Grove vs MyFitnessPal for Fiber Tracking

I build Grove, so weigh what follows accordingly. MyFitnessPal is the better app if you want to log calories, protein, carbs, and fat all at once, and its no-cost tier covers more than people expect. Grove is the better app if fiber is the only number you care about, because fiber gets the whole screen instead of sitting near the bottom of a nutrient list, and every gram comes from USDA data instead of entries other users typed in.

Almost everyone who decides to track fiber starts with MyFitnessPal. Of course they do. It is the app your friends already have, the one that comes up first, and it does show fiber.

Then they log a bowl of oatmeal and go looking for the number. It sits past calories, past the macro chart, in a list next to sugar and sodium and vitamin A. Finding it takes three taps. Doing that three times a day for a week takes stubbornness. Most people quit by Thursday.

That gap is why I built Grove. But MyFitnessPal is a genuinely good app, and plenty of people reading this should use it instead of mine. Here is how to tell which group you are in.

What MyFitnessPal is genuinely good at

Scale, first. The food catalog is enormous. Restaurant meals, regional grocery brands, the weird protein bar you bought at a gas station in Ohio. Somebody has already entered it. If your eating habits involve a lot of packaged and restaurant food, you will spend less time typing.

Second, breadth. MyFitnessPal was built to track a whole diet. Calories, protein, carbs, fat, exercise, weight, water. If you are cutting for a race, working through a body composition goal, or your doctor asked you to watch sodium and protein together, one app holding all of it is worth real money.

Third, the no-cost tier is not a demo. You can log meals, see a daily total, and keep a streak going without paying anything. That matters. A lot of people are not ready to subscribe to a habit they have not proven they will keep.

Fourth, it has been around long enough that everything talks to it. Wearables, scales, workout apps.

None of that is faint praise. If you want to track your whole diet, MyFitnessPal is a reasonable default and I would not talk you out of it.

Comparison table

| | Grove | MyFitnessPal | | --- | --- | --- | | Built around | Fiber and gut symptoms | Calories and macros | | Food data | USDA FoodData Central | Crowdsourced, user-submitted entries | | Where fiber lives | The main screen | Inside a nutrient list | | Barcode scanning | Yes | Yes | | Gut symptom check-ins | Yes | No | | Home screen widget quick-add | Yes | Not a fiber-focused equivalent | | Apple Health | Writes your fiber to Health | Broad Health integration | | Account required | No, logs stay on your device | Yes | | Price as of August 2026 | $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr, 7-day free trial on annual | No-cost tier; Premium $9.99 to $19.99/mo or $49.99 to $79.99/yr; Premium+ $24.99/mo or $99.99/yr |

Where fiber tracking gets frustrating in MyFitnessPal

Two problems, and only one of them is about design.

Fiber is buried by design, and the design is correct. MyFitnessPal's job is to show you twenty numbers. That means no single number can dominate the screen. Fiber has to share space with everything else, so it gets a row. If fiber is the only thing you are working on, you are paying an attention tax every single time you open the app. You have to go find your goal instead of seeing it.

That sounds small. It is not. The people who stick with tracking are the ones who can glance at their phone at 4pm and know whether dinner needs beans. When the answer takes three taps to reach, you stop asking the question.

The database is crowdsourced, so fiber values wobble. This is the bigger issue. MyFitnessPal's catalog is huge because users built it. That is a real strength for coverage and a real weakness for accuracy, because the person who entered "black beans, 1 cup" may have typed the fiber field carefully, guessed at it, or left it blank.

Calories survive this reasonably well. Most people spot a 900-calorie sandwich that should be 400. Fiber does not survive it, because nobody has an instinct for whether a cup of lentils is 8 grams or 15. You cannot eyeball the error. So you log a day, see 31 grams, feel good, and have no idea whether you actually ate 31 grams.

For a number you are tracking specifically to change your health, that is a bad place to be.

I am not going to itemize which MyFitnessPal features sit behind Premium, because that list changes. Check the app's own pricing screen before you commit.

Where Grove is better

Grove does one job. Fiber, and how your gut feels about it.

One number, front and center. You open Grove and see today's fiber and your goal. That is the screen. No macro chart, no calorie budget, nothing to scroll past. Default goals are 34 grams a day for men and 25 for women, based on federal guidance, and you can change yours. If you want to work out your own target first, the fiber calculator and our guide on how much fiber per day will get you there in a minute.

