These two come up together constantly, and they are less alike than they look. One gives you a number and is free to use. The other keeps a list of ingredients it objects to and charges a subscription. Which is better depends entirely on which of those you wanted.
The short answer
- Pick Yuka if you want a general read on a product’s nutritional balance and its additives, for nothing, with the method published so you can argue with it.
- Pick Olive if you want one app covering food and cosmetics that keeps its own list of things to avoid, and you do not mind paying a subscription for it.
How each one decides
Yuka produces one score out of 100, from nutritional quality at 60%, additives at 30% and organic certification at 10%. It is the same score for every person who scans the product. The full working is on the Yuka page.
Olive flags categories rather than scoring balance: seed oils, synthetic additives, allergens and similar. It is closer to a checklist than a grade, and which things are on the checklist is Olive’s judgement. Detail on the Olive page.
So they disagree about products regularly, and neither is malfunctioning when they do. They are answering different questions.
What each one costs
This is the sharpest difference between them.
Yuka is free to scan. Its Premium tier, which adds a search bar, an offline mode and alerts over seven dietary preferences, starts at $10 a year in the US.
Olive is a subscription with a seven-day trial that asks for payment details up front. Its App Store listing shows monthly options at $7.99 and $14.99 and annual ones between $29.99 and $69.99.
Over a year, on the numbers each publishes, Yuka Premium is roughly the price of one month of Olive.
What each one covers
Both scan food and cosmetics. Olive advertises access to over a million products across both; Yuka covers both categories with separate scoring for each. For cosmetics specifically, either will answer you and Kaibu will not, because Kaibu is food only.
Where both of them stop
Neither answers the question “does this suit me”. Yuka’s score is identical for every reader, and its alerts cover seven preferences it chose. Olive flags the categories Olive objects to. If you are shopping around a particular allergen or a particular diet, you are reading somebody else’s list and translating.
That gap is what Kaibu was built for: you save the diets and allergens you actually care about, and a product is read against your list rather than a general one. Scanning is free and unmetered, and it is food only.
None of the three is a medical device, and none replaces the packet. Label data is crowd-sourced and can be wrong or out of date, so check the pack before you eat.