I recently had to find a new food journal and ended up trying out fitday.com, thedailyplate.com, fitwatch.com, and sparkpeople.com. I like sparkpeople the best.

Fitday: I liked Fitday the least. It was awkward to use and just didn't have a lot of the cook features that some of the other journals had. My biggest gripes were:

1. It made me re-log in constantly. I'm just logging the food that I eat, it isn't exactly top secret, there's no need to time out my session every hour.
2. Way too hard to find foods. For example, I never could find fat free cottage cheese. I had to set up a custom food for it.
3. The database wasn't nearly as extensive as The Daily Plate and SparkPeople's. Lots of brand-name foods that I eat every day weren't in the database.
4. Didn't divide up my food into meals--everything is in one long list. It made it hard to see if I accidently missed something.
5. No ability to search custom foods. To add one of your custom foods to your log, you have to pull up a page that lists all of them, then scroll through the list to find the ones you want. I do a lot of cooking, so I know I will eventually have hundreds of custom foods. Even with only 25 or so, the page loaded really slowly and it was already hard to find things in the list.
6. It doesn't track sugar. I think maybe you could set up a field to track this if you upgraded to the for-fee version, but given the other issues I had with Fitday, I wasn't willing to this.

The Daily Plate: Overall, The Daily Plate had a lot of features that I liked. The search functionality worked great and I was able to find a lot of the foods that I eat regularly (although you do have to be careful to make sure the nutrition is accurate, since a lot of them are entered by other users). I also liked that it divided the journal into different meals. I especially like the ability to create "meals" that I eat over and over again. But it did seem like there were a lot of steps to go through to add a food to my log.

In the end, the deal-breaker for me was that there didn't seem to be any way to set up custom foods. This just seemed crazy, but, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to do it. You can enter calories manually, but just the calories, not the rest of the nutritional data for the food. And you can't save it for future use. There is a way to enter a recipe, but it was really hard to use, took a long time to enter one recipe, and it calculated the calories for me and they were way off--by like 1,000 calories per serving. There was no way to override their calcuations with my own. I do a lot of cooking and use many of the same recipes over and over again, so not being to set up custom foods was a big drawback for me.

Fitwatch: This was actually the first food journal I ever used and it did work pretty well. You could set up custom foods and it also had a recipe analyzer that I recall seemed reasonably accurate. It doesn't have some of the nifty features that The Daily Plate and SparkPeople have, like the ability to set up meals or to copy meals from one day to the next. Also, the food database isn't nearly as extensive as either The Daily Plate or SparkPeople and it has a lot of foods in it that don't seem that useful (for example, baby food--who is counting calories for babies?). The search function was hampered by all these foods that weren't useful (e.g., search results often included a lot of baby food). In the end, I stopped using it because it had far too many pop-up ads.

SparkPeople: This is the one I decided to stick with. I found it to be pretty easy to use. Adding foods to my log is quick and easy. The database is at least as extensive as The Daily Plate--but again, same issue with foods entered by other users not always being accurate. The search function works great--very easy to find the foods I'm looking for. I really like that I can choose to exclude fast food from the search results (it's pretty rare that I ever eat fast food, so not having to wade through all those foods to find what I'm looking for is nice).

It also divides my food into meals and even let me create my own custom meals (I have up to four snacks per day and it's nice to be able to list them all separately, rather than just one long list of snacks).

It also stores a list of favorites, which is handy, because once I've verified that a food is accurate, I can add it to my list of favorites . That way, I don't have to try to remember which of the ten listings for, say, Trader Joe's Greek yogurt is the one that I verified was correct.

Setting up custom foods is quick and easy and it's also just as easy to add them to my food log as adding the foods already in the database. For recipes, I wish I could list the ingredients and maybe some comments, but none of the free online journals seemed to offer this feature.

It doesn't have the ability to set up meals like The Daily Plate does, but you can copy meals from one day to the next, which is maybe even better.

Diet Power: I did not end up trying this because it is a software you have to install on your computer and I really wanted something that was online.