9 pre-workouts, scanned and ranked by what's in them
We photographed the supplement facts panel of nine pre-workouts and scored every dose against the amount used in published research. Here's the ranking, and the ingredient that actually separates them.
Short answer: Gorilla Mode, 78 out of 100. Bottom of the nine is Warrior Rage at 45. The full table and what separates them is below.
Nine pre-workouts. Every number below was read off the supplement facts panel at the serving the label states, and scored against the doses used in published human trials.
No brand paid for anything and nothing here is a recommendation. It's arithmetic.
| best dosed | worst dosed | what separates them | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score | Gorilla Mode, 78 | Warrior Rage, 45 | 33 points |
| Citrulline | 5000mg pure | 750mg | sevenfold |
| Caffeine | 200mg | 150mg | almost nothing |
That last row is the finding. Caffeine barely varies across the whole category, which is the number every comparison leads with. What actually moves the score is citrulline, creatine and whether the rest of the label is doing anything at all.
The ranking
5000mg of pure L-citrulline, real betaine, tyrosine and alpha-GPC. The catch is that the label serving is one scoop and the product is sold on two, which doubles the caffeine to 400mg. Full teardown.
Holds up better than its marketing suggests. Worth checking the servings per container against the scoop you actually use.
The only one here with beta-alanine at a genuine 3200mg in a single scoop. Expensive, and the tub is 20 servings at the two-scoop dose, not 40.
4g of citrulline malate, which is about 2.7g of actual citrulline once you take the malic acid out. Beta-alanine at 2g and taurine at 400mg are both short.
The one most people buy first. Caffeine at 150mg is the only ingredient at a researched dose, and all five vitamins on the front come in under the daily value. Full teardown.
Best creatine of the nine at 3.4g, and the weakest everything else. Citrulline at 750mg, plus two ingredients with no credible human evidence at their dose.
Sold on its stimulant load, and that part is real. The performance side of the label is thinner than the front of the tub implies.
A tidy label with nothing wasted on it, but the pump ingredients sit below the ranges the trials used at one scoop.
The lowest of the nine by a clear margin. Long ingredient list, very little of it at an amount any trial used.
This is only the headline number
A score is the summary of about forty judgements: every ingredient against its researched dose, which ones overlap, what the combined daily totals come to against published upper limits, and how much of the price is buying nothing. None of that fits in a ranking.
Scan any tub for the full breakdown, including the ones that aren't on this list. Or check a single ingredient here first.
What the ranking is actually measuring
Three things, scored separately.
Dosing is whether each ingredient is at the amount published trials used. This is where the spread lives, and it's the only part most labels fail.
Evidence is how well supported that ingredient is for the thing it's sold for, independent of dose. Creatine and caffeine score at the top of this regardless of how little of them is in the tub.
Overlap is whether you're paying twice for the same nutrient. A single product has nothing to overlap with, so every one of these scores full marks there, which is why nothing in the list drops as low as its dosing alone.
Check your own instead
These nine are the ones we happened to scan. Yours probably isn't here, and the answer for it is on the back of the tub rather than in anyone's ranking.
Try the dose checker for a single ingredient, or photograph the whole panel in the app and it reads every dose off it, compares each against the amount used in published research, and adds the totals across everything you take.
It reports the arithmetic and names the source of every figure. It doesn't tell you what to take.