I have used both Loseit and MFP and I prefer Loseit. There are some subtle differences between the two, but on the whole they function the same way (track foods, barcode app, syncs with fitbit). I took at hiatus from the Loseit app during Dec when I was really crazy with the holiday stuff and a big deadline. I was lured by MFP's seemingly massive database of foods and I needed to stay accountable while busy.
Its really going to come down to personal preference, but at MFP it actually took longer for me to log. There is something about Loseits interface that makes logging faster and its just slightly more intuitive. On MFP, you have to click which meal a food belongs to each time you enter a food and it sounds like a little thing, but after a while it gets to be annoying. It was for me any way. At lose it, when you're entering dinner items all at once, its all going to be under "dinner" until you change it. Sometimes you enter things under the wrong meal, but its really easy to switch it. Its just a little user interface detail.
The next two items were MFP deal breakers *for me*. Yes, MFP's database is much bigger than Loseits. However, more often than not you'll be looking some obscure food item up (in one case, it was a grilled tofu banh mi sandwich) and you will get about 25 different versions of the same sandwich ranging from 350 cals to 800 cals. This would happen more often than not, and I found that I was often just guessing and making assumptions that my sandwich was probably the 500 cal or the 800 cal sandwich. For me, personally, I decided that I needed to do more work and really understand how many calories I was consuming and custom entering more food items. Yes, still sometimes you have to guess on things and entering "something" is better than nothing at all. But for me I wanted to get a little more accurate. Custom entering my own food is definitely for me.
The last item was recipe sharing! If you have a parter who is helping you enter food/recipes, like lets say the dinner you are preparing together (in our house this happens almost every night - we love to cook) you can not enter a recipe then share it with someone on MFP. This was killing me. There is a workaround on MFP, where you can just copy someones breakfast (and that's what we would do) but you can't go back and modify a recipe if something was entered wrong. You have to re-enter it yourself. That was the one thing that made me switch back to LoseIt and I am really glad that I did. I used MFP for an entire month and now that I am back on LoseIt, it feels so much easier to me.
Again, its just a personal preference and fits my goals and certain food journaling habits. I would not be surprised if MFP add's recipe sharing down the line. A lot of people are requesting it. OH, and regarding the $40 a year, that's nothing after paying for 10-years of WW meetings. Its a worthwhile investment to me. I also really love the community over at LoseIt. MFP has a lot of nice people too, but I never got into the groove over there. Probably because I was so busy when I was using it.
OK that's my .02!
PS OH! and as far as entering food at fitbit, I don't know much about that yet. I started at Loseit/MFP and that brought me to fitbit. I hope that the food logging improves here. Its actually a really cool site with a lot of features.
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