Metrify vs Welling: two AI-first food trackers, compared

The similarity is real, and it is the surface

Welling and Metrify start from the same insight. Typing food into a search box, one item at a time, is the reason most people stop tracking. Both apps let you describe a meal in a sentence or photograph it instead. Of every app we looked at while researching this piece, Welling is the closest to what Metrify does, and we are not going to pretend to be the only app of our kind.

But the resemblance ends at the input box. Welling is a food tracker with a diet coach attached. Metrify is a complete fitness tracker that you happen to operate by talking, covering food, strength training, weight, and health data in one conversation, with the whole thing stored on your phone instead of somebody's server.

What Metrify's assistant can do

Metrify's assistant has direct access to your log, not just to the conversation. It can write several entries from one sentence, go back and edit a row it wrote thirty seconds ago, save a custom food, log a workout, and read your own history back when you ask it a question. In practice that means:

• "Same lunch as yesterday" pulls the actual previous entry instead of making you rebuild it.
• "Actually make that two eggs, not three" corrects the row it just wrote. It does not add a second row and leave you to clean up.
• A photo of your plate plus "the rice was about 300g" in the same message uses the picture for the rest of the meal and your number for the rice, without logging rice twice.
• "How much protein do I have left today?" is answered from your actual logged data, not estimated.
• "Log 3x8 bench at 185" goes into the same thread as your dinner.

That is the difference between an assistant that talks about your diet and one that runs it, and it is why an entire day of food, training, corrections, and questions about your own trends fits in a single conversation.

We are not going to tell you what Welling's assistant can and cannot do here. We have not tested it, and their published materials do not go into that detail. What we would say is that these six things are the ones worth testing in any app in this category, ours included, during a trial and before you pay for anything. They are cheap to check and they are where these products actually differ.

Training is a first-class citizen, not a calorie estimate

Welling's FAQ describes logging activity through chat in two ways: telling the assistant what you did and for how long, or supplying calories burned from a separate device. Both produce a burn number. Their published materials do not describe a routine builder or a system for tracking specific sets and reps.

Metrify treats training as training. Workout Lab lets you build routines, log sets and reps against them, and see training history as heatmaps and progression graphs. You can replay a saved routine by name in chat: "log my Push Day workout" logs that routine's exercises, sets, reps, and weights.

If you lift, this is the difference between a food app that knows you burned 300 calories and an app that knows your bench went up fifteen pounds this quarter. One of those is a number. The other is the reason you went to the gym.

Exercise calories, and why this is an accuracy question

Welling's FAQ states that burned calories are added to your daily calorie budget by default, though this can be disabled. Metrify builds your goal on a sedentary baseline and counts logged exercise once, on the burn side. Your daily target does not move when you train.

This is not a matter of taste. Exercise burn estimates are among the least reliable numbers in all of fitness tracking, and adding them to your allowance converts that error straight into food you have been told you can eat. On top of that, if your baseline already assumed you train, the same calories get counted twice and your real deficit is quietly half what the screen says. Nothing flags it. The symptom is a stall you cannot explain, and the usual conclusion is that your metabolism is broken when the arithmetic simply ran twice.

A fixed goal removes both failure modes at once. The deficit you see is the deficit you have, and every number built on top of it, your trend and your weight projection included, inherits that accuracy. The full argument is in why your workout should count once.

Where your data lives

Metrify stores every food log, weigh-in, workout, and goal locally on your device. Not encrypted on a server, not anonymized, not retained under a policy that can be revised next quarter. On the phone. Delete the app and the data is gone, because it was never anywhere else.

Welling's published materials do not describe local storage or state where user data lives.

This extends to what the assistant knows about you. Tell Metrify once that you are vegetarian, avoiding gluten, or eating low FODMAP, and it remembers across every future conversation. Those durable facts are stored on your device, and the server never sees them. It is not a preset list of supported conditions, it is whatever you tell it, held privately.

Price, and the free tier

Welling does not publish pricing on its website, so the App Store listing is the only source. Checked directly on 31 July 2026, the US listing showed $22.99 per month or $99.99 per year, with no free tier. App Store pricing varies by region, so your store may differ.

Metrify publishes its price openly: $69.99 per year or $9.99 per month. That is roughly 30 percent cheaper annually and less than half the monthly cost.

More importantly, Metrify has a free tier you can stay on forever. Unlimited manual food, weight, and workout logging, the full Workout Lab, full progress charts, health sync, and the same on-device privacy that Premium gets. Not a trial that expires into a paywall. If the AI is the only part you want to pay for, that is the only part you pay for.

Comparison table

What Welling does better

Two things, and they are worth stating plainly. Welling has been shipping publicly for longer than Metrify, which is in beta. And Welling writes data back to Apple Health, including nutrition, workout, weight, and water, which Metrify does not currently do. If you need your nutrition data readable by other apps in the Apple Health ecosystem, that is a real reason to choose them today.

Who should use which

Choose Metrify if you want your health data to stay on your own device, if you lift and want that tracked as training rather than as a calorie estimate, if you want a calorie goal that reflects your actual deficit, or if you would rather not pay $99.99 a year to find out whether you like an app.

Choose Welling if you specifically need nutrition written back into Apple Health for other apps to consume.