SparkyFitness

What is SparkyFitness?

SparkyFitness is a self-hosted health and fitness tracker that logs nutrition, exercise, water, and body measurements in one place. It’s a web app built on React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL that you run in Docker on your own server, so your food diary and health data stay on infrastructure you control instead of a commercial app’s cloud.

What is SparkyFitness best for?

Privacy-minded people who want MyFitnessPal-style calorie and macro tracking without a subscription or handing personal health data to a commercial app — and who are comfortable running a Docker container. It’s also built for families and friends who want to track and share progress together on one shared instance.

What can SparkyFitness do?

• Track calories, macros, and meals with custom foods, pulling from the OpenFoodFacts, USDA, FatSecret, and Nutritionix nutrition databases
• Log exercise, water, sleep, fasting, mood, and body measurements, with goals and daily check-ins
• Estimate a meal’s nutrition from a photo and log entries by chat with the optional SparkyAI assistant (beta)
• Sync data from Apple Health, Google Health Connect, Garmin, Fitbit, Withings, Strava, Hevy, and Wger
• Bring your own AI provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google — with encrypted API keys
• Share progress with family and friends, and view long-term charts and reports

Where does SparkyFitness fall short?

• It’s not open source in the OSI sense. The code is public but under a custom non-commercial license, so you can self-host it free for personal use but need written permission to use it commercially.
• The phone experience still trails a polished native app. Independent reviewers note it needs a fully-fledged mobile app before it can match MyFitnessPal for on-the-go logging.
• It’s under active development and warns of breaking changes between releases, with AI, family sharing, and the API still marked beta — expect rough edges and careful, manual upgrades.

Is SparkyFitness free?

Yes — it’s free to self-host for personal use, and you only pay for the server it runs on. The license is source-available and non-commercial, so it isn’t free in the OSI open source sense: commercial use needs written permission. There’s no official paid cloud, though third-party managed hosting through PikaPods and Zenith Hosting exists for a fee.

What does SparkyFitness replace?

SparkyFitness is a self-hosted MyFitnessPal alternative. It covers the same calorie counting, macro tracking, and food-logging job — including photo-based food logging that MyFitnessPal keeps behind its Premium tier — without a subscription and with your data on your own server.

FAQ

Is SparkyFitness open source? Its code is public, but under a custom non-commercial license rather than an OSI-approved one. That means it’s free to self-host for personal use, while commercial use needs the author’s written permission.

Can I self-host SparkyFitness for free? Yes. Deploy it with Docker Compose (also Portainer, Kubernetes, Proxmox, or TrueNAS Scale) and you only pay for the server or NAS it runs on.

Is SparkyFitness a good MyFitnessPal alternative? For privacy-focused users, yes — it replicates calorie and macro tracking and even AI photo logging. If you need a polished phone app, MyFitnessPal is still smoother today.

What do I need to run SparkyFitness? A server, NAS, or home lab with Docker and PostgreSQL. The AI features are optional and need your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google API key.