Nutrafol vs. Hers

You and 30 million other American women probably have at least one thing in common, and that’s hair loss.1 And 30 million is a modest number because it applies only to androgenetic alopecia — the technical term for pattern hair loss that, in women, typically manifests as general hair thinning and/or a widening part caused by elevated levels of a particular enzyme, an increased proportion of a specific androgen, and an abundance of androgen receptors in the scalp.2 3

But whatever type of hair loss you have, you know how much it can affect your self-perception and confidence.

The good news is that you have solutions at your disposal.

Take Nutrafol and Hers, two of the leading health and wellness brands on the market. While one is a supplement company and the other is a telehealth platform, they converge in that they both offer potentially effective treatments for hair loss. To be sure, Hers’ focus on prescription medications means its products have a greater magnitude of scientific support than any supplement, so it gives you better odds of seeing the desired results. But a supplemental approach has its merits, especially for people who can’t tolerate prescriptions or prefer botanicals to lab-derived drugs.

With all that in mind, let’s see how Nutrafol and Hers compare.

In the matchup between Nutrafol and Hers, each company has its share of strengths and weaknesses. The chart below lays out the box score, so to speak. Keep in mind that some categories do hold more weight than others.

At this time, we suggest you have the best chances of finding a safe, effective, and affordable hair loss treatment at Hers.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

Nutrafol and Hers are two brands we’ve covered before, and hair loss is an area with which we’ve come to be deeply familiar. So, for this review, we built on our existing base of knowledge on these topics with further study into what causes and potentially reverses female-pattern hair loss, and we reacquainted ourselves with the companies’ products to understand exactly how they measure up against one another. All told, we’ve put several hundred research hours into understanding which treatments offer consumers the greatest chances of restoring hair.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

To compare Nutrafol with Hers, we pitted the two brands against each other in these six categories:

• Efficacy: How likely are the company’s treatments to reverse the effects of androgenetic alopecia or other types of hair loss?
• Safety: Which company’s products pose the least risk of harm to the user?
• Cost: In general, which company offers the more affordable treatment options?
• Website user experience: When it comes to browsing products, which company’s website is more user-friendly and intuitively designed?
• Customer support: If you have a question or need help, which company’s support channels are more expedient and seamless?

Each of the following subsections covers one evaluative criterion, tells you the winner, and explains how we made our decision.

Effectiveness for hair loss

Advantage: Hers

Dealing in prescription-strength treatments, Hers has the definitive advantage over Nutrafol with regard to effectiveness. The prescription-strength treatments in question are minoxidil and finasteride. Minoxidil (originally developed as a blood pressure medication) is thought to work by opening up the flow of blood and nutrients to the hair follicles and thereby stimulating active growth.23 And finasteride (originally developed for benign prostatic hyperplasia, or an enlarged prostate) inhibits an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase, which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT); because DHT facilitates androgenetic alopecia, preventing it from occurring can eliminate a major hair loss factor.24

If you’ve explored the prescription hair loss space at all, you’ll no doubt have encountered these names since they’re among the most used and most effective clinical-strength treatments for androgenetic alopecia. In fact, research has shown that both minoxidil alone and in combination with finasteride can significantly increase hair counts and diameters, and combination therapy can even decrease serum DHT — the key biological mechanism behind androgenetic alopecia.4 What’s more, minoxidil specifically can be an effective treatment for other types of hair loss, like telogen effluvium and alopecia areata.10 11

Nutrafol shouldn’t be discounted, though. Although its supplements can’t reasonably outperform a well-studied and FDA-approved medication, they do have the potential to treat androgenetic alopecia. Nutrafol’s active ingredients (e.g., saw palmetto and ashwagandha) have well-established properties for blocking DHT or reducing other hair loss factors, like stress.5 6

Safety

Advantage: Hers

We give the safety ribbon to Hers because, again, its active hair loss ingredients are FDA-approved treatments. As such, they’ve each withstood a comprehensive drug development process that supplements aren’t subject to. The process involves four distinct stages, including safety testing and post-market safety monitoring, so users have fairly strong assurances they’re safe from severe systemic effects except in rare instances.7

That doesn’t mean that Nutrafol is inherently dangerous (unless you have a fish allergy, as many of the products include marine collagen from fish like cod, haddock, and pollock), but it does mean its specific formulation hasn’t undergone the stringent sort of testing that minoxidil and finasteride have. It also doesn’t mean that minoxidil and finasteride aren’t capable of causing side effects, but that clinical testing has determined them to be generally safe. Also, because Hers requires provider consultation and review before a person can gain access, professional opinion functions as the initial failsafe protecting the user from harm.

