Vegamour vs. Nutrafol

The hair care market can be a daunting one to navigate. At your local big-box stores, you'll find multiple aisles dedicated to all the creams, colors, serums, shampoos, and what have you. Online, the territory is even larger. If you've searched at all for solutions to shedding, thinning, or graying, your social media feeds probably abound in advertisements for at least half a dozen specialized brands.

There's a good chance that Vegamour and Nutrafol have been among them. Thanks in part to their strategic marketing, they're now two of the best-known brands. They're also quite different, despite the overlap in their target audiences.

In this comparative review, we examine just how different they are, point by point, so you can make a well-informed decision about which is best for your unique hair health needs. For those in a hurry: Though there’s much to like about both options, we feel that Nutrafol is the stronger recommendation for most people at this time.

The chart below gives you a quick look at how Vegamour and Nutrafol performed in our assessments. You’ll notice the product variety criterion defies an easy nod to a winner. That’s a topic we flesh out in later sections.

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.

Our Vegamour vs. Nutrafol comparative review draws from previous research we'd done on Nutrafol and builds on it with fresh research on Vegamour's processes and key active ingredients. More than 240 cumulative hours have gone into understanding and assessing the two brands, apart from which we've also ordered and tried their products so we could report on the consumer experience from a firsthand perspective.

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.

We compared Vegamour and Nutrafol across four criteria that we felt addressed their qualities on a summary level:

• Effectiveness
• Safety
• Cost
• Variety
• Customer experience

In the following sections, we briefly explain how we selected our winner in each category.

Effectiveness

Winner: Nutrafol

Before we explain why we find Nutrafol to be the more effective hair care brand, we want to note that efficacy, here, relates chiefly to the ability to mitigate or reverse hair loss. Each company does some things that the other doesn’t do. Vegamour includes anti-graying and general hair health products to offer a broader range of hair products than Nutrafol. Meanwhile, Nutrafol now offers a skin health nutraceutical, something Vegamour doesn’t offer. Since hair loss is where their catalogs overlap, that’s where we compare the two.

On that score, both Vegamour and Nutrafol use ingredients that demonstrate the potential to address common biochemical causes of pattern hair loss, but Nutrafol also addresses stress, a factor that often underlies the biochemical mechanisms.

The key biochemical factors in question are oxidative stress and dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a testosterone derivative that drives much of pattern hair loss. Nutrafol addresses these factors with the following formulary approaches:

• Horsetail extract inhibits 5α-reductase and interleukin-6, two DHT inducers.2
• Saw palmetto blocks DHT uptake and its ability to bind to receptors.3
• Curcumin can inhibit DHT and protect against oxidative stress.4
• Hyaluronic acid also protects against oxidative stress.5
• Pea sprout extract may reduce hair loss, based on the results of a small 2020 study.6

Then, to tackle stress, there’s ashwagandha, a botanical featured in nearly all of Nutrafol’s oral hair-growth supplements. Ashwagandha has a long history of use as an anti-stress and anti-anxiety supplement, with plenty of research to support its effects to those ends.1

We want to reiterate that Vegamour also uses well-supported ingredients for hair loss, specifically in its GRO+ Advanced System products. Studies have shown that polyphenols, microalgae, niacinamide, and plant stem cells all have hair-restoration potential, and their inclusion in Vegamour's formulations speaks to the brand's capacity to help certain people with pattern hair loss. Nutrafol just has a slight upper hand.

Also, we should make clear that we're talking about non-prescription hair-loss products when it comes to either company. Even the most effective supplemental ingredients don't have the same degree of scientific support or reliable efficacy as prescription medications like minoxidil, finasteride, and dutasteride.

Safety

Winner: Nutrafol

Nutrafol gets our ribbon for safety thanks to its thorough testing processes and comparably low risk of adverse events.

Both companies conduct third-party testing, but only Nutrafol states that it tests raw ingredients in addition to finished products. Also, whereas Vegamour doesn't test its products for allergens, Nutrafol tests for at least eight common ones:

On the topic of side effects, Vegamour and Nutrafol alike use ingredients that are likely to pose dangers to certain populations. Vegamour uses microalgae (allergen), fo-ti (liver toxicity), and PABA (a possible carcinogen); Nutrafol has horsetail extract and ashwagandha, which interact with certain medications or health conditions. Because Vegamour's ingredients are potentially problematic to broader user categories, we feel that Nutrafol boasts a lower side effect profile.

