Three apps, three philosophies, three very different answers to "is this product any good for me?" Here is an honest comparison from the physician who built What's the Score.
| Feature | What's the Score | Yuka | EWG Healthy Living |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physician-developed scoring | Yes — practicing MD methodology | No — data-scientist team, no clinician on record | Partial — toxicologists, not clinicians |
| Categories covered | Food, wine, beer, spirits, beauty, pet, household, oral care | Food, beauty, pet (limited) | Beauty + household cleaners only |
| Ingredient database size | ~4.8M products, 1.94M scored | ~2M products (Europe-leaning) | ~100K products (US) |
| Wine headache score (sulfites + tannins + histamines) | Yes — unique | No | No |
| Beer-specific scoring (additives, ingredient transparency) | Yes | No | No |
| Ultra-processed badge + ingredient-count warning | Yes — NOVA-style + >15 ingredient trigger | Partial — implicit in score | No |
| "Try this instead" with % cleaner comparison | Yes — named alternative with score delta | Yes — alternatives shown | No |
| Nutrition-facts-based scoring (sugar stacking, fiber, protein) | Yes — USDA FoodData backed | Partial | No |
| FDA recall integration | Yes — daily sync | No | No |
| Self-healing data (photo + URL validation crons) | Yes — 9 nightly agents | Unknown | Unknown |
| Public API | Yes — tiered B2B (/api) | No | No |
| Charity-matched subscriptions (95% to user-chosen cause) | Yes — every.org | No | No |
Yuka was first. The product-scan UX is polished and the community has contributed millions of product photos. If you shop mostly in European supermarkets, their food coverage is probably deeper than ours there.
EWG Skin Deep is the gold standard for cosmetic ingredient hazard data. We actually use their hazard scale as an input to our beauty scoring. If you want the rawest possible cosmetic safety lookup, their free Skin Deep database is excellent.
Every rule in our scorer has a physician's rationale behind it. We score alcohol (beer, wine, spirits) with category-specific chemistry — sulfites, tannins, histamines for wine; alcohol % and ingredient transparency for beer; nobody else does this. We integrate FDA recalls directly. We pay 95% of subscription revenue to a charity the user picks. And we expose every number through a public, tiered B2B API so companies doing nutrition research, allergen tracking, or retailer product-review can query at scale.
Download What's the Score on the App Store — free. Scan any barcode. See a 0–100 physician-developed rating, the specific concerns that drove the score, and a cleaner alternative when one exists.