Living with diabetes is an ongoing challenge that can infringe on how you live and even affect your quality of life. Luckily, research around diabetes and blood sugar levels has come a long way, especially in recent years. And at the same time, new technologies that can help you understand and interpret the massive amounts of data that lives in your blood have also come to market.
In 2024, there are hundreds of apps available to help you understand your blood sugar response and learn how to improve your lifestyle habits, and it can be hard to choose what’s worth your time.
What data should you care about, and how can you act on it? And what if you don’t have diabetes but want to be proactive about your health and wellness?
Here's everything you need to know about the best glucose monitoring apps of 2024.
Who Can Benefit from Glucose Monitoring Apps?
When you think about glucose or blood sugar, you may picture insulin, finger pricks, and all the other routines and lifestyle changes associated with diabetes. But glucose monitoring isn’t only beneficial for people with diabetes–and there are many reasons someone without diabetes may want to monitor their blood sugar.
There is a wealth of data and hidden knowledge that can potentially be helpful for meeting a weight loss goal, improving mood and energy levels, and building healthy, sustainable habits. This can include patterns derived from glucose and exercise data, learning about the food you eat, or even how it all pairs up against your behavior.
While some blood sugar apps cater specifically to the unique challenges of diabetics, others offer benefits that will help everyone. Some apps, such as the Nutrisense app, even pair with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) for the most accurate and far-reaching insights into your health.
Through the power of a CGM, you can take advantage of this data on demand through Nutrisense and other apps to make the best decisions about your diet, exercise, and even sleep.
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Best Types of Apps to Understand Your Blood Sugar Levels
If you type “glucose” into your phone’s app store, dozens of apps will fill your search list. With so many apps to choose from, how can you make sure you’re choosing the right one based on your health goals?
This can be overwhelming when you're looking for apps about something as important as your health. So which apps are right for you? We broke our list down into three major categories to make it easy:
- CGM apps
- Food tracking apps
- Apps for people with diabetes
Before we get to our list of the best blood sugar apps, let’s take a look at what each category means and whether it’s right for you.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring Apps
CGM apps such as the Nutrisense app pair with a CGM sensor to provide you the most accurate, up-to-date data about your blood glucose levels. With a CGM app, you can view how your food, exercise, stress levels, or sleep impacts your day-to-day life. While CGMs are vital to those living with diabetes, glucose monitoring apps can also provide unique insights into how anyone’s daily habits are impacting your overall wellness.
Food Tracking Apps
Just like the name suggests, food tracking apps do exactly that: allow you to log the foods you eat so you can better understand your eating habits and recognize patterns in order to make better choices or maintain positive ones. Whether your goal is to stick to a diet or determine how your overall nutrition is impacting your well-being, these apps can come in handy.
Most food tracking apps also make it possible to look up the macro and micronutrients, caloric breakdown, and vitamin and mineral content of the foods you eat. This is certainly compelling for diabetics and non-diabetics alike, as you’re able to take a deeper look at your overall nutrition.
Apps for People Who Already Have Diabetes
The common feature among diabetes-focused apps is insulin management, which is a feature that is not usually available in food tracking or blood sugar apps. Anyone with type I, type II, or gestational diabetes knows the potentially catastrophic consequences of forgetting when they last dosed their insulin or how much they should take next.
These apps can take the stress factor out of tracking your doses while providing their own individual flair and features. While these apps don’t offer much for non-diabetics compared to the other apps in this list, people with diabetes will undoubtedly find these helpful.
Top 13 Apps For Blood Glucose Monitoring and Nutrition Support
Here are our top 13 recommendations for blood sugar, food tracking, and CGM apps to try out broken down by category.
Best Continuous Glucose Monitoring Apps
1) Best CGM App: Nutrisense
Price: Free with membership
All of the apps on this list offer easy ways to track and understand how your food and habits may affect your blood sugar. And some other CGM companion apps can help you view your glucose levels. However, only a dedicated CGM app like the Nutrisense app can also provide the trends, insights, and education you need to understand how the real-time data from your CGM is impacted by various lifestyle and dietary factors.
