Fasting Apps Compared: 7 Trackers, Pros, Cons and Pricing

Quick Answer: There is no single best fasting app, and the question splits four ways: what the free tier holds, whether the app logs food as well as time, whether it runs on your wrist, and whether you can fast alongside someone. Fasted is a timer-first tracker with a free tier you can live in and no account to start. Zero is the food-and-fasting product with the longest track record. Simple sells coaching. BodyFast sells plans. Fastic sells community. The seven-app field, the trade-offs and the honest gaps in our own app are below.

Intermittent fasting apps have split into two categories that are barely the same product. One is a timer: press start, watch the window, get on with your day. The other is a nutrition and coaching platform that happens to contain a fasting feature. Both call themselves fasting apps, and picking the wrong one is the single most common reason people abandon three in a row.

Disclosure: Fasted is our app. It appears first below, and its gaps are named rather than worked around.

How This Comparison Was Made

This is a desk comparison, not a lab test, and it is worth being plain about that. Every claim about a competing app comes from that app's own App Store listing, description or website — the sources are cited at the end. Claims about our own app come from the app itself.

What that means in practice: the compatibility rows, the pricing shapes and the account requirements are checkable facts you can verify in a minute. Judgements about whether a coach is useful or a design is fast are opinions, and they are written as opinions. Nobody has run seven apps side by side for a fortnight and measured them, and a page that says it did is selling you something.

Store listings change. Every dated claim below carries its date so you can see how stale this page has become.

The 7 Best Intermittent Fasting Apps in 2026

1. Fasted

Fasted is a timer first. The home screen is a circular clock that fills as you move through five metabolic phases — fed, catabolic, fat burning, ketosis, deep ketosis — and there is nothing to log to make it work. Around that sit six built-in daily protocols, streaks, history and notifications, all of them free, with no account and no trial to expire. Fasted Pro adds Fast Buddy, the hunger map, the history heatmap, analytics, custom protocols, notes, weight and body measurements, and export.

Where it falls short: it does not log food, it has no Apple Watch app, and it is the newest listing in this group by years. If you want to photograph lunch, start a fast from your wrist, or lean on a long store history, three of the other six do those things better.

Best for: People who want the window tracked accurately and nothing else asked of them.

2. Zero

Zero has been around since the early days of fasting apps and has built a strong reputation. It is also no longer only a timer: its App Store listing is titled "Zero: Fasting & Food Tracker" and the description leads with fasting, protein, meals, hydration and habits together. It has an Apple Watch app, Apple Health sync, and the largest educational library in the category. The paid tier, Zero Plus, carries the tracking depth.

Where it falls short: it wants an account before it will show you a timer, and if you only ever wanted the timer you are now carrying a food tracker you did not ask for.

Best for: People who want fasting and food in one place, and content to read while they learn.

Read our full Fasted vs Zero comparison for a detailed breakdown.

3. Simple

Simple has moved furthest from where it started. Its App Store listing is now titled "Simple: AI Weight Loss Coach", built around a coach called Avo and a camera feature that reads a photo of a meal and gives feedback. Fasting is still in there; it is one habit among several. There is an Apple Watch app and Apple Health integration.

Where it falls short: the onboarding quiz runs several minutes and ends at a paywall, and the free tier is the thinnest of the seven.

Best for: People who want to be talked through it rather than timed.

4. BodyFast

BodyFast is a German company generating significant revenue, largely through its Coach feature. The app offers over 50 fasting plans and the Coach adapts your schedule based on your progress. The free tier is functional but limited.

Best for: People who want a wide variety of structured fasting plans.

See our Fasted vs BodyFast comparison for more detail.

5. Fastic

Fastic has built one of the largest user bases in the fasting app space. Its social features, including community challenges and a social feed, set it apart. The app also includes meal plans and recipes, making it more of a lifestyle platform than a pure fasting tracker.

Best for: Users who are motivated by community and social accountability.

6. Life Fasting Tracker

Life Fasting Tracker has open-source roots and was one of the first apps to introduce social fasting circles, where groups of people can fast together. The app is straightforward and functional, though its design and feature set have not kept pace with newer competitors.

Best for: Groups who want to fast together and track as a team.

7. WINDOW

WINDOW is a lesser-known option that focuses on simplicity. It provides a clean timer with basic tracking. Development has been slower than competitors, but it remains a solid option for people who want the absolute minimum.

Best for: Minimalists who only need a timer and nothing else.

Feature Comparison Table

Apple Watch rows come from each app's App Store compatibility section, checked 5 August 2026. Everything else comes from the listings and descriptions cited at the end. A dash means we did not check.

