ScaleMyPlate vs Etekcity Smart Nutrition Scale: Which One Fits Your Kitchen?

You’ve narrowed it down to two smart food scales. The Etekcity Smart Nutrition Scale costs $39.99. ScaleMyPlate costs several times more. Both weigh to the gram, both have a barcode scanner of some kind, and both promise easier macro tracking. So what exactly is the extra money for, and is it worth it for you?

We make ScaleMyPlate, so we know which one we’d pick. But a comparison is only useful if it’s fair, so we’ve stuck to each company’s published specs and we’ll point out exactly where the Etekcity is the better choice. By the end, you’ll know which one fits the way you cook.

The short answer

Choose the Etekcity if you’re happy tracking in a phone app, want Apple Health or Fitbit sync, and want to spend as little as possible. It’s a well-made scale at a great price.

Choose ScaleMyPlate if you track most days and the constant back-and-forth with your phone is what makes you skip meals or quit. It puts the scanner, the database and the macro math on the scale itself.

The rest of this article explains why, with a few tools to help you decide.

Two very different philosophies

The Etekcity ESN00 is built around the free VeSync app. The scale weighs, with 1-gram increments from 3 g to 5,000 g, and sends the weight to your phone over Bluetooth. The app does everything else: you search the Nutritionix database of about one million foods or scan a barcode with your phone’s camera (Etekcity notes the scanner currently works in the U.S. only), and the app tracks up to 19 nutrients and syncs with Apple Health and Fitbit.

ScaleMyPlate flips that around. The scale has its own color touchscreen, a built-in hardware barcode scanner and a database of millions of foods. Calories, protein, carbs and fat appear on the scale as you add each ingredient, with a running total for the meal. The phone app is optional and syncs your history over Wi-Fi.

That single choice, where the “smart” part lives, explains almost every other difference.

Head to head, feature by feature

Here’s how they compare on the things that matter day to day, with an honest call on each row:

Notice that weighing accuracy is a tie. Any decent scale weighs well; that part is solved. The real question is how much effort it takes to turn a weight into a logged meal, which we explain in more depth in our guide to the four types of smart scales.

The question isn’t which scale weighs better. It’s where you want the work to happen.

Logging a real dinner, step by step

Specs don’t show what using a scale feels like at 7 p.m. with wet hands. So let’s log the same four-ingredient dinner on both. Press play and watch the two counters. The step counts end up surprisingly close. The difference is how many of those steps happen on your phone:

Thirteen steps versus twelve doesn’t sound like much. But nine of those steps happen on the phone. At three meals a day, that’s close to two hundred phone steps a week. That’s the friction people describe when they say tracking “takes over” their cooking, and it’s a big reason many people quit. If you already keep your phone on the counter and don’t mind, the Etekcity loop works fine.

What logging looks like on the scale

Here’s a simple yogurt bowl built entirely on ScaleMyPlate. The yogurt comes from a barcode scan, the granola and honey from a quick search, and the meal total updates with each addition:

The math: time and money

ScaleMyPlate costs more up front, there’s no way around it. Whether that’s worth it depends on how often you’d use it and how much time it saves you. Plug in your own numbers; the seconds saved per ingredient is your own estimate, so be honest:

A note on currencies: the Etekcity’s $39.99 is its U.S. list price, and ScaleMyPlate’s $194.99 is its early-bird price in Canadian dollars (regular $249.99 CAD). Prices change, so check both sites before buying.

Weigh what matters to you

No scale wins on everything. Slide each priority to show how much it matters to you, and see which one comes out ahead:

Common questions

The bottom line

The Etekcity Smart Nutrition Scale is a genuinely good product: accurate, affordable, with a free app and health-app sync. If you’re a casual tracker, or you already love doing everything on your phone, it’s the sensible buy.

If you track daily for fat loss, muscle gain, diabetes management or batch meal prep, the calculation changes. The extra cost buys you a scale that does the whole job on its own, so your phone can stay in your pocket. Whichever you choose, the scale is only half the system: set good targets with our free Calories & Macro Calculator, and see how small errors add up in why macro tracking sometimes stops working.

Both scales weigh to the gram. Pick the workflow you’ll stick with.

Written byScaleMyPlate TeamPractical, research-backed guides on nutrition and macro tracking.