Easy Diet Diary Review: Australia's Free Calorie Tracker, and When You'd Want Something Else

Every few years someone in Australia asks a dietitian which app to use and gets the same answer: Easy Diet Diary. It isn't flashy and it isn't new, and that's mostly a compliment. It's the tracker that Australian health professionals reach for because they trust the numbers.

This is a review of what it actually does, written by someone who builds a competing app. So the conclusion up front, in case you want to skip the rest: if Easy Diet Diary is working for you, keep using it. The reasons to leave are specific, and I'll be specific about them.

#What it is

Easy Diet Diary is a free calorie and nutrient tracker built by Xyris, a Brisbane company whose main business is Foodworks — the nutrition analysis software used by dietitians, universities and hospitals across Australia. The consumer app is, in effect, the front door to that platform.

It's free with no ads and no premium tier. You log by searching, scanning barcodes, tapping recent meals, or creating custom foods and recipes. It tracks energy in kilojoules or calories, plus macronutrients, exercise and weight. You can attach photos to diary entries. And you can share your diary with a dietitian through Foodworks.online, which is the thing no other consumer app in Australia does.

#Where it's genuinely excellent

The data. This is the whole case. Most trackers run on crowdsourced databases where the same product appears twelve times with twelve different numbers. Easy Diet Diary's food composition data comes from official Australian sources. When Queensland Health publishes its list of apps for carbohydrate counting — the context where a wrong number actually hurts someone — Easy Diet Diary is on it, with the note to make sure you're using an Australian database because carbohydrate data differs across countries.

The price. Free isn't a tier here; it's the product. There's nothing to upgrade to and nothing being held back to make you.

The dietitian link. If you're working with an Accredited Practising Dietitian, your diary lands in the tool they already use. That turns a food log into something a professional can act on.

It's Australian without making a thing of it. Kilojoules by default, local brands present, serving sizes that match the packet.

#Where it shows its age

None of these are hidden. They're the trade-offs of a tool built for accuracy first.

The interface is from an earlier era. Functional, dense, unglamorous. If you've used a modern app, the first few days feel like a step back. Plenty of people don't care; some do.

Logging is search and scan. Its store listing describes searching, barcodes, recents and custom foods. It doesn't describe estimating a meal from a spoken description or a photo. For packaged food that's fine. For a plate someone else cooked, you're building it from components, and that's the point where most people's logs go quiet.

It's a diary, not a coach. It records what you ate and shows you the totals. It doesn't tell you what to do about the rest of the day, doesn't notice your Thursday pattern, and doesn't answer questions. For many users that's exactly right. For someone who has kept a perfect diary before and still not changed anything, it's the missing piece.

Easy Diet Diary is built to be right. The apps that compete with it are mostly built to be fast. Which one you need depends on which failure you've actually had.

#Who should stay

• You work with a dietitian, or plan to.
• You're managing a condition where the carbohydrate or nutrient numbers matter — diabetes, kidney disease, a medically supervised diet.
• You want a free app and mean it.
• You mostly eat packaged or home-cooked food you can find or build from ingredients.
• The manual workflow doesn't bother you and you've kept it up.

That describes a lot of people, and for them this is the end of the article.

#Who should look elsewhere

Three honest reasons, each pointing at a different app.

The search-and-scan loop is why you stop. If you've installed Easy Diet Diary twice and abandoned it twice around day ten, the data quality was never the problem. The entry cost was. Snap n Eat (Melbourne) logs from a photo; Rekkon logs from a description. Both trade some precision for a log that still exists in week six.

You want a bigger database and a modern feel. FatSecret — also Australian-born, now global — has a far larger database with barcode scanning and a maintained interface, at the cost of crowdsourced entries you have to sanity-check.

You want coaching, not a record. This is the one we built for. Rekkon is a voice-first coach: you say “chicken and salad, and a schooner”, it estimates the kilojoules, and you can ask it what dinner should look like given what you've already had. It costs money after a trial, it's iPhone only, and it doesn't do micronutrients. Those are real limits against a free app with official data, and I'd rather state them than have you find them.

#The honest comparison

#Bottom line

Easy Diet Diary is a good, trustworthy, free tool built by people who take food data seriously, and it deserves its place as the Australian default. Switch only for a reason you can name — speed, coaching, or interface — and pick the app that fixes that specific thing. If you can't name the reason, you don't need to switch.