The best apps to track proteins

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Getting enough protein is important to our basic health, and for supporting athletic endeavors. Calorie tracking apps like my favorite, Stopwatchcan help you keep track of your protein intake, but sometimes you just want to make sure you’re hitting your protein goals without putting calories at the center.

Why you might want to track proteins

After all, tracking your macros isn’t just for weight loss. (And weight loss doesn’t REQUIRING calorie tracking; (this is just a useful tool, not the only way to do it.) Protein tracking can be useful if:

• You are trying to gain muscle.

• You do a lot of endurance sports (like distance running).

• You are pregnant or lactating.

• You’re trying to eat better and you’ve chosen protein as your focus instead of trying to improve everything at once.

Protein-only tracking is especially popular among people who are getting into the habit of lifting weights. You may need to step out of your comfort zones based on calories and weight, and simply focus on feeding yourself.

To figure out which is the best protein tracking app, I downloaded the top four protein trackers in the iPhone App Store that are NO full-featured calorie tracker. Read on to find out what I found.

All major protein tracking applications are very simple and similar

I suppose this is a niche market, but somehow I expected more. The App Store is full of protein-tracking apps, and they all have nearly identical interfaces: a circular progress bar for the day’s protein (which shows how much you’ve eaten relative to your goal) and a button that lets you add your meals . i ate that day I tested these four:

However, unlike most calorie trackers, there is no way to claim free meals. Two of them (Hello Protein and Protein Log) have no search at all. The other two (Protein Tracker and Protein Pal) have a search, but require a premium subscription.

This means that most of the time, when you’re using these apps, you just have to I know how much protein is in the food you are recording. You can either check a label, Google it or just know it off the top of your head. For someone like me who has followed protein for years, this is not too difficult COURSE one egg has 6 grams of protein – but it seriously limits the ease of use for beginners.

Best for minimalists: Protein Log

Protein Log is one of the applications that does not have a search function. It doesn’t find foods for you and it doesn’t help you figure out how much protein you have MUST to eat It just gives you a place to say “chicken, 44 grams” and adds it to your daily total.

There is a history tab that shows what you ate and how much protein each item had. You can also use the calendar to check your protein intake for each day in the past. In the Analytics tab, you can see how much protein you’ve had each day this week, this month, and this year, compared to your goal.

Candidate: HelloProtein is also in the minimalist category, but it has a rather big drawback: there is no way to modify what you ate the previous days. I logged a few things yesterday, then woke up this morning and remembered I needed to log a protein bar. Too bad – there’s no way to add it. HelloProtein gives you an analytics page, but what good are my weekly stats if I know that on Monday I’m missing 20 grams that I know I ate?

Protein Pal has more features for the best price

If you want something with a built-in search, Protein Pal is the app you’re looking for. It also recommends a protein target for you, if you want. When you start the app, it gives you a place to enter your protein goal, but there’s also a “protein calculator” to help if you’re not sure which number to choose. He recommended that I aim for 110 grams of protein per day, which is about 0.73 grams per kilogram of body weight and fits the Recommendations for muscle growth (which was the point I entered).

Once you’ve decided on a goal, this app behaves a lot like my minimalist pick, Protein Log. The main difference is search, which is available under the pro subscription ($3.99/month or $23.99/year, with a 7-day free trial). Now you can find foods through a text search (“powered by FatSecret,” it says) or a barcode scanner (“powered by” and then there’s a green icon I don’t recognize).

Both are a bit clumsy. The barcode scanner will display the results, then immediately scan its surroundings again, so you have to move the camera FAR from the thing you just scanned if you want to actually enter it. Frustratingly, the database is not always accurate. My favorite protein bar, Barebells Salty Peanut, listed on the app as containing 16 grams of protein when the label says it has 20 grams.

Candidate: Protein Tracker/ProteinPlus is a similar app with similar features; his research even gave the same incorrect 16 grams of protein for my Barebells bar. It also gave me a free 7-day trial before charging $24.99/year, but the month-to-month cost is $9.99—a full $6 more each month than Protein Pal. (Protein Tracker has a slightly nicer interface for searching, but I’m not paying an extra six bucks just for that.) When I went into my subscriptions (under iPhone Settings > Apple ID) I noticed that there two annual options, one for $24.99 and one for $19.99. If you end up using this app, make sure you choose the cheapest one, because paying an extra $5 for no reason is just stupid.