Triggerbites vs Migraine Buddy: which app is right for you?
The best migraine attack tracker - or the app that finds your food triggers?
If migraines are part of your life, you've almost certainly met Migraine Buddy. It's the best-known migraine app in the world, built with input from migraine sufferers and neurologists, and used by millions of people.
And it's very good at what it does. For recording an attack - the pain, the aura, the duration, the medication that helped or didn't - Migraine Buddy is excellent.
But there's a question it can't really answer: is my diet triggering these?
Migraine Buddy treats food as one checkbox in a long list of possible triggers. If you suspect aged cheese, red wine, chocolate or something fermented is setting off your head, a single "food" toggle won't find it.
That's the gap this comparison is about. Let's break down Triggerbites and Migraine Buddy, honestly and fairly.
The Quick Overview
| Triggerbites | Migraine Buddy | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Food triggers & symptom patterns | Migraine & headache attack tracking |
| Logging Style | Write like a diary (voice & photos too) | Structured attack questionnaire |
| Food Tracking | Full diary - ingredients & compounds | One trigger category among many |
| Ingredient Extraction | Automatic (AI-powered) | No |
| Compound Tagging | 20+ categories (histamine, FODMAPs, salicylates…) | No |
| Delayed-Reaction Analysis | Yes - multiple windows up to 72 hours | Trigger logging, no food-timing windows |
| Migraine-Specific Tools | No | Weather, sleep sensors, aura, medication tracking |
| Import Existing Notes | Yes (PDF, photo, CSV) | No |
| Reports | PDF & CSV | Yes - export for clinicians |
| Platform | iOS (Android coming soon) | iOS & Android |
| Price | Subscription (7-day free trial) | Free; paid Premium tier |
1. Two Different Jobs: Attack Tracking vs. Food-Trigger Discovery
This is the distinction that matters most.
Migraine Buddy
Migraine Buddy is an attack tracker. When a migraine hits, you record it in detail: pain intensity and location, aura, duration, symptoms, the medication you took and whether it worked. Over time that builds a precise picture of your migraine pattern - invaluable for you and your neurologist.
Triggerbites
Triggerbites is a trigger-discovery tool. It's less interested in cataloguing the attack and more interested in what led up to it - specifically, what you ate in the hours and days before. It breaks meals into ingredients, tags compounds, and correlates them with your symptoms.
One documents the migraine. The other hunts for what caused it.
Winner: Depends on your goal - Migraine Buddy to record and understand your attacks; Triggerbites to investigate whether food is setting them off.
2. How You Log
Migraine Buddy
Logging in Migraine Buddy is a structured questionnaire - tap through pain, location, symptoms, triggers and medication. It's well designed for capturing an attack quickly, even when you feel awful.
But it's attack-centred. There's no natural place to record "here's everything I ate today" in any depth.
Triggerbites
Triggerbites is a diary. You write what you ate and how you felt in plain language, snap a photo, or talk:
Aged cheddar and two glasses of red at dinner. Woke up with a full migraine and nausea.
That single sentence becomes structured, analysable data - the foods, the drinks, the symptoms and the timing.
Winner: Depends - Migraine Buddy for fast, structured attack capture; Triggerbites for capturing the diet detail that attack logging skips.
3. Food: A Checkbox vs. an Ingredient Engine
This is where the two apps stop overlapping.
Migraine Buddy
In Migraine Buddy, food is a trigger category. You can note that "food" or a broad item may have played a role, but the app doesn't break meals into ingredients and doesn't analyse food chemistry. It can't tell you that the common thread across your bad days is aged, fermented, high-histamine foods rather than any single dish.
Triggerbites
Triggerbites is built around exactly that. Every meal is broken into ingredients, and each ingredient is tagged with compounds - including histamine, which is strongly associated with migraine for many people. So instead of "cheese, maybe?", you get "your migraines track with high-histamine meals."
Winner: Triggerbites - for food-trigger discovery, an ingredient-and-compound engine beats a single trigger checkbox.
4. Catching Delayed Reactions
Migraine Buddy
Migraine Buddy lets you tag suspected triggers, but it doesn't analyse food across delayed time windows. A migraine that reliably follows a trigger 24 hours later is hard to pin down from trigger tags alone.
Triggerbites
Triggerbites analyses across multiple windows - same-day, next-day, out to 72 hours - because food-related migraine triggers are so often delayed. The wine on Friday and the headache on Saturday aren't an obvious pair until something lines them up. (More on this in why your food reaction shows up hours or days later.)
Winner: Triggerbites - explicit delayed-reaction analysis for food triggers.
5. The Migraine-Specific Toolkit
Here Migraine Buddy has real strengths that Triggerbites simply doesn't try to match.
Migraine Buddy
Migraine Buddy tracks the things that matter to migraine specifically: weather and barometric-pressure correlation, automatic sleep-pattern detection via phone sensors, aura, medication effectiveness, and AI-driven insights - plus reports designed for neurologists. If non-food factors like weather and sleep are central to your migraines, that toolkit is genuinely valuable.
Triggerbites
Triggerbites doesn't do weather, barometric pressure or automatic sleep sensing. It's a food-and-symptom tool, not a migraine-specialist platform.
Winner: Migraine Buddy - for migraine-specific tracking beyond food, it's purpose-built and Triggerbites isn't.
6. Price and Platform
Price. Migraine Buddy has a free tier, with a paid Premium tier. Triggerbites is a subscription with a 7-day trial. Migraine Buddy is the cheaper option and has a usable free tier.
Platform. Migraine Buddy is on iOS and Android. Triggerbites is iOS only for now, with Android on the way.
Winner: Migraine Buddy - cheaper, with a free tier and Android availability.
Can You Use Both?
Honestly - yes, and for a lot of people that's the smartest setup.
Migraine Buddy is excellent for recording attacks and tracking weather, sleep and medication. Triggerbites is built to investigate the food side that Migraine Buddy treats as a checkbox. Used together, you cover both halves of the puzzle: the full picture of your attacks, and a real answer on whether your diet is feeding them.
So, Which One Should You Choose?
Choose Migraine Buddy if:
- Your priority is detailed attack tracking - pain, aura, medication, duration
- Weather, barometric pressure and sleep are central to your migraines
- You want neurologist-ready attack reports
- You're on Android, or you want a free tier
Choose Triggerbites if:
- You suspect food is triggering your migraines and want to prove it
- You need ingredient-level and compound-level analysis, not a trigger checkbox
- You want delayed-reaction analysis across multiple time windows
- Your symptoms go beyond migraine - gut issues, reflux, skin flares
The Bottom Line
Migraine Buddy is rightly the most trusted migraine app there is. If what you need is to record and understand your attacks, it's superb, and nothing here changes that.
But recording an attack and finding its cause are two different jobs. If you've tracked dozens of migraines and still can't tell whether food is involved, that's because attack logging was never designed to answer it.
Triggerbites is. Write what you ate, and it extracts the ingredients, tags the compounds, checks the time windows and tells you whether your migraines track with your diet. Use it alongside Migraine Buddy, or on its own - either way, the food question finally gets a real answer.
Live, love, log.
Weighing up Triggerbites and Migraine Buddy? Reach out at - the team is happy to help you find the right fit.