Data tells us that nearly half of the adults in the United States have attempted to lose weight in the last year. Of those, only about 20% successfully lose and keep the weight off long term. It’s obvious that we need better weight management solutions, which is where Noom and Optavia enter the picture. Unlike typical weight loss programs, these two companies have developed app-based solutions that offer coaching and accountability along your weight loss journey.
While Noom and Optavia share some similarities, they’re each different in their own way and offer unique benefits. We looked at the two head-on to see which offered the best weight loss program and diet app for healthy weight loss.
Noom
Pros
Professional dietary coaching at your disposal- Medical advice to help you on your health-focused journey
- Daily interactive lessons to keep you on track
- Flexible subscription plan
- App-based program is accessible 24/7
- Great customer reviews
Cons
- No supplemental meals
- You’re on your own for meal planning, grocery shopping, and food prep
- A single month’s membership is a bit expensive
Optavia
Pros
Light meals and snacks are included- Optavia app for additional support
- Teaches new healthy eating habits
- Shorter term programs are available
Cons
- Bulk kits may seem cost prohibitive for some
- Offered in bulk boxes, meaning you’re stuck with them if you don’t like them
- A limited menu of Lean & Green meals
- Not designed for people with special dietary considerations, or food allergies
Weight Loss Strategy
The Noom App is a lifestyle-based weight loss program, but it isn’t as rigorously structured as other similar programs, such as Weight Watchers. Rather than offering a program that you have to make work for your lifestyle, Noom takes a different approach to helping people reduce weight – they help you create a fitness and diet plan that fits effortlessly into the life you’re already living.
Noom starts by asking questions about your lifestyle and goals, then uses science to create a plan designed to work specifically for you. With an approach that includes both the science of psychology and weight management, Noom aims to help you develop healthy habits and make positive, sustainable changes to lose weight safely.
Noom provides all the tools to help you achieve and maintain weight loss. The main tools that Noom uses to help you develop a successful weight reduction strategy include:
- App-based support that’s by your side 24/7
- One-on-one coaching with trained professionals and ongoing coaching throughout your weight loss journey
- Daily lessons that provide both targeted and general knowledge you need to succeed
- Professional medical advice for safe and sustainable weight reduction
- Lose at your own pace with a program designed to fit into your life
- Tools to track food intake, water consumption, and fitness so you can visually see your progress
Optavia also offers app support, but the App itself isn’t the foundation of Optavia’s diet plan. The Optavia program also includes one-on-one coaching and goes a step further to offer diet plans that include pre-packaged meals, similar to Weight Watchers or Nutrisystem.
With Optavia, ongoing coaching assists in helping you find the meal plan best aligned with your health goals and dietary lifestyle. This includes in-depth personalization and guidance toward the meal plans and Fuelings to meet your nutritional needs.
Weight Loss Strategy Winner – Optavia ​
Noom and Optavia are similar in many ways but diverge in one important area – food. Noom is fantastic for people who want more control over the foods they eat. While the App helps keep you on track, there’s a higher level of accountability to see results with Noom (which isn’t necessarily bad). Optavia is the winner because they offer many of the same benefits as Noom, with the added benefit of taking all the guesswork out of eating healthy with meals and snacks designed for weight loss.
Menu & Food
Noom
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Medifast/Optavia
check - 6 Meal Plus 24+ Fuelings
- 6 (1 Box)
One of the key differences between Optavia and Noom is the food. The App offers coaching, advice, and practical knowledge for losing weight, but you choose, purchase, and prepare your own food. The goal is to help you develop healthy eating habits with the help of professional coaching and a range of dietary tools.
When talking about food, Noom is great for people that aren’t interested in having meals delivered or following any specific prepared meal plans. They want to eat healthy meals and snacks that they prepare on their own. Considering that most people aren’t going to subscribe to a meal delivery program for life, Noom’s platform is designed to set you up for lifelong success.
In contrast, Optavia is a healthy dietary approach and meal delivery program combined. The idea is that by following the programs, you’ll lose weight and gain the knowledge and habits you need to sustain your achievements, even after you no longer have Optavia’s meals delivered to your door.
