Which meal planning apps track nutrition, not just recipes?

Three kinds of app wear the same label.

Recipe managers such as Paprika hold recipes but never score what you eat. Trackers such as Cronometer and Cal AI score food after it is eaten without deciding what you cook, and MyFitnessPal, a food log first, adds a meal planner in its paid tiers. A planner that carries nutrition through settles the numbers before you shop: Eat This Much builds the week from your calorie and macro targets, Samsung Food+ and MyFitnessPal Premium Plus sell meal plans tailored to your goals, and WhatsCook.ing, which we make, plans from your goals, your tastes and what is in your kitchen. WhatsCook.ing then reads every meal you cook nutrient by nutrient, iron, calcium, vitamin D and omega 3 included, and puts the foods that close your gaps at the top of the shopping list. It is iPhone only and new on the App Store, so pick Eat This Much on Android or the web.

We make one of the apps below, so read this as a competitor's comparison. Every figure comes from the App Store listing linked beside it, read 9 September 2026.

Recipe managers mostly leave your nutrition to you.

Paprika 3 costs $4.99 once, no subscription, and holds 4.90 stars from 53,706 ratings, the highest in our set. It describes itself: "Organize your recipes. Create grocery lists. Plan your meals." Its pantry is a list you keep by hand, and it does not score what you eat.

Samsung Food starts from recipes you save around the web, free at its core with premium at $6.99 a month, at 4.78 from 6,333 ratings. Mealime plans from its own library at 4.81 from 53,992 ratings, but its closing page says it "will be discontinued as of October 21, 2026", so it is not the app to move to. SuperCook is free with no in-app purchases listed and finds recipes from ingredients you tick off a list, a search rather than a week, with no nutrition.

If the question is where to keep your recipes, this group answers it cheaply. Samsung Food also shows nutrition and health scores for its recipes, and its paid Samsung Food+ adds nutrition tracking with meal plans tailored to your goals.

Trackers score food after you eat it.

These are the most-rated apps in this guide, and they hold the most precise numbers. Cronometer describes itself as designed for accuracy, holds 4.77 stars from 97,718 ratings, and charges $10.99 a month or $59.99 a year for Gold: the tool for micronutrients to a decimal place. MyFitnessPal is the incumbent at 4.7 stars from 2,356,014 ratings, a food log first, with a meal planner in its paid tiers. Cal AI photographs the meal you ate and returns a breakdown, free to download with in-app purchases Apple lists from $0.99 to $29.99, at 4.80 from 361,529 ratings.

ZOE sits at the edge of this group: nothing is planned for you, it scores the meals you log, guided by its own biology tests. It is free to download with in-app purchases at $15.99 and $99.99, at 4.77 stars from 6,965 ratings.

Apart from MyFitnessPal's paid planner, they tell you what you ate, not what to cook, and none knows what is in your kitchen. Their strength is where we lose: a tracker is built to log everything, a restaurant meal, a packet of biscuits, a protein bar, with a barcode scanner and a large food database. WhatsCook.ing can log those from a photo or a few words, but it is built around cooking, so if most of your food is bought rather than cooked, one of these is the better fit.

Planners that carry nutrition through the week.

This is the group where nutrition is settled before you shop. Samsung Food+ and MyFitnessPal Premium Plus sell goal-based meal plans as paid upgrades. Eat This Much does it from numbers: your calorie and macro targets, a budget and a schedule. It holds 4.72 stars from 22,087 ratings, with in-app tiers Apple lists from $8.99 to $84.99, and a virtual pantry for what you already own.

WhatsCook.ing does it from your goals and your shelf: you set your diet, goals and tastes once, photograph the cupboard or fridge, and it writes the week around both. Ask for a pantry-only week with a whole food group missing and it writes four days instead of seven, and says so first. The shopping list leads with the foods that close your nutrient gaps, and whatever the pantry already covers stays off it. Marking a meal cooked is the entire logging step: you never keep a food diary or weigh anything, because each recipe's nutrition is worked out from its ingredients, with calories and macros checked against a USDA FoodData Central reference table when the ingredients match. Vitamin and mineral targets follow NIH recommended intakes for your sex and age, and the Nutrient Lens shows each nutrient against your target.

That meal scores the day across four pillars, Calories, Protein, Nutrients and Heart (calorie fit, protein adequacy, micronutrient coverage and heart health), each out of 25, which moves a BioAge estimate. BioAge is built from your age and the nutrition of the meals you log, with its method shown inside the app. It is a nutrition-derived estimate, not a medical measurement, not a diagnosis, and not a substitute for advice from a doctor.

Four reasons to pick something else.

Price. WhatsCook.ing is $29.99 a month or $179.99 a year on the US App Store, after a 7-day free trial through your Apple Account. That is the most expensive line on our comparison table, and there is no free tier.

Platform. It is an iPhone app, with no Android version, on the App Store since 22 September 2026.

Scope. No grocery ordering and no barcode scanner. It is built around the meals you cook; a drink, a snack or a meal out can be logged from a photo or a few typed words, but if most of what you eat comes in a packet, a tracker's food database is the better tool.

Effort. The questionnaire is long, because diet, allergies, goals and body metrics feed the targets, and the first plan takes three to four minutes.

Match the app to the job, not the word.

To keep your own recipes and score nothing, pick Paprika, or Samsung Food to pay nothing. For exact numbers on everything you eat, pick Cronometer, or Cal AI if photographing the plate is the only logging you will keep up. For a plan built to macro targets, pick Eat This Much. For one app that plans the week from your goals and your kitchen, tracks the vitamins and minerals in what you cook, and leads its shopping list with the foods that close your nutrient gaps, that is what we built.

One test settles most of it. Does the nutrition arrive before the shop, or after the meal? Only one of those changes what you buy.

Read next: ten apps in one table, planning from what is in my fridge, the best app for one person, and the questions people ask, including what BioAge is built from.

Every figure above, and where it came from.

Prices, star ratings and counts are what Apple showed on the US App Store on 9 September 2026, opened again on 21 September 2026. Counts rise daily, and prices are the tiers Apple lists, not necessarily the one you are offered.

App Store listings, read 9 September 2026: Paprika Recipe Manager 3, Samsung Food, Mealime, SuperCook, Cronometer, MyFitnessPal, Cal AI, ZOE Health and Eat This Much.

Mealime's closing date and the deletion of personal data come from mealime.com/closing, read 14 September and checked again 21 September 2026. Our longer page is the Mealime alternative.