Pricing Comparison

Two things about price matter more than the number: what the free tier holds, and whether you can ever stop paying.

Fasted's free tier is the timer, the six built-in protocols, the phases, streaks, history and notifications, with no account and no free trial. Fasted Pro is $6.99 monthly, $29.99 yearly, or $49.99 once for permanent access. The lifetime price is the unusual part — almost nothing else in this category sells one.

Zero is free to download with Zero Plus on top; its US listing showed three Zero Plus purchases at $9.99, $69.99 and $89.99 when read on 16 August 2026. Simple's listing carries seven separate purchases across two tier names. BodyFast gates its Coach — the thing that makes it BodyFast — behind a paid tier. Fastic and Life both have free tiers with paid upgrades.

We are not going to publish a price table for apps whose listings we have not re-read this month, because store prices move by country and by week and a stale table is worse than no table. Open the listing, scroll to In-App Purchases, and every price the app can charge you is named there. That check takes thirty seconds and beats any comparison page, including this one.

For which premium features are worth the money once you have found the price, read our free vs paid fasting apps guide.

What to Look for in a Fasting App

Feature lists in this category are long and mostly padding. These are the things that decide whether you are still using an app in March.

A timer you can see without opening anything. Every app in 2026 runs a reliable background timer, so that is no longer a differentiator. Where you can glance at it still is: a home screen widget, a lock screen readout, or a watch app. You will ask "how long have I been going?" eight times a day, and the answer should not cost you a tap.

Your protocol as a preset. If you run 16:8 you have no problem — everything supports 16:8. If you run OMAD, 14:10, or an occasional 36-hour fast, check the app has it built in rather than making you rebuild a custom window every time. Fasted ships six daily protocols and a 36-hour extended option, and the free fasting schedule quiz will narrow yours down in about a minute.

Something that keeps you honest. Fasting fails at the point where a hard Tuesday meets nobody watching. Streaks work for some people, and are the reason a broken week turns into a broken habit for others. A named partner works better for most people than a feed of strangers. Whichever mechanism you pick, it has to be one you will not switch off in week three.

Stats that tell a story. Raw numbers are not helpful. What you want after a month is your average duration, your completion rate and where the short fasts cluster — trends over weeks, not a bigger number today.

A design you will actually use. If the app feels cluttered, slow or annoying, you will stop opening it. The right fasting app is the one you keep opening.

Below those sit the features worth having but not worth choosing an app for: weight trends, a calendar view of your history, customisable reminders, water tracking. Useful, all of them. None of them is a reason to move apps.

Features That Sound Better Than They Are

Four things generate marketing copy and rarely change outcomes.

AI coaching. Genuinely useful in week one, when everything is unfamiliar and you want to ask someone whether a splash of milk ruins the fast. Its value falls off a cliff once you know the answers. Most people consult the coach heavily for a fortnight and never again, which makes it an expensive thing to keep renting.

Gamification. Badges and levels give you a short reward for a behaviour that pays off over months. They can carry the first few weeks. They should not decide which app you install, because the badge that motivated you in January is wallpaper by March.

Mood and energy logging. The idea is sound — certain schedules really do leave some people flat. The problem is that almost nobody logs consistently enough for the data to say anything, and a half-filled mood chart is worse than none because it invites you to read a pattern into noise.

Public social feeds. Community works if you draw energy from it. If you find yourself opening the app to read the feed rather than to start a fast, the feature has quietly become the thing you do instead of fasting.

The trap underneath all four is that more features make an app harder to use daily. Every extra screen and prompt sits between you and the one tap you came for. Simplicity is a feature; it just never appears in a comparison table.

Which Apps Track Food As Well As Time

Fasting is about when you eat. What you eat inside the window decides most of the outcome, and this is the line the category splits on.

Zero is the clearest answer here. Its listing is titled "Zero: Fasting & Food Tracker" and it carries meal logging, a protein score and hydration alongside the timer. If you want one app for both jobs, this is the one built for it.

Simple logs food by photograph rather than by search. You take a picture of the plate and the coach responds. Lower friction than typing, and it depends entirely on you remembering to take the picture.

Fastic offers meal plans and recipes rather than a log. It tells you what to eat instead of recording what you ate, which helps with decisions and gives you nothing to look back on.

Fasted does not log food at all. It tracks weight, water and body measurements on the Pro tier, and that is the honest ceiling. If a food diary is what you came for, we are not your app.

BodyFast, Life and WINDOW do not track food either.