Cost

Advantage: Hers

You might think that a prescription would cost more than a supplement, but that isn’t the case with Hers and Nutrafol. Minoxidil is the main ingredient that Hers offers for female-pattern hair loss, and its price has trended downward since it became available as a generic approved for over-the-counter sales in the mid-1990s. So, while exact pricing may vary, a Hers hair loss treatment starts at an equivalent of around $29-$35 per month. Though the price may entail an up-front payment for a three- or five-month treatment plan, it’s tough to beat such a long-term bargain.

Most Nutrafol products are significantly more expensive. Any one of its main oral supplements is either $79 on a subscription or $88 (plus $6.95 shipping) as a one-time purchase. Even the least expensive items in the catalog (shampoos and conditioners) cost about $9 more than minoxidil through Hers.

However, Nutrafol does have a better return policy than Hers. We discuss its coverage and caveats under “Nutrafol vs. Hers for cost.”

Website user experience

Advantage: Nutrafol

Website user experience (UX) relates to anything on the page that affects how you feel as you interact with a website. Is it a pleasant time, more or less? Is it easy or hard, slow or fast, to find the information you want? That's all UX.

Neither Nutrafol nor Hers has a good UX, but Nutrafol is significantly less bad. You don't have to scroll too much through the catalog before the product links enter your view, every product link leads to the associated product page, and every product page clearly displays the pricing.

You'd think we could say the same about any commercial website, but that's bafflingly not the case. Hers (and its sibling brand, Hims) took the manual on user-friendly UX and used it for nothing but to balance the company coffee table. On its Hair Loss Treatments page, the first two-thirds of the page's real estate is occupied by animations, user testimonials, and marketing copy. When you finally find the product links, you'll find that clicking one leads not to a product page but to an onboarding questionnaire. Pricing is less than transparent. And if you want to contact customer support, you'll have to navigate to a separate page to locate the link.

For anyone trying to determine whether Hers is a viable option for their increased shedding, its website design choices may inspire some additional hair loss through stress and rending. If nothing else, the attendant frustrations may be enough to drive prospective customers to another brand, such as Nutrafol.

Customer support

Advantage: Nutrafol

Both Nutrafol and Hers have online chat support, which we love to see; compared to telephone and especially email, it drastically cuts down the response turnaround time and allows each party to convey their question or answer as clearly as possible. However, with Hers, the rub is that online chat support is only for existing patients. If you’re only a prospective customer, you’ll have to submit your question through the query portal and then wait for an email. (Of course, you have to find the query portal first. Here’s a link so you don’t have to go hunting for it.)

Nutrafol’s chat feature doesn’t have any such obstacle. You can activate the chat from any page on the company website, and after typing “agent” a few times, you’ll connect with a representative within a minute. That was our experience, anyway. The connection interval may be longer during times of high customer support volume, but our testers have thankfully avoided those periods.

Nutrafol is a health brand that specializes in hair loss treatments. Hers (the sibling company to Hims) is a telehealth platform that includes hair loss in its treatment catalog. Hair loss is their shared point of commercial interest.

Apart from that, they’re very different companies. Nutrafol deals in supplements, so its treatments are driven by botanical ingredients and aren’t subject to FDA approval before hitting the market.8 Hers, however, uses pharmaceutical-grade ingredients in addition to nutrients and botanicals; its formulations aren’t FDA-approved, but the minoxidil and finasteride used in the formulations are.

The companies differ in their consumer-end processes as well. Buying a Nutrafol product is as straightforward as any ordinary commercial online transaction — select your items and input your payment information. With Hers, though, you must first verify your identity and have a medical provider review your treatment plan before you can move forward with the purchase.

Hers is the better option for most women because its prescription-strength ingredients provide the best odds of reversing hair loss. And not just one type of hair loss, but several.

