Eat This Much vs Mealime: Which Meal Planner Wins in 2026?

A hands-on comparison for fitness-focused users who care about macros, not just meal ideas.

Update (as of October 26, 2026): Mealime shut down on October 21, 2026. Albertsons Companies (which acquired it in 2021) discontinued the standalone app and moved the recipes into Meals Hub inside its grocery store apps (Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME, and others). Personal data, saved plans, favorites, and notes were deleted with no bulk export. Pro billing stopped earlier and features were unlocked for everyone until the end. The original team is building a new app called Cookroom. Many long-time users are unhappy with Meals Hub as a replacement. Official notice: Mealime is moving to Meals Hub.

If you train seriously and care about hitting your macros, most meal planning apps are useless to you. They were built for people who want “healthy dinner ideas,” not for someone trying to land 180g of protein at 2,400 calories without spending an hour with a spreadsheet.

We spent four weeks running Eat This Much and Mealime side by side (before the shutdown), using each one to plan a full training week with the same calorie and macro targets. We logged everything: how close the actual macros landed to our targets, how often the recipes repeated, how the grocery lists held up, what broke at scale, and how each app handled the things fitness users actually do (changing protein targets mid-week, swapping a chicken meal for steak, building around what’s already in the fridge).

Going in, we expected a closer fight. The reality wasn’t close. Eat This Much is the only app of the two that treats macro targets as a first-class input rather than a side feature, and once you’ve used a planner that actually solves for your numbers, the others feel like glorified recipe browsers. With Mealime now gone as a standalone app, the gap is even clearer. That’s the short version. The long version, with the honest downsides for each, is below.

Quick verdict

App	Best for	Starting price	Verdict
Eat This Much	Macro-targeted weekly planning	Free / $5 mo (annual)	The only one that builds plans around your numbers. Wins outright for fitness users. Still fully available.
Mealime (closed Oct 21, 2026)	Couples and beginners who want easy dinners	Was Free / $5.99 mo	Excellent for what it was, but it’s a recipe app, not a macro planner. Standalone app discontinued; recipes now in Meals Hub (Albertsons apps). Read user reactions on Reddit and the founders’ new project on X/Twitter.

How we tested

We set the same baseline for both apps: a 2,400-calorie target, 180g protein, 240g carbs, 75g fat, with a mild dairy restriction and a preference for high-protein recipes. We ran each app for four weeks, generated weekly plans every Sunday, did the grocery shopping from the resulting lists, and cooked the meals the app generated rather than swapping things out. Where an app couldn’t be set to those targets, we noted it and used whatever the closest equivalent was.
Each week, we tracked four things: how accurately the plan hit our daily macros (measured by logging the actual meals in a separate tracker), how much overlap there was with the previous week’s recipes, whether the grocery list was usable or padded with quantities we’d never finish, and how long the whole Sunday planning ritual took. The numbers in each section below come from that log. Note that Mealime testing was completed before the October 21 shutdown.

1. Eat This Much: The macro-focused winner

Verdict

If you’ve decided your macros first and want the meals built around them, Eat This Much is the only app in this group that actually does this. Set your calorie target, your macro split, and your daily budget if you want one, and it generates a week of meals that fit. That’s the entire premise of the product, and it’s been refined over 14 years. It remains fully available and independent of any grocery chain.

Who it’s best for

Lifters, runners, and anyone working with a coach or following a structured nutrition plan. People who can articulate what they need to eat in grams and calories, and who want the planning admin to go away. It’s also a strong fit for anyone in a recomp or cut phase where macro precision matters more than recipe novelty. With Mealime gone, it’s the clearest remaining option for this use case.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Ashley Gagnon ✨ (@ashleyamberg)

What stands out

The macro accuracy is the headline. Across four weeks of generated plans, our daily totals landed within about 4% of our protein target on average and within 6% of our calorie target. The reason is structural: Eat This Much solves a constrained optimisation problem at plan generation time. It isn’t picking pretty recipes and hoping the numbers work out.
The serving-size logic is also better than we expected. When the algorithm needs 41g of protein in a meal, it’ll scale the portion of chicken or fish up or down by a sensible amount rather than handing you a recipe with a fixed serving that misses by 15g. You can lock individual meals you want to keep (Sunday meal prep, for example) and have it generate the rest around what’s already accounted for.
The Instacart integration is the other thing that quietly saves time. The grocery list pushes to Instacart in a couple of taps, and the quantity translation is mostly clean. We had two SKU mismatches over four weeks, both on niche ingredients. Eat This Much has also published guidance for former Mealime users on importing recipes.

The honest downsides

Three things will frustrate you—first, recipe repetition. The algorithm has a finite pool of recipes that fit any given macro target, and by week three, you’ll start seeing the same chicken-and-rice variation come back with mild garnish swaps. You can manually expand the recipe library by adding your own, but doing that defeats the purpose of “automatic” meal planning.
Second, the interface feels engineering-led. It’s functional rather than friendly, and the mobile app has more friction than it should. Editing a generated plan is fine once you know where to look, but the learning curve is real, and the in-app onboarding doesn’t completely solve it.
Third, the grocery lists trend long. The algorithm doesn’t think much about what you already have in the pantry by default. We ended up with three bottles of soy sauce in week two before we got better at flagging staples.

Pricing

Free tier covers one daily plan at a time. Premium runs $9 per month or $5 per month if you commit annually ($60/year). The free tier is genuinely useful as a try-before-you-buy, but weekly plans, grocery list automation, and grocery delivery integration are all behind the paywall.

