you to aim for. The free version of the app from MyFitnessPal is pretty basic, but if all you’re looking for is an app that encourages accountability and provides a basic snapshot of calories in vs. calories out, then it does a good enough job.
If you’re willing to pay for the premium version of the app, then you have access to more features than what’s offered through the basic fitness and calorie tracker.
With the premium fitness app, MyFitnessPal offers a database of 18 million foods, including foods from many different global cuisines. To their credit, MyFitnessPal offers a huge food database, and you’d be hard-pressed to find single food that isn’t in there.
However, it’s a common complaint of MyFitnessPal users that there are a fair amount of inconsistencies and inaccuracies, which leads to miscalculations. Taking this into consideration, this might not be the best calorie-counting app if you want an app that’s accurate down to every single calorie.
The paid version of MyFitnessPal’s app does offer some nice additional features. These include
- Barcode scan to easily enter food values
- Personalized daily plan
- Calculations of micronutrients and macronutrients on a per meal, daily, and weekly basis
- Intermittent fasting tracking
- Food analysis and tracking of eating patterns
- Integration with nearly three dozen other fitness & activity tracking devices
Noom App
The Noom app is designed to not only help with counting calories and activity but also serve as a tool to lead you to success through various facets of your weight loss journey. In comparison to MyFitnessPal, Noom offers more tools to help users lose weight sustainably.
The Noom app can be used for calorie counting, although its food database is not as large as MyFitnessPals. Noom does offer an individualized goal for calories and fitness, but it’s not a diet in the sense that Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig is.
What sets this app apart from other weight loss and fitness apps is that Noom offers daily lessons (you choose how much time, if any, you spend on these lessons daily). These daily less include things like reading informative health articles, daily challenges, and working toward changing your emotional relationship with food.
Noom could also be considered in the realm of health apps, as opposed to just being a weight loss app. The app encourages you to track multiple key health metrics, like blood pressure and blood glucose levels, in addition to supporting mental health through the process.
The Noom app also offers access to a personal coach, customized fitness plans, tracking of eating patterns, and more. The Noom app does integrate with other health and activity tracking devices, although it appears that MyFitnessPal works with more. Additionally, all of the features are available with the Noom subscription, so you’re not put in the position to pay more for additional features.
Apps Winner
When looking at Noom Vs. MyFitnessPal for just their apps alone, Noom comes out ahead. MyFitnessPal would win if we were to base this off of the size of their food database, but Noom offers features that make it much more than just a fitness and food diary.
It’s designed to help Noom users to put their unhealthy relationship with food in the past, make better food choices, and develop a sustainable strategy for improved health. Each feature of the Noom app contributes to that – and the app is intuitive to use, even for those who might not exactly be tech savvy.
Community Support
Noom
- Online
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MyFitnessPal
For many people, a support network is essential for weight loss success. It’s completely normal to seek camaraderie, accountability, and guidance on this journey. Both Noom and MyFitnessPal offer some level of community support to help keep you on track as you work toward your goal of achieving a healthy weight.
Noom Community Support
Noom offers access to their Noom Community for anyone who is a current subscriber to the app. As with any type of health app, the size of the community is limited by the number of users. Noom isn’t brand new to the fitness industry, but it is younger than MyFitnessPal.
While we don’t have exact numbers on how many people use each of these apps, MyFitnessPal is estimated to have hundreds of millions of users, while Noom is estimated to have tens of millions of users. This is a stark difference in terms of the potential size of the community.
The Noom community is organized into Circles, which are essentially smaller groups that allow Noom users to connect with a reasonable-sized group of people who share common interests and form relationships with others going through a similar weight loss journey.
One standout feature of Noom’s community support is the connection you get with a personal coach. If you’re looking for a strict personal coach that checks in daily, demanding accountability, don’t get your hopes up too much with Noom.
The personal coach typically checks in about once a week unless you prompt for more interaction, asks about your progress and goals, offers health tips if you need them, and will help you restructure your diet and fitness routine to maximize your efforts toward losing weight.
The Noom coach does expect some accountability, but they’re not the ever-present accountability partner that some people need. Most Noom coaches also aren’t registered dietitians, so there are limits on how they can assist you in that way.
MyFitnessPal Community Support
MyFitnessPal launched nearly twenty years ago in 2005, and over that time, it’s estimated that MyFitnessPal has connected with nearly 200 million app users. That’s a lot of opportunity for a large community support network to form. Granted, not all of these people are currently using the app, and not all of them are signed up for the premium version of the app. Still, it’s a safe assumption that the MyFitnessPal community is overall larger than what you’re going to find with Noom.
Even with a larger community network, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the community is going to be active. With Noom vs. MyFitnessPal, neither offers the type of community engagement you get with complete weight loss plans like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, and it’s a matter of you getting out of it what you put into it.
These aren’t the type of community networks where there’s enough action to spend most of your time sitting back and being a “lurker.” The best results come when you put in the effort to be active.
Personal coaching is available with MyFitnessPal – to an extent. While not offered with the free version of the app, the premium version offers multiple plans, and the amount and type of coaching support you receive depends on the plan you choose to take part in. A few examples of these plans are Total Body Power, Mindful + Motivated, and Eco-Friendly Eating.
Community Support Winner
There’s a lot about each of these apps that puts them almost in a tie in the category of community support. MyFitnessPal wins here for reasons like having an overall larger community, and the personal coaching that’s available is more targeted toward specific goals. The downside of MyFitnessPal is that the community support and coaching features are accessed through premium membership.
