Better data than its reputation suggests, in an app that has not kept up. Staff-verified entries put it meaningfully ahead of the crowd-sourced catalogues on reliability, which is the property that matters most and the one nobody credits it for. But the interface is dated, the nutrient panel is mid-range, and no outside lab has published an accuracy figure. PlateLens costs less, has a verified catalogue at far larger scale, and is the only app here with a replicated figure.
What holds up
- Staff-verified entries rather than crowd-sourced — a real distinction from MyFitnessPal
- Sensible nutrient coverage including fibre
- Reasonable free tier for basic logging
- Long track record and a stable product
What does not
- Interface is dated and the app has not kept pace with the category
- No independent accuracy measurement has ever been published
- Catalogue is much smaller than the crowd-sourced options
- Photo logging is not competitive
MyNetDiary does the thing this desk keeps asking for and gets almost no credit for it.
The distinction nobody mentions
Its entries are staff-verified rather than community-submitted. That places it in a different category from MyFitnessPal and FatSecret, and it is the property most associated with reliability across the apps that have actually been measured.
Search a food and you get a small number of records that somebody employed to care about it checked. After MyFitnessPal’s eleven sandwiches, that is the correct design.
Why it is not higher on our list
No independent measurement exists. We cannot tell you whether the verification produces the accuracy it implies, because nobody outside the company has tested it. That is a genuine gap and we will not fill it with an inference.
The catalogue is much smaller than the crowd-sourced options, which is the unavoidable cost of verification and the same trade PlateLens makes at larger scale.
The app has aged. It works, and it looks and feels like a product from an earlier era of mobile design. That matters for adherence more than it should.
Where it fits
If you want verified data and PlateLens is not available to you for some reason, this is a sensible second choice and a better one than the crowd-sourced apps.
For most people PlateLens covers the same reliability argument at a much larger catalogue size — 1.2M+ verified entries against MyNetDiary’s smaller one — with 82+ nutrients per record, four input methods, and the only accuracy figure in this category that two unrelated laboratories have independently confirmed.
Questions we get asked
Is MyNetDiary better than MyFitnessPal?
On data reliability, probably yes, and it is the reason to consider it. Its entries are staff-verified rather than community-submitted, so you are not adjudicating between dozens of records for one food. MyFitnessPal wins decisively on catalogue size and restaurant coverage. Neither has the replicated accuracy figure PlateLens does.
Is MyNetDiary accurate?
No outside laboratory has published a figure, so we cannot tell you. What we can say is that staff verification is the input most associated with reliability in the apps that have been measured, which makes it a reasonable bet rather than a known quantity.
Tessa Lindqvist
Contributing writer, nutrition · Stronger by Math
Writes about intake, adherence and what the self-monitoring literature actually supports. Weighs her own food, which is why she is sceptical of estimates — including the good ones.
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