Nutrisense takes this further by pairing the insights you get from CGM technology with the option to work 1:1 with a credentialed glucose expert through options like insurance-covered video calls. This personalized support from registered dietitians and nutritionists can help you turn all the data you're seeing into actionable health plans. So you're not just monitoring your glucose; you're using the insights from this tracking to benefit your health.
When you sign up for a Nutrisense plan, you have the flexibility to pick from the CGMs on offer or connect any compatible prescription or over-the-counter sensor to the app. This allows you to access comprehensive data analysis and personalized advice, regardless of which device you prefer.
Download Nutrisense for iOS or Nutrisense for Android and sign up for a program that suits your health, to get started with the best CGM app available.
2) Best BGM App: Glucose Buddy
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
Glucose Buddy has had a lot of media presence over its life for good reason. Its premium subscription is superpowered, granting you access to both an automated A1C calculator as well as chat access to personal diabetes experts for $19.99/month.
The $29.99/month and $59.99/month plans up the ante by supplying you with a glucometer and all the lancing meters you could need. If you have a Dexcom CGM, Glucose Buddy touts a seamless integration with it.
3) Best App for Simple Insights: Glooko
Price: Free
Universal adaptability with as many CGM and blood glucose devices as possible is Glooko’s aim, which is why we especially like it. Glooko can sync with more than 80 different brands and types of devices, including insulin pumps.
It doesn’t have as many luxuries as Nutrisense or Glucose Buddy and doesn’t include expert, personalized support, but the essential data to track is all there. If you want to get started tracking your blood sugar from your CGM through your phone without committing to the features and support of a subscription service, consider this app.
Best Food Tracking and Diet Apps
Here are our top five favorite food tracking apps that can provide support for weight loss, calorie counting, and following a healthy diet.
1) Best App for Food Tracking: MyFitnessPal
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
First in this category is a no-brainer for anyone interested in improving their diet and building healthier habits. MyFitnessPal is useful to anyone who wants to start learning more about what food they eat and, perhaps more importantly, how to build habits around them.
Most powerful is the app’s fitness plan feature, which takes the guesswork out of how to get yourself to start moving and ultimately comparing and tracking those workouts against what food you eat. For $9.99/month (or $49.99/year) you get access to expert guidance, including meals planned by dietitians.
2) Best for Habit Tracking: Noom
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
Noom packs a wallop in this category by way of the dozens of peer-reviewed publications they’ve personally funded and authored. They really mean business when it comes to food and nutrition science and it’s reflected in the app.
It’s also the only app in this category that provides chat support from real-life professionals. Nutrisense’s side-by-side comparison to Levels demonstrates how that extra human help can become the secret to success in meeting your glucose or weight management needs.
We have confidence Noom’s lifestyle coaches may be the necessary push to act on the healthy choices that are right for you, especially when they offer a flexible premium plan that begins at $66.35/month with options for as many months as you care to commit to all the way to $199/year.
3) Best App for Keto: Carb Manager
Price: Free, with in-app purchases
While it’s targeted at people sticking to the ketogenic diet, Carb Manager’s inherent ability to manage carbs, finds itself well positioned to help those of us working on managing our blood sugar.
Since it takes way fewer carbs than you might think to spike your glucose, not paying attention to them may set you up for a big crash later. The built-in food diary makes it a breeze to find carbs hidden in foods you’d never expect, and the included calculators remove the guesswork about how all of your food stacks up against each other throughout the day.
If you’re into fasting (which we don’t recommend without speaking to your doctor first), the premium version of Carb Manger tracks that as well.
4) Best App for Food Education: Fooducate
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
Reading all of the ingredients on your food’s packaging is a futile effort when you don’t even know what half of the names even mean. How are you supposed to know how any of those ingredients might affect your blood glucose? Or what their caloric content is? Is it worth the risk of ruining your mood for the rest of the day?
