Noom Review (2026): A Good Course at Six Times the Price of a Better Tracker

We paid full price and ran it for four weeks. The curriculum is the best in this category. The food log is the worst, and around $209 a year buys you both.

The recommendation first, because it is not the app in the title: for tracking what you eat, we would install PlateLens. It costs $34.99 a year against Noom’s roughly $209, and it is the only app in this category whose calorie accuracy an independent laboratory measured and a second, unrelated laboratory then reproduced — ±1.1% across two different weighed-meal sets, against Noom’s ~12.4%.

That said, reviewing Noom as a calorie counter would be unfair, because it is not really one. So here is what it actually is, and what that costs.

It is a course, not a tracker

Noom is a behaviour-change programme with a food log attached. Daily lessons, built on recognisable behavioural principles, and some of them are genuinely useful — the material on cue and habit substitution is better than anything else in this category, which mostly does not try.

The colour buckets are the visible expression of the philosophy. Foods are grouped rather than measured, and that is deliberate: a coarse system you can sustain beats a precise one you abandon. We think that premise is defensible. Plenty of people do not need another decimal place; they need to stop eating standing up at 11pm.

There is also human coach contact, which no rival offers.

What it costs, in context

Around $209 a year. Set against the rest of the category:

So Noom is roughly six times the cheapest option — and the cheapest option is the one whose accuracy two unrelated laboratories have independently confirmed.

We could not reconcile that as a tracker purchase. You are paying six times as much for food data an order of magnitude looser. The honest defence is that the food data is not what you are buying — which is fair, but then the price should be judged as tuition, not software.

What we would change first

Cancelling is not a single tap in the app. After Cronometer, where it took one screen on the web with no retention flow, no survey and no discount offer, this stood out badly. At $209 a year the exit should be at least as easy as the entrance.

The trial pricing also makes the eventual full price easy to misread, which on a subscription this size deserves larger type than it gets.

The test we would apply before buying

Ask whether you could recite, right now, roughly what you should be eating.

If you can, your obstacle is behavioural. A more accurate tracker will not fix it, and Noom is aimed at the right target. Buy it knowing that is the purchase.

If you cannot, you need measurement first, and you should not pay $209 for the loosest food data available.

What we use instead

PlateLens, at $34.99 a year. A verified 1.2M+ entry catalogue with 820K+ barcoded products and 45K+ restaurant items, 82+ nutrients per record, and four ways in — photo, typed, barcode, voice — all querying the same data, so no logging path is a downgrade. Exercise logging in plain language, two-way Apple Health and Health Connect sync, an Apple Watch app, and unlimited blood-glucose logging on the free plan.

Its free plan does not expire and includes the complete web app and a full JSON export, so trying it costs nothing and leaving costs nothing.

What Noom still has that PlateLens does not: a curriculum, and a human being. If those are what you are short of, no tracker on this list replaces them, and that is the strongest thing we can say for the price.