2. Mealime: Now closed — recipes moved to Meals Hub

Verdict (updated)

Mealime was excellent at what it did. It was a clean, fast, well-designed recipe app that produced a weekly plan of healthy dinners and an organised grocery list. If you didn’t track macros and you mostly wanted help answering “what should I cook this week,” it was the best of the two. For a fitness user with structured nutrition targets, it was the wrong tool. As of October 21, 2026, the standalone app is gone. Official notice: Mealime is moving to Meals Hub.

Who it was best for

Couples and individuals who cook five dinners a week, want a healthy variety, don’t follow a strict macro split, and value not having to think. People for whom 30-minute weeknight dinners are the main planning problem to solve.

What stood out

The user experience was the best of the two by a margin. The hands-free cooking mode (which advances through recipe steps without you touching the phone) is the kind of feature you don’t appreciate until you’ve used it, and the aisle-sorted grocery list saves real time in the supermarket. The recipes themselves are well-written, the photos are honest rather than staged, and the large user base meant the most-cooked recipes had been refined over time.
Watch this review for more insights:

The free tier was genuinely usable. You got weekly meal plans, grocery lists, and basic personalisation without paying. Pro unlocked nutrition info, calorie filtering, allergen warnings, and recipe notes. At $5.99 a month for Pro, it was the cheapest paid tier in this comparison.

The honest downsides

It isn’t a macro tool. You could see nutritional info on Pro, but you couldn’t filter recipes by protein content, set a daily protein floor, or have the plan generate around macro targets. We tried to reverse-engineer this by manually filtering for high-protein recipes, and the plans still landed around 40 to 60 grams short of our protein target on most days.
Two smaller issues. The stated cooking times consistently undercount real time by 10 to 15 minutes (we timed it). And the grocery list rebuilds from scratch if you change the meal plan after it’s been generated, which is frustrating if you’ve already half-shopped and want to swap in a different Thursday dinner.

What customers are doing now

Reactions on Reddit (especially the main thread in r/mealime) and X have been largely negative toward the Meals Hub transition. Common complaints include: Meals Hub living inside grocery store apps (problematic if you don’t shop at Albertsons-family stores), grocery lists forcing specific branded products instead of generic quantities, weaker recommendation/scrolling experience, and personal data not transferring. Many users report spending hours manually copying recipes into alternatives.
Popular paths people are taking:

• Trying Eat This Much (macro-focused, independent of any store)
• Moving to Plan to Eat (bring-your-own recipes, strong importer)
• Samsung Food, self-hosted tools (Mealie on Raspberry Pi), or other planners
• Watching the original Mealime founders’ new project: Cookroom (announced shortly after the shutdown)

See the discussion in the main r/mealime shutdown thread and related posts for real user experiences.

Head-to-head: how the two actually compare

Macro accuracy

This is the single biggest point of separation, and it isn’t close. Across four weeks of identical inputs, Eat This Much produced plans that averaged within 4% of our protein target. Mealime averaged 27% under. If your goal is to hit numbers, you have one remaining option in this group.

Metric	Eat This Much	Mealime (pre-closure)
Macro-target inputs	Yes	No
Avg. protein vs target (4-week)	Within 4%	27% under
Avg. calories vs target	Within 6%	9% over
Customisable macro split	Yes	No

Recipe variety and repetition

None of these apps gives you infinite variety. They all draw from a finite recipe database, and by the fourth week, you’ll start seeing patterns. Mealime had the best recipe quality on a per-meal basis. Eat This Much loops the same chicken-and-rice variations sooner than the others, which is the tradeoff for the macro precision.

Grocery list quality

Mealime’s lists were clean and aisle-sorted, but didn’t account for the pantry. Eat This Much’s lists are accurate to the plan but tend to be long and assume you’re starting from an empty kitchen.

Value for money

Eat This Much at $5 a month (annual) is the best remaining value in this group for the fitness audience. Mealime was close behind for casual users while it existed.

App	Monthly	Annual	Annual effective monthly	Free tier?
Eat This Much	$9.00	$60.00	$5.00	Yes (1 daily plan)
Mealime (closed)	Was $5.99	Was $49.99	Was ~$4.17	Was yes

So which one should you actually pick?

Pick Eat This Much if you train, lift, run, or follow any structured nutrition plan. It’s the only one of the two that solves the macro problem rather than ignoring it. The interface won’t win design awards, and the recipe pool gets repetitive, but you’ll hit your numbers without spending Sundays with a calculator. For fitness users, this is the right answer — and it’s still fully operational.

Former Mealime users looking for easy dinners: Check Meals Hub in an Albertsons Companies app if you shop at one of their stores and mainly want the recipes. Otherwise, look at Plan to Eat (bring your own recipes), the founders’ new Cookroom project, or stick with Eat This Much if you also care about macros. Many people are manually archiving favorite recipes before they become harder to access.

The bottom line

After four weeks of side-by-side use (pre-shutdown), this comparison wasn’t close for the audience we care about. If you’re a fitness-focused user who cares about macros, Eat This Much is the only one of these that does what you actually need it to do. It isn’t perfect (the recipe loop gets old by week three, and the interface isn’t going to win any awards), but the macro targeting works, the price is fair, and the Instacart integration removes the last bit of friction. We’d recommend it without hesitation.
Mealime was the right pick if you didn’t track macros and just wanted help with weeknight dinners, but the standalone app closed on October 21, 2026, with personal data deleted. For most fitness-minded readers, the verdict is straightforward: start with the free tier of Eat This Much, run it for a week against your actual targets, and you’ll know within seven days whether it’s earned its place in your routine.

Official sources and user discussion: Mealime closing page, main Reddit thread, Cookroom announcement on X.