Optavia offers several categories of healthy meals and snacks that are aligned with their diet plans. They offer a selection of healthy meals with their Lean & Green Meals. These meals include lean protein, plus up to three servings of produce and two servings of healthy fats. By enjoying these meals, you learn to identify healthy ingredients in the right portions while keeping calorie intake in check.
A few examples of Lean & Green Meals include Turkey Meatball Marinara, Ginger Lemongrass Chicken, and Beef Stew. The menu of Lean & Green Meals isn’t huge, usually offering about six options per week. But they are meals that most people will enjoy, including picky eaters.
Optavia offers other meal plans that feature snacks and small meals. Think along the lines of protein shakes, soups, bars, and crunchy snacks. A few favorites from this section of the menu include the Yogurt Berry Blast smoothie mix, Extra Creamy Chocolate Shake Mix, Creamy Double Peanut Butter Crisp Bar, Homestyle Chicken Noodle Soup Mix, oatmeal, and breakfast cereals. All meals, snacks, and Fuelings are made with healthy ingredients.
Menu & Food Winner – Optavia
Comparing these two companies head to head in this category is challenging, considering they each offer something so different. We give the award to Optavia because they’re a meal delivery program that offers prepared meals, mixes, and snacks that help you develop better-eating habits. Their meal delivery simplifies the process and removes the stress of meal planning, prep, and purchasing costly food items you may never use. Noom offers food lists and recipes, but Optavia makes it a little easier.
Weight Loss Success
Success stories offer motivation for chasing after your own goals. Both Noom and Optavia offer glimpses of some of their customers’ success with their programs.
Noom Success Stories
Noom gets incredible customer reviews, both for the quality of the Noom App and the results people have achieved using their program. It’s obvious that their approach, largely based on lifestyle and psychology, works wonderfully for many searching and looking to achieve better health.
Noom doesn’t feature a lot of success stories on its website, but there is one that stands out. It’s the story of a couple named Ann and Steve. Both had tried other structured weight-reducing programs in the past, like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. However, they often found themselves victims of the yo-yo dieting effect.
With Noom, they found features like the daily lessons to be very helpful, and the calorie tracker and lessons combined helped them to learn valuable information about calorie density, which is something that was previously left untouched in other programs they tried.
After using Noom, Ann has lost 67 pounds, and Steve has lost a total of 62 pounds, and both have seen positive changes in many different areas of their life.
Another success story that can be found in Women’s Health details the success of a woman named Mary. Like many, Mary had found herself struggling with weight gain after the birth of her child and was having difficulty making the lifestyle adjustment necessary to lose and keep the weight off. Noom helped her learn how to stop reaching for convenience foods, even though she was a very busy new mother. She learned healthy eating and food prep habits that greatly changed her life. Mary was able to lose 40 pounds and keep it off.
Optavia Success Stories
Optavia shares snippets of success stories on their site. These are great motivation stories of real transformations. For example, there’s Monica. She mentions how she was overweight at the age of ten and decided to work towards a healthier lifestyle and diet once she had children of her own. After trying Optavia, her personal coach and the support of the Optavia community helped her to lose a total of 167 pounds.
A little further down the page in Penny’s success story. Penny dreamed of becoming a firefighter, but carrying around extra weight and cardiovascular health issues had stood in her way. After a health scare, Penny found herself turning to Optavia and lost 160 pounds.
Like Noon, Optavia also shares success stories of couples who have managed to shed weight, adopt a healthier diet, and make substantial changes in the quality of their life with their program. The story of Sussy and Wes is just one example, and they tell how Optavia positively affected their emotional health as well as their physical health.
Weight Loss Success Winner – Noom
With all of the great success stories, it’s hard to pick a winner, but in this category, we decided to go with Noom. At this point, they have tens of thousands of positive reviews and positive results from their program.