Verified numbers, not guesses. Grove runs on USDA FoodData Central. When Grove says a cup of cooked lentils is 15.6 grams, that came from the same database dietitians and researchers use. It is not a stranger's typo.

Logging takes about ten seconds. Search a food, pick a natural portion like one medium avocado, done. There is barcode scanning for packaged food and a home screen widget so you can add your usual breakfast without opening the app.

It tracks how you feel, not only what you ate. Grove has gut symptom check-ins next to your fiber. Bloating, digestion, energy. Nobody eats 30 grams of fiber a day because they love arithmetic. They do it because they want to stop feeling awful after lunch. Grove keeps those two things on the same timeline so you can see whether the change is doing anything.

No account, and your food log stays on your phone. Grove writes your daily fiber to Apple Health if you want it there. Beyond that, there is nothing to sign up for and no server holding your meals.

Grove is cheaper for this one job. As of August 2026, Grove is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial on the annual plan. New users need a subscription once the trial ends, which I will be straight about: there is no permanent no-cost tier. MyFitnessPal Premium starts at $9.99 a month and runs to $19.99, with Premium+ at $24.99. If fiber is your goal, you are paying roughly half as much for an app that puts it on the front page.

The paid tier also opens up full calendar history, a monthly grid view, and weekly insights, which is where tracking stops being a chore and starts being data you can actually read.

What Grove does not do

It does not count calories. It does not track protein, carbs, fat, sodium, or your workouts. It does not have MyFitnessPal's restaurant coverage. If you need any of that, Grove will frustrate you and you should close this tab and go download MyFitnessPal.

Should you use both?

You can, and a few people do. Log everything in MyFitnessPal, keep Grove for the fiber view.

I would not. Logging the same meal twice is the fastest way to quit tracking altogether. Pick the one that matches the goal you actually have this month, and give it two weeks before you judge it.

Which one should you pick?

Pick MyFitnessPal if you want calories and macros, you eat a lot of restaurant and packaged food, you want to spend nothing to start, or you are tracking several nutrients at once for a specific plan.

Pick Grove if fiber is the number you are actually trying to move, you want USDA values rather than user submissions, you want to see whether more fiber changes your bloating and digestion, or you want to open an app and get an answer in one second.

If you want to see how Grove stacks up against the other dedicated fiber apps, Grove vs FiberUp covers that matchup, and the best fiber tracker apps roundup covers the whole field.

Frequently asked questions

Can you track fiber in MyFitnessPal?

Yes. MyFitnessPal shows fiber as part of its nutrient breakdown for each day, so you can log meals and read your daily total. The friction is that fiber sits inside a long list rather than on the main screen, so checking it takes several taps every time you want the number.

Is MyFitnessPal accurate for fiber?

It varies by entry. MyFitnessPal's food catalog is largely user-submitted, so the fiber value on any given item depends on who typed it in. Coverage is excellent and accuracy is uneven. Apps built on USDA FoodData Central, including Grove, pull from a single verified source instead.

Is Grove cheaper than MyFitnessPal Premium?

Yes, as of August 2026. Grove is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year with a 7-day free trial on the annual plan. MyFitnessPal Premium runs $9.99 to $19.99 a month or $49.99 to $79.99 a year, and Premium+ is $24.99 a month. Grove does less, and costs less for doing it.

Does Grove track calories or protein?

No. Grove tracks fiber and gut symptoms only, and that is deliberate. If you need calories, protein, carbs, or fat alongside your fiber, MyFitnessPal or Cronometer will serve you better. Grove is for people who already know fiber is the one thing they want to fix.

Do I need an account to use Grove?

No. Grove has no sign-up and no login. Your food log stays on your iPhone, and the only thing that leaves the app is your daily fiber total, written to Apple Health if you turn that on. Nothing about your meals sits on a server.

The bottom line

MyFitnessPal is a strong app carrying a wide job. That width is exactly what makes it a mediocre fiber tracker, because fiber cannot be the hero of a screen showing twenty other numbers, and a crowdsourced database cannot promise you the gram count is right.

Grove is narrow on purpose. One number, USDA data behind it, ten seconds to log, and a record of how your gut felt while you did it.

If that is the app you have been looking for, get Grove on the App Store and find out where today's fiber actually landed before dinner.