The ingredients in question are minoxidil and finasteride. Both ingredients team up in Hers’ Hair Blends Postmeno Serum for postmenopausal women, while minoxidil is also available as a standalone oral tablet, a chew combined with biotin, a tablet combined with zinc and B vitamins, and a separate serum combined with biotin, ketoconazole, and vitamin B5. These treatments may be effective not only for androgenetic alopecia but also for:9

• Certain cases of alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that attacks the hair follicles10
• Telogen effluvium, which is often caused by stress or a major change to the body11
• Anagen effluvium, or hair loss secondary to a medical treatment (e.g., chemotherapy)12

The Postmeno Serum is especially promising because it leverages the androgen-blocking power of finasteride in women whose decreasing estrogen levels make their bodies more susceptible to the relative abundance of DHT — the key biological mechanism behind androgenetic alopecia. In 2018, this very sort of treatment was put to the test in a randomized, double-blind, controlled study on 30 postmenopausal women with female-pattern hair loss. In it, the subjects received either a 3% minoxidil solution or a combination of 0.25% finasteride and 3% minoxidil. After 24 weeks, both subject groups exhibited increased hair counts and diameters, and the combination group saw significantly decreased serum DHT.4

What about Nutrafol? The company’s primary hair loss treatments for women are four oral supplements formulated to block DHT:

• Nutrafol Women: For women aged 18-44 with thinning hair
• Nutrafol Women’s Balance: For women aged 45 and older
• Nutrafol Women’s Vegan: For vegan women aged 18-44
• Nutrafol Postpartum: For women with thinning hair in the first year after giving birth

To their credit, they contain some excellent botanical ingredients for treating androgenetic alopecia — for example:

Unfortunately, we can’t speak to Nutrafol’s dosages since they’re hidden behind proprietary blends. We know that something like ashwagandha is effective at doses as low as 240mg, but we can only speculate as to whether Nutrafol’s supplements deliver that much of the ingredient per dose.13

However, with regard to validating efficacy, we can also consult the scientific literature specifically on Nutrafol. In 2021, for example, there was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study that assessed the effects that Nutrafol Women’s Balance could have on perimenopausal, menopausal, and postmenopausal women with thinning hair, and in which the intervention group saw “significantly increased” hair counts compared to placebo.25 A similar study took place in 2024, this time using Nutrafol Women’s Vegan, wherein a “significant proportion of subjects reported improved hair quality, appearance, texture, and volume.”26 It’s true that these studies were conducted and written by researchers affiliated with Nutrafol, but their methods appear sound.

Each company’s active ingredients pose some risk of side effects. For example, saw palmetto can cause headaches and is potentially unsafe for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding,20 while finasteride can decrease libido, cause irregular menstruation, and lead to birth defects in male babies.21 27 Looking at just those two sets of adverse events, you might be inclined to think Nutrafol is safer than Hers.

On the contrary, Hers stands above Nutrafol for safety because its key active ingredients have survived the gauntlet that is the drug development process. This process entails multiple stages of clinical research, FDA review and approval, and ongoing surveillance to ensure consumer safety. Meanwhile, dietary supplements can be sold to consumers without undergoing such oversight, and only after they’ve hit the market are they subject to FDA regulation.7 8

But let’s back up and look again at Hers’ finasteride. Consider that it appears only in the Hair Blends Post Meno Serum, a topical treatment. Topical finasteride differs considerably from its oral counterpart in that much less of it enters the bloodstream. Therefore, topical application poses far less risk of the adverse events we mentioned above.22 It looks like even in an ingredient-to-ingredient comparison for safety, Hers may have the upper hand.

If low cost is a priority, then Hers is the one you want. As of this writing, the company offers five prescription-strength treatments for hair loss, each at a more affordable long-term cost than a comparable Nutrafol alternative:

• Oral Minoxidil
• Biotin + Minoxidil Chew
• Hair Blends Serum (with minoxidil, ketoconazole, and vitamin B5)
• Hair Vitamins + Minoxidil Tablet (with zinc and B vitamins)
• Hair Blends Post Meno Serum (minoxidil and finasteride)

Besides the Oral Minoxidil, a plan that starts as low as $29 per month, each of the treatment options has a monthly equivalent price point that starts at $35. The price may vary depending on your exact treatment plan, but $29-$35 is quite affordable for some of the most scientifically supported hair loss drugs you can get. (There are also shampoos, conditioners, and a biotin gummy. The most promising shampoo, called the Triple Threat, contains saw palmetto and argan oil.5 28 The other hair care products are less promising.)

Keep in mind that we’re talking about monthly equivalent prices. Hers doesn’t offer true month-to-month pricing for all of its products; instead, you pay for maybe a three- or five-month treatment plan up front, and the cost breaks down to the $29-$35 range. It takes a commitment, but there are real long-term savings to be had.

