Which is better, MacroFactor or Cronometer?

They answer different questions. MacroFactor works out how much you should eat by measuring your expenditure from your weight trend. Cronometer works out precisely what you did eat, down to eighty nutrients from verified sources. If your calorie target keeps being wrong, MacroFactor. If you have a nutrient question, Cronometer.

Is Cronometer's free version enough?

For most people, yes. Full macro and micronutrient logging with a verified database and no paywall on the fundamentals. What the free tier does not give you is an adaptive calorie target, because Cronometer does not have one at any price.

Does MacroFactor track micronutrients?

It tracks them and does not specialise in them. The database is well curated but does not distinguish laboratory-verified entries from crowd-sourced ones the way Cronometer does, and the nutrient breadth is narrower. If micronutrients are why you log, Cronometer is the better instrument.

You can, and it is redundant enough that few people sustain it. Logging every meal twice is the definition of friction. The more common answer is to use MacroFactor continuously and run a two-week Cronometer audit once or twice a year when you have a specific nutrient question.

Which is better for athletes?

MacroFactor, for most athletes, because a wrong calorie target costs more than an unmeasured micronutrient. The exception is an athlete with a restricted diet or high volume on a narrow food rotation, where deficiency risk is real and Cronometer is the tool that finds it.

MacroFactor vs Cronometer: Coach or Instrument

The actual division

MacroFactor is a coach. Its central feature is measuring your maintenance calories from your own trend weight against your own logged intake, then setting and adjusting a target. Everything else in the app serves that.

Cronometer is an instrument. Its central feature is a nutrient database with sourcing you can verify, and a complete picture of eighty-plus nutrients. It has an opinion about nothing.

Neither is a weaker version of the other. They are different products that both happen to require you to log food.

Where MacroFactor is decisively better

The calorie target. Cronometer predicts maintenance from a formula — height, weight, age, sex, activity level from a dropdown. That method carries roughly 200 to 300 kcal a day of individual error and cannot respond to a training load that moves week to week.

MacroFactor inverts it: watch the trend weight, watch the intake, solve for the expenditure that must have produced that outcome. No formula, no dropdown, and no exercise calories added back — which removes the least reliable number in nutrition tracking. The arithmetic, worked through.

For anyone whose target has been quietly wrong, this is the whole game. Whether it is worth paying for.

The coaching layer. A defensible position on rate of change, and adjustments that arrive on a schedule rather than when you remember to recalculate.

Handling of imperfect logging. It tolerates gaps better than you would expect and is honest that chronic under-logging biases the estimate downward.

Where Cronometer is decisively better

Data you can defend. It marks laboratory-analysed entries from USDA and NCCDB separately from manufacturer and user-submitted ones. Almost nothing else does, and it is the distinction that decides whether a micronutrient figure is a number or a guess.

Nutrient breadth. Eighty-plus per food, with targets.

Honest gaps. When a food has no value coded for a nutrient, Cronometer shows the absence rather than treating it as zero. That is the difference between "you are short on iron" and "you have not logged enough foods with iron data".

The free tier. Genuinely usable, with no paywall on the fundamentals. MacroFactor has no free tier at all.

The comparison

	MacroFactor	Cronometer
Calorie target method	Measured from trend	Predicted from formula
Adds exercise calories back	No	Yes
Adjusts target over time	Yes, automatically	Only if you change it
Coaching / recommendations	Yes	None
Micronutrients	Yes, secondary	80+, the product
Verified vs crowd-sourced data	Not distinguished	Explicit
Missing nutrient data shown as	Incomplete	An honest gap
Database size	Large	Medium
Barcode coverage	Good	Adequate
Free tier	None	Strong
Primary logging flow	Search	Search

Which to pick

MacroFactor if the recurring problem is that your weight is not doing what the numbers said it should. That is a target problem and MacroFactor is the only mainstream tracker that fixes the cause.

Cronometer if you have a specific nutrient question — a restricted diet, a diagnosed deficiency, high training volume on a narrow food rotation — or if you want the best free option.

Cronometer periodically, MacroFactor continuously. The practical answer for most serious athletes: run MacroFactor as the daily tool and do a two-week Cronometer audit once or twice a year to check nothing is quietly short. What tends to go short at high training volume.

What neither one does

Both are nutrition products, and both are blind to your training in the same way — MacroFactor deliberately, Cronometer incidentally.

MacroFactor's blindness is elegant: it absorbs training load through the weight trend without needing to know what the training was. That is genuinely clever, and it means it cannot attribute a change. Expenditure rose 300 kcal a day; endurance block, extra walking, or body composition? The split is what tells you whether your plan worked.

And neither can act on the training side:

Low energy availability should change what today's session asks for. Why fuelling and prescription are one problem.
Whether to deload depends on lifting volume, endurance intensity and recovery markers. None of those is food. When a deload is actually indicated.
A long run and a rest day are not the same energy day, even at the same weekly average. How far apart.

If your nutrition question keeps turning out to be a training question wearing a calorie hat, that is a category boundary rather than a missing feature. What both halves on one ledger looks like.

Before paying for either, run the numbers on your own data. If a measured maintenance figure lands close to what your current app predicted, the target was never your problem and Cronometer's free tier will serve you fine.