The alternative most fasters land on is two apps: a fasting tracker for the window and a dedicated nutrition app for the plate. The food databases in a real nutrition app are far better than anything a fasting app ships, and the cost is that the two data sets never meet. Whether that matters depends on whether you were ever going to look at both. Most people are not, which is a good argument for one app that does one thing.

One thing worth saying plainly: you do not need to count calories for intermittent fasting to work. Awareness of what you ate beats precision about it, and if logging food makes you anxious, skip it and put the effort into consistency instead. The free macro calculator will set rough targets without any daily logging at all.

If You Want It On Your Wrist

Fewer fasting apps have an Apple Watch app than their marketing implies, and this single question rules more apps out than any other.

"Works with Apple Watch" gets used for four different things. A native watch app is a real app on the watch that shows the fast and usually starts and stops it. A complication puts a number on your watch face. Notification mirroring is iOS forwarding your phone's alerts to your wrist — every iPhone app gets it free, including apps with no watch code whatsoever. Apple Health sync is useful and unrelated. Only the first one puts a timer on your arm.

The check takes ten seconds and comes from Apple rather than from marketing. Open the App Store listing, scroll to Information, and read Compatibility. If "Apple Watch — Requires watchOS 10.0 or later" is listed, the app ships a watch app. If Apple Watch is missing from that list, it does not, whatever the screenshots suggest.

Of the five apps we checked that way on 5 August 2026, two listed Apple Watch: Zero and Simple, both at watchOS 10.0 or later. BodyFast, Fastic and our own Fasted did not. If a wrist timer is non-negotiable, that narrows the field to two before you read anything else.

Two caveats. The compatibility row proves a watch app exists and says nothing about what it can do — some are full controls, some only display a running number, and only the app's own watch screenshots will tell you which. And Google Play has no equivalent section, so on Android the same ten-second check does not exist, which is one reason the field looks different there: the best intermittent fasting app on Android is a separate question with a separate answer.

What you get without one is a home screen widget, which Fasted has on both iOS and Android. That covers more of the real workflow than people expect, because a fast has two taps in it — start and stop — and everything between is waiting. A watch app makes those two taps and the periodic glance more convenient. It does not measure anything the phone cannot.

Fasting With Someone Else

Accountability in this category runs on a ladder, and most apps stop on the bottom rung.

App notifications. The app reminds you. No other person involved. This is what "accountability" means in most fasting apps.

A public feed. Strangers can see you are fasting and you can see them. It works if you are motivated by being visible. It requires you to care what strangers think.

A friend list. You see when specific people you follow are fasting. More personal than a feed, still passive.

A live partner. One person you invited sees your running fast and you see theirs. Private, synchronised, deliberate.

Fasted's Fast Buddy is the fourth rung: you pair with one named person, see each other's live timer and phase, and send reactions. It is deliberately one partner rather than a network. It sits on the Pro tier. Fastic and Life offer the second and third rungs through community feeds and fasting circles. Zero, Simple, BodyFast and WINDOW offer the first only.

For couples this is usually the whole decision. Two people fasting on the same schedule get something a solo app cannot give either of them: breaking the window early stops being a private choice. A few practical notes if you are setting that up. Pick a window that contains the meal you already eat together, and let the free fasting calculator set the clock times around it. Start on the same day. Agree in advance how you will handle dinners out, because a shared plan that cannot survive a birthday is not a plan. And keep it supportive rather than competitive — "we are doing this together" holds where "who can fast longer" does not.

You do not need an app for any of this. Two people texting at the start and end of each fast get most of the benefit. What a built-in feature adds is that nobody has to remember to send the text.

Getting Value Out of Whichever One You Pick

Most people tap the timer and ignore everything else, which leaves most of the value on the table. Four habits change that.

Start the timer at the last bite, not when you feel like starting. If you finish dinner at eight and start the timer at eleven, your logged 16-hour fast was 13. Build the trigger: last bite, open app, start. The stat is only worth having if it is real.

Set a window you can hit four days in five. People pick 18:6 because it sounds serious, complete 13 hours, break the streak weekly and conclude fasting does not work for them. It was the target that did not work. Start where you land consistently and tighten later.

Review weekly, not daily. Five minutes a week on your average duration and completion rate tells you more than a month of glancing at today's number. Look for patterns — shorter fasts at weekends, after social events, on hard work days. Once a pattern is visible it is fixable.

Treat a broken streak as information. The common failure is not breaking a streak; it is deleting the app afterwards rather than starting again at zero. The streak was never the point. The history is.

The Verdict

There is no single best fasting app for everyone. But there is likely a best one for you.

Read it as a set of sentences rather than a ranking. Find yours.

"I want to start today with no hassle." Fasted. No account, no quiz, no trial that turns into a charge.