In comparison, for a Nutrafol oral supplement, you’ll have to pay more than twice as much. Each of the oral supplements costs $79 for subscribers and $88 for one-time purchasers, while secondary products — a serum, a shampoo, and a conditioner — are $44-$49. The only products in Nutrafol’s catalog that are less expensive than a Hers treatment are the Hair Wellness Boosters, but you have to purchase them alongside a supplement.

For some people, website UX doesn’t matter; if a company has a product they want, they’ll deal with some degree of frustration to get it. For others, it’s an important convenience factor that determines whether a particular brand is worth the trouble.

If you count yourself among the latter camp, then you may find Nutrafol to be the better option. While its website is far from being intuitively designed, it’s heaps more user-friendly than the over-busy, over-the-top situation at Hers.

The greatest design flaw on the Nutrafol site lies in placing content below the fold. The term “below the fold” refers to information that has been positioned lower than the reader’s immediate view. It originates from print newspapers, on which the bottom half of the front page matter wouldn’t be visible to customers browsing a newsstand. The idea is that you want to keep the most important content above the fold. With that in mind, examine this screenshot of Nutrafol’s Product dropdown menu:

Look way down at the bottom. Does it look like there’s more content below “Metabolism?” In fact, there is, and it happens to be the See All Products navigation link. That’s an important link, but it’s completely out of view on a 14-inch laptop screen. Our testers couldn’t even scroll down on the menu, so they had to zoom out to 80% on their browser just to access it.

Ultimately, though, Nutrafol’s website is manageable. Once you get to the products page, you can easily browse the available items, select the ones you want, and make your way to the checkout screen.

The same can’t really be said about the Hers website. To explain, we’ll begin by showing you the front page:

We think it’s reasonable for a visitor to expect that clicking the “Grow fuller hair” link would take them to a product page that lays out all of the hair loss treatment options, but that isn’t what it does. Instead, it takes them to a questionnaire about their hair type, hair loss experience, and other such matters. While this navigation flow makes sense since Hers is a telehealth company, it also presents an obstacle to the visitor who wants to get a rundown of their options before putting time and effort into what’s essentially an onboarding process. Similarly, if you want to contact customer service, you won’t find a “Contact” link anywhere on the front page but will have to locate “Customer Help Center” to be taken to a page that does contain a “Contact” link. In other words, useful information is obscured behind extraneous navigation.

Anyway, we were able to find the Hers hair loss product page by searching for “Hers hair loss” via search engine. But when we reached the page, we saw the depths to which Hers was willing to place content below the fold:

What you see in the image is the very first instance of selectable hair loss products entering the viewable screen, and it’s halfway down the page. Above it? Testimonials, some marketing copy — nothing that’s more important than the company’s products on the company’s product page.

The sum of the issue is this: Nutrafol minimizes your time from check-in to checkout, with a tolerable bump in the road, whereas buying from Hers takes more of a commitment and likely more patience.

Our chief point of comparison in evaluating customer support was each company’s online chat feature. Both are convenient, both are effective, but only Nutrafol offers those qualities to everyone.

If you want to access Hers’ chat support, you have to be an existing patient with a Hers care team. Otherwise, your only mode of contact is the query portal located on the obscured Contact page. You send your message through the website and then wait for a response to ding the inbox of the email address you provided. The response turnaround can be as fast as a few hours, but it may also take a day or more before you get a satisfactory answer from the support team.

In contrast, Nutrafol’s chat function is easily accessible to any visitor on any page of the website. Just click the chat icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, get past the AI assistant, and you’re on your way to being connected to a live agent. In our experience, the connection interval is a matter of seconds, the agents are friendly, and their responses are straight to the point.

In terms of effective treatments, Hers is the company you probably want to go with. Unless you’re unable to use prescription-strength products, or you’d rather explore a botanical treatment path, its minoxidil and/or finasteride products will give you the best odds of reversing the effects of androgenetic alopecia or other forms of hair loss, and at a friendlier price point.

Nutrafol, however, offers some of the most compelling supplemental products inhibiting the root causes of androgenetic alopecia, so it’s worth considering as an alternative. It also provides a user-friendlier website that better values the consumer’s time.

If you’re on the fence between prescription-strength and supplemental treatments, we urge you to discuss options with your doctor. They can help you further weigh the pros and cons of each treatment path.