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 |
Optavia
OPTAVIA ESSENTIAL KITS | SERVING PER BOX | PRICE PER MEAL |
Essential Optimal Kit (5 & 1 Plan®) | 119 | $5.99 |
Essential On-The-Go Kit (5 & 1 Plan®) | 119 | $5.99 |
When comparing the prices of Noom vs Optavia, it’s important to consider the entire picture and not just the bottom line price. Noom is an app that offers very in-depth psychological and lifestyle analytics, plus coaching and professional medical advice.
Noom is a monthly subscription service where you can access all of their tools and coaching perks for a single monthly rate. All of the plans are set up for autorenewal. You can have your subscription set to auto-renew every month, but there is a discount if you choose a longer-term autorenewal option. Noom makes this easy by offering autorenewal set up for whatever installments make it easy for you, from one month to eleven months. They also offer an annual autorenewal program, which offers the best pricing.
Currently, a single month of Noom costs $60. If you choose to subscribe for an entire year, you pay $199, which is a huge savings over the monthly price for the same duration.
Optavia’s pricing is set up so that you pay according to the meals you choose, with the App and support factoring into that pricing structure. You can order a la carte meals and Fuelings at various price points.
For example, you might pay $22 for a box of smoothie mixes, but you get seven servings in each box, which brings the price to just over $3 per serving. The Lean & Green meals come packaged in boxes of six servings and cost a little over $30. This puts the price at about $5 per meal, which is very affordable. The downside is that you’re stuck with the remaining five portions if you do not like a meal.
Optavia also offers bundles, which are ideal if you’re planning ahead for a three month commitment to their program. There are several bundles that range in price from $378 to $473.
Pricing Winner
Comparing the pricing structure for these two companies is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but overall, we think Noom offers a more affordable pricing structure. They offer a significant discount for signing up for the annual renewal of the program compared to a single monthly membership. Plus, it’s also possible to control your own food budget by doing your own shopping and looking for grocery deals in your area if you’re on a more restricted food budget.
Customer Service
Noom
- Online
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Optavia
One detail that stands out with Optavia and Noom is that their level of customer service includes continual access to coaching, advice on how to eat healthily, and support throughout the journey. So, as long as you’re subscribed, you can count on great customer service support.
But what if you decide that either of these services is the right fit for you anymore? With Noom, you can cancel your subscription anytime, but you’ll still be on the hook for the remaining of your original renewal term. If you sign up for an entire year but want to cancel after three months, you won’t get a refund for the unused portion of your subscription plan. Instead, you’ll still have access to the tools and coaching, and your plan won’t renew at the end of the term.
Noom offers a free trial to help you decide if their program is right for you. If you’re still undecided, it’s best to go with a month at a time until you’re sure you want to make the investment.
Optavia offers an option to sign up for a Premier Membership, which includes auto-shipments of food for your diet. Optavia does allow you to cancel this membership at any time, but you do lose all the perks that it provides, such as shipping benefits and additional perks.
Customer Service Winner
While you pay significantly more if you pay by the month, we do like that Noom gives you so many options for subscribing to their service. It’s also hard to ignore the tens of thousands of diet reviews that give Noom huge praise for their product and customer service.
Winner
Noom
Both services are great options in you’re looking to lose weight, and while they have similarities, there are also enough differences that set them apart. In the battle of Noom vs. Optavia, we give the final award to Noom. Our reasons are the excellent customer service, flexible subscription program, and the many success stories of people who have used the Noom app. For many, Noom has been a real game changer.
To be fair, we also give high praise to Optivia. Their service is fantastic for those who want more structure and like the idea of prepared meals and snacks to make things easier. It all really comes down to which style of program works best for you. Here are a few points to consider before making your final decision.
Choose Noom if you:
- Want a personalized dietary plan that takes lifestyle and emotional health into consideration
- Like flexibility
- Want to work with a coach to help you achieve success
- Aren’t interested in pre-packaged meals and snacks
- Want to learn new recipes, how to shop, and other lifestyle tricks
- Like the idea of daily interactive lessons
Choose Optavia if you:
- Want an all-inclusive plan that includes support, coaching, and some meals and snacks
- Are looking for a program that teaches calorie density as a dietary strategy
- Prefer small meals and planning ahead
- Want flexibility in the plans you choose