Fooducate demystifies any food you may encounter by giving you access to a massive database attached to a barcode scanner that breaks down anything you scan in the grocery store into the component ingredients (and tells you what they actually do, too). The premium version even lets you add databases for keto and gluten-free diets.
Best Apps For People Who Already Have Diabetes
If you’re someone who already has diabetes, check out our top six recommendations for diabetes apps.
1) Best App for Diabetes Management: mySugr
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
Easy-to-read dashboards and intuitive logging are what we like best about mySugr. For those who like to get as gear-headed as possible with their routine, the pro version takes blood sugar management to dizzying heights.
The subscription unlocks the ability to track and tag places you’ve been, things you’ve done, and places you’ve eaten at so you can remember how it all affected you and your sugar levels. Not to mention, this app has a handy insulin calculator with exportable results for your doctor. While typically $2.99/month (or $27.99/year), pro is free if you have an Accu-Chek Guide, Guide Me, or Aviva meter.
2) Best App for Managing Insulin: RapidCalc
Price: $7.99
As the supercomputer among these apps, RapidCalc boasts the usual tracking metrics alongside the most advanced insulin management system offered among these apps. Control over your basal dosage is so refined that users describe the app as providing the same fidelity as an insulin pump without actually delivering the insulin.
3) Best for Basic Glucose Tracking: Diabetes:M
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
Foremost an app for tablets, Diabetes:M works just fine on regular smartphones and includes the usual food and exercise logging, glucose and insulin monitoring, and exportable reports functions you can expect from most of the apps in this category. The simple premium subscription ($4.99/month) wipes the ads away and opens the built-in food and nutrition database to allow you to expand your grocery cart contents safely and deliciously.
4) Best App for the Newly Diagnosed: Beat Diabetes
Price: Free, with ads
Veteran diabetics will be able to jump right into apps we’ve so far included in this category, but what about those who have been newly diagnosed? Not only is there a deluge of new information to digest, but getting the news can be just plain scary.
Beat Diabetes is geared towards those who have been newly diagnosed and it's a great, risk-free choice to learn the fundamentals of tackling diabetes the right way quickly. The most crucial facts are presented in expandable categories on the home screen and written by medical professionals.
5) Best App for Healthy Recipes: Diabetic Recipes
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
Complete with healthy recipes designed specifically for those with diabetes, the Diabetes Recipes app can be a great resource if you need a hand in resetting your diet. This app provides you with step by step cooking instructions, recipe videos, and even a breakdown of the nutritional information of each meal.
You can search through the app’s library of diabetes-friendly recipes or search by ingredient or style to find recipes you enjoy. This app makes it easier than ever to eat well while still enjoying delicious foods and being aware of your carb and calorie intake.
6) Best App for Quick Insights: OneTouch Reveal
Price: Free, with ads and in-app purchases
OneTouch Reveal is a handy app that syncs with OneTouch blood sugar meters to collect your glucose insights. Your data is collected in one convenient location so that you can spot trends, and the app will even send you push notifications if you have an abnormal reading.
You can download your data to share with your doctor or even grant them access to view your glucose history inside the app to make adjustments to your nutrition or daily habits.
Engage with Your Blood Glucose Levels with Nutrisense
Your blood sugar levels can significantly impact how your body feels and functions. That’s why stable blood glucose levels can be an important factor in supporting overall wellbeing.
With Nutrisense, you’ll be able to track your blood glucose levels over time using a CGM, so you can make lifestyle choices that support healthy living.
When you join the Nutrisense CGM program, our team of credentialed dietitians and nutritionists are available for additional support and guidance to help you reach your goals.
Ready to take the first step? Start with our quiz to see how Nutrisense can support your health.
Find the right Nutrisense programhealth potential.
to help you discover and reach yourHeather is a Registered and Licensed Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN, LDN), subject matter expert, and technical writer, with a master's degree in nutrition science from Bastyr University. She has a specialty in neuroendocrinology and has been working in the field of nutrition—including nutrition research, education, medical writing, and clinical integrative and functional nutrition—for over 15 years.