Meals & Nutrition
What Noom and MyFitnessPal have in common is that neither of them is considered a diet program in the traditional sense. There isn’t a preset diet plan to follow, although both services do provide a daily goal for calorie tracking and offer nutritional tips and recipes to help you develop healthy habits.
Noom does break down foods into red, yellow, and green categories. This system helps you learn to better identify healthy foods, so eventually, you can fill up your plate with all the good stuff without the need to count calories in order to maintain or lose weight.
Green foods are all healthy foods that you can eat without restriction, while yellow foods are also mostly healthy but are eaten in moderation. The red foods are the foods that should be limited. There aren’t any food restrictions, but the diet plan you build for yourself should focus mostly on those green and yellow foods.
MyFitnessPal doesn’t provide this type of list, but with the premium option, you do get a snapshot of which of your foods are highest in calories, fats, sugars, etc. This information can help you make the right dietary decisions for a healthy lifestyle.
One thing that users mention about both apps is that the suggested caloric intake is too low and ends up ranking high on the hunger scale. There’s also a concern that needing to track calories so religiously and keeping a strict food diary can negatively impact eating habits. Anyone with a history of disordered eating should consider if either of these is a good fit.
Meals & Nutrition Winner
Both apps require calorie tracking if you’re going to make full use of the features. Noom wins because its food lists can assist in identifying the right foods to eat for a healthy lifestyle and contribute to more sustainable weight loss.
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 |
MyFitnessPal
PLAN | PRICE PER PLAN |
Annually | $49.99 |
In an ideal world, it would be easy to lose weight effortlessly without any outside help or tools, but that just isn’t how it is for most of us. Many would argue that anything spent on a weight loss program or app is well worth the cost, but it still needs to fit within your budget and offer good value for what you’re paying.
MyFitnessPal Price
As far as affordability goes, the basic MyFitnessPal app is about as good as it gets. They offer a free version that’s considered by many to be one of the best calorie-counting apps in the free category. With the free version, you get reasonably comprehensive food tracking and a nutrient dashboard that offers a snapshot of food intake and fitness for the day.
If you want the full scale of everything MyFitnessPal offers, that requires a paid premium membership. If you don’t want to make an annual commitment, you can pay month to month. The monthly cost is $19.99. If you want to pay for an entire year upfront, the cost is $79.99, which averages out to a little over $6.50 per month.
Noom Price
Noom offers all of its benefits and features to all members, but they don’t offer a free version of their app. They do offer a free or “choose your own price” trial period, which gives you two weeks to try it all out and see if Noom is a good fit for you. After the initial two weeks, you do have to sign up and pay to keep all the tracking on the progress you’ve made.
With Noom’s pricing structure, it can be seen as a really good deal or a bit expensive, and it all depends on how long you sign up for. You can choose to sign up for one month, two months, three months, etc., all the way up to an annual auto-renewal plan.
For a single month, Noom costs $70, which is steep. Each additional month you commit to offers cost savings. For example, if you sign up for five months, the fee is $174, which averages out to about $34.50, so a little less than half what the month-to-month plan costs. The annual subscription costs $209 upfront, which averages out to a little over $17 per month. This is a tremendous saving over the monthly plan.
Pricing Winner
On the basis of cost, MyFitnessPal wins, especially if you’re on a budget. Honestly, it’s easy to argue that Noom offers more, even though the cost is higher. However, we also understand that sometimes you’re just looking for something to get you motivated and keep you on track to help you lose weight, and MyFitnessPal is an economical option for that.
Reviews & Results
Noom
MyFitnessPal
Noom has more statistical results that show it’s an effective app for losing weight. According to one source, more than 75% of women and men lost weight with Noom when they stuck to it for at least nine months. There are less solid statistics on MyFitnessPals, but all you need to do is take a look at online reviews and success stories to see that it’s also a great option for getting on track to lose weight.
For Apple smartphone app reviews, MyFitnessPal earns 4.7 stars out of more than 1.5 million reviews. That’s outstanding customer testimony. Just having that accountability of logging food and activity daily has helped people lose weight and also prevents them from experiencing the rebound weight gain that’s so common with any dietary meal plan.
Noom also gets good reviews, but they don’t have quite the same level of reviews that MyFitnessPal has achieved. This makes sense Noom hasn’t been around as long. One complaint about Noom is that it’s difficult to hold onto all of those healthy habits and accountability once you choose to cancel your membership.
Reviews & Results Winner
With a long history and overall great reviews and success stories, MyFitnessPal wins in this category. That said, Noom Vs. MyFitnessPal both offer something different which will appeal to and work better for different people.
Winner
Company Noom
In the comparison of Noom Vs. MyFitnessPal, we feel that Noom wins it overall. Noom isn’t the new Weight Watchers by any means, but it does offer a lot of nice and empowering tools for helping you lose weight or not gain weight, whichever your goal might be.
If you can afford the annual subscription, Noom is economical considering all of the features you get, and we like that you don’t have to pay extra for a premium membership to access all of the benefits.
That said, each app has something beneficial to offer, and what works for one might not work for another.
Choose Noom if you:
- Want more than a simple food and activity tracker
- Like the idea of facing the emotional aspects of weight control
- Like a little more structure, but still want freedom in choosing your foods
- Don’t mind daily weigh-ins
- Like the idea of having access to a nutritional/accountability coach
Choose MyFitnessPal if you:
- Want a free food and activity tracking app
- Eat a variety of foods and want an app with a huge database of foods
- Don’t mind paying extra for more benefits
- Like the idea that MyFitnessPal has such a longstanding history and is one of the most popular health apps
- Need an app that integrates with many fitness devices.