"I want to fast and log my food in one app." Zero. It is the one built for both jobs.

"I want to be coached rather than timed." Simple.

"I want it on my wrist." Zero or Simple. Not us.

"I want dozens of structured plans." BodyFast.

"I want a community around it." Fastic for challenges and a feed, Life for fasting circles.

"I want to fast alongside one specific person." Fasted, on the strength of Fast Buddy.

"I want to pay once and never again." Fasted's $49.99 lifetime is the only one-time purchase in this group.

"I want the absolute minimum." WINDOW.

The most useful advice on this page is not a recommendation. Install two of them, run the same fasts through both for a week, and keep whichever one you open without thinking about it. That test costs nothing and beats any comparison table, including the one above.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free intermittent fasting app?

Fasted offers one of the most generous free tiers among fasting apps, including the fasting timer, multiple schedules, and basic tracking. Zero and Life also have decent free versions, though Zero gates several features behind its Plus subscription. Most apps offer free timers but lock stats, insights, and advanced features behind paywalls.

Are fasting apps worth paying for?

It depends on your goals. If you only need a timer, a free tier works fine, and so does the free browser-based fasting timer on this site. If you want detailed stats, weight tracking, meal logging, and insights that help you optimize your approach, a premium subscription can provide real value. The key is whether you will actually use the premium features consistently.

Do I need an app to do intermittent fasting?

No. People fasted successfully for decades without apps. But a good app makes it easier to stay consistent, track your progress, and understand patterns over time, provided you know how to use one properly. The best fasting timer apps add structure and accountability that many people find helpful.

Which fasting app has the best timer?

Most major fasting apps have reliable timers. The differences come down to interface design and what surrounds the timer. Fasted pairs its timer with schedule flexibility, streak tracking, and detailed stats. Zero keeps it minimal. Simple wraps the timer in coaching prompts. Choose based on the experience you prefer around the timer itself.

Can I switch fasting apps without losing my data?

Most fasting apps do not support data import from competitors. If you switch, you will likely start fresh. Two things soften that. Most apps let you enter past fasts by hand, so an evening of backfill rebuilds the pattern that matters. And your fasting record is a fact about the last few months of your life, not a number held on somebody's server — uninstalling an app does not undo the fasts.

What is the best intermittent fasting app in 2026?

It depends which of four questions you are actually asking. If it is "what can I start in the next minute", Fasted, because it needs no account and the free tier is a whole tracker. If it is "what logs my food too", Zero. If it is "what runs on my watch", Zero or Simple. If it is "what will keep me honest", an app with a named partner or a streak you will not switch off. Anything that names one winner without asking you a question first is guessing on your behalf.

Is Noom an intermittent fasting app?

No, and this is the most common mix-up in the category. Noom is a calorie-restriction and behaviour-change product built on colour-coded food density and a coaching curriculum drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy. It has no concept of a fasting window: it will not track your window, will not tell you when it opens, and does not support 16:8 or OMAD as protocols. You can practise fasting while using Noom, but Noom will not track it. The two also sit at very different prices — Noom bills monthly at a rate several times a yearly fasting-app subscription, so check its own pricing page before assuming they are substitutes. If you want both, you need both.

Which fasting app is best for journalling every fast?

Fastient, which is built around exactly that: notes taken during the fast, weight logged beside them, and charts that put the two together over months. It is not on the seven-app list above because it is a narrower product than the rest — a journal with a timer rather than a tracker with notes. It requires an account. Read the average on its own App Store listing rather than from an article, and check how many ratings that average is built on.

Which fasting apps work on Apple Watch?

Of the five we checked on 5 August 2026, Zero and Simple listed Apple Watch in their App Store compatibility section, both at watchOS 10.0 or later. BodyFast, Fastic and Fasted did not. This changes with updates, so check the listing yourself — Information, then Compatibility. Note that any fasting app's notifications will buzz your wrist whether or not it has a watch app, because iOS forwards every notification to a paired watch, which is why "get alerts on your watch" is such a slippery claim.

Do I have to create an account to use a fasting app?

Most of them, yes. Zero, Simple, Fastic and Fastient all want an email address before they show you a timer. Fasted does not — you can install it and start a fast without registering, and the history stays on the device. The trade-off is real and runs the other way too: an account buys you cloud backup, and a device-only app loses your history with the phone. If you have been burned by a lost phone before, that friction may be worth it.

What to Read Next

• Fasted vs Zero: Which Fasting App Is Better?
• Fasted vs BodyFast: Detailed Comparison
• Free vs Paid Fasting Apps: Is Premium Worth It?