Open Food Facts or Pura: open data or a personal answer

We should be honest about the shape of this one. Open Food Facts is a nonprofit giving away open data built by volunteers, and we are a paid app. Every instinct in marketing says to skip this comparison. It is on the site because leaving it off would be worse.

If you want a free food database that you can inspect, contribute to and build on, use Open Food Facts. That is a good answer and we are not going to talk you out of it.

What is actually different

Open data versus a judgement. Open Food Facts gives you the record: what a product contains, who entered it, what classifications apply. Pura gives you an interpretation, generated for you, which you cannot audit line by line. Openness is a real advantage and it belongs to them.

A database versus a photograph. Open Food Facts works from a barcode and a community-built record. If a product is not in it, you can add it, which is a genuinely good answer, but it does not help you in the aisle right now. Pura reads the ingredient list off the label, so it works on the thing in your hand whether or not anyone has ever recorded it.

A general record versus your record. The database describes the product the same way for everybody. Pura measures the same product against your allergies, your conditions and your avoid list, and keeps separate profiles for other people in the house. That is the part a shared database structurally cannot do, because it is not shared information.

Food versus three categories. Open Food Facts also runs sibling projects for cosmetics and other products, but its centre of gravity is food. Pura treats food, cosmetics and supplements as three categories with three sets of criteria.

Where Pura is better

The unrecorded product, immediately, without contributing anything.

Personalisation, which is the whole reason we exist.

Cosmetics and supplements handled with the same seriousness as food.

And plain-language follow-up questions after a scan, which a database does not attempt.

Where we would send you to them instead

If you want to check our work, or anyone’s, against a public record.

If you are a developer and want the data rather than an app.

If you are outside our language coverage, which is most of the world right now.

If you object on principle to paying for something a nonprofit does for free. That is a coherent position and we are not going to argue with it.

Using both is the sensible answer

Open Food Facts for the public record and the breadth. Pura for the label in your hand and the parts that depend on you. We would rather write that down than manufacture a rivalry with a project we think is good for everyone, including us.