Compare / How it works

How the comparison works

One row is one test

Companies sell the same lab test under different names: “ApoB”, “Apolipoprotein B (ApoB)”, “Apolipoprotein B (APOB)”. Each name on each company's site is mapped by hand to one entry in a list of 526 tests, and each entry carries a LOINC code, the standard identifier labs use for a result. Two products include the same test only if they map to the same entry.

• Variants a shopper would treat as one test are merged: a count and a percentage of the same cell type, calculated and direct LDL, the D2 and D3 fractions of vitamin D.
• Tests that only sound alike are kept apart: free and total testosterone, hs-CRP and standard CRP, serum and red-cell magnesium, blood glucose and urine glucose.
• Nothing is matched by guesswork. A name with no mapping stops the build until someone adds one.

What is left out

• Company-specific indexes. Figures a company computes itself from other results (TyG index, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, triglyceride/HDL ratio and similar) are not counted as tests. Calculated results that labs report as a standard line with their own LOINC code are counted, which includes LDL cholesterol, eGFR and globulin and also a few ratios: total cholesterol/HDL, LDL/HDL, ApoB/ApoA1, omega-6/omega-3 and the free thyroxine index. These rows are marked “calc” in the comparison, since they add no new measurement.
• Panels with unpublished contents. Some panels, mostly allergy panels and drug screens, do not say what they measure. They are listed on the provider page but not compared.
• Things that are not lab tests. Imaging, fitness tests, genome sequencing and microbiome kits have no comparable result-level codes.

Prices

Prices are read from each company's public site (629 products in the current data). Memberships are priced per year; everything else is a one-time price. The “closest match” figure is the cheapest set of a company's products that covers as many of the reference package's tests as that company sells, found with an exact solver. It can be far higher than the company's own package price when the last few tests are only sold inside expensive panels, so read it together with the count beside it. Pricing your own picks uses the same rule, solved exactly in your browser.

A “+$” figure in the table is the cheapest single product that adds that test to the package. One product often covers several rows, so those figures should not be summed; pick the tests instead and the total is worked out properly.

Draw fees, shipping, sales and member promotions are not included unless the company shows them as the listed price.