Cost

Winner: Vegamour

Our cost assessment looked exclusively at comparable products between Vegamour and Nutrafol. (There was no reasonable way to judge Vegamour's prices for its anti-gray and hair health products against Nutrafol's since Nutrafol doesn't deal in such products.) In almost every instance, Vegamour showed it was potentially more affordable than Nutrafol.

Laser in on the word "potentially" there. To be sure, several Vegamour products range up to an upper limit that exceeds Nutrafol's. Take shampoos as an example. The costliest Vegamour product is the GRO Collection Revitalizing Shampoo, which costs $48 as a one-time purchase and $42 as a subscription. Notwithstanding whether the GRO Collection product stands up in quality against Nutrafol's shampoos, there's no denying that the $42 threshold is lower than the $44 one-time-only shampoo that Nutrafol has in its catalog.

With some products, even Vegamour's upper threshold is lower than Nutrafol's lowest. The oral supplement is a good case in point. At its costliest, Vegamour's GRO Biotin Gummies ($36) cost less than half what you'd pay for Nutrafol's supplements at their lowest ($79). Again, without any thought to efficacy, we acknowledge that the monetary difference is substantial.

Variety

Winner: Vegamour [technically]

Vegamour's catalog currently consists of 24 products, and Nutrafol's has 19. Looking exclusively at the numbers, we obviously must acknowledge that Vegamour has more product variety than Nutrafol.

However, the numbers game isn't entirely fair since most of Vegamour's products aren't comparable to Nutrafol's. Vegamour's brand scope goes beyond hair loss and encompasses anti-graying and general hair health, such that no fewer than 12 of its products address concerns that are unrelated to hair loss. Moreover, seven of its products are non-formula items (i.e., accessories), and including them in our assessment hardly levels the playing field for Nutrafol. If we look strictly at hair-loss formulas, then Nutrafol has a bit more variety.

On the other hand, it makes sense to consider Vegamour's non-hair-loss products from a consumer perspective. After all, wide product variety speaks to a brand's ability to accommodate numerous user populations, and the reality is that Vegamour does exactly that. If you have hair concerns in general, you stand a better chance of finding a relevant solution with Vegamour than you would with Nutrafol.

Customer experience

Winner: Vegamour

Vegamour provides the better customer experience in two ways:

• Responsive customer support
• Easy-to-navigate website

Our customer support assessment typically involves our reaching out to the support team and evaluating them based on the speed and quality of their response. Vegamour's team gets solid marks on both metrics. Both our email and our chat request got fast and satisfactory responses, and the representative directly addressed our question's substance (no prevaricating here).

With Nutrafol's team, not so much. The email we sent them didn't get a response until a solid week had passed, and our chat request didn’t get picked up at all. When the response came, it didn't answer our question; if anything, it only repeated the information that inspired our question in the first place.

As for website navigation, it's a pretty complex issue that comes down to this: Vegamour's website is intuitively laid out, so we could quickly locate navigation links and get a complete sense of the company's catalog. With Nutrafol's site, we couldn't. Read on for a more comprehensive assessment on the topic toward the end of this review.

Vegamour and Nutrafol are hair care brands that entered the market around roughly the same time — 2016 and 2014, respectively. Both have extensive product catalogs sold primarily through their official brand websites and Amazon storefronts but also at Sephora, a multinational retailer of personal care products.

Similar though they are, Vegamour and Nutrafol are distinctive in what they are and what they have to offer. Let's break down the companies' three primary differences:

To assess brand reputations, we turned to two of the most widely regarded consumer-review sources: the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and Trustpilot. Vegamour and Nutrafol have profiles on each site. As we write this review, Vegamour has a slightly better standing among customers.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of what we've gleaned:

As for our experience, we haven't faced any subscription difficulties with Vegamour, experienced poor side effects from Nutrafol's supplements or serums, or had undue charges put on our accounts from either company. The only complaint we can attest to is Nutrafol's unresponsive customer support.

Lawsuits and other challenges

Legal issues and similar challenges have affected both Vegamour and Nutrafol. Below, we summarize each case to date.

Even though Vegamour's legal issues don't directly relate to product efficacy, they're still useful for consumers to know. After all, how a company accommodates its audiences and employees can often make or break a person's decision to support the brand.

Also, we should acknowledge that the Nutrafol case is less about efficacy than the intersection of efficacy with marketing. The primary question informing the lawsuit isn't whether Nutrafol's products are effective but whether the company misrepresented the extent to which its products could yield the desired outcomes. It's a subtle but important distinction that we illuminate in a later section.

Let's start here with a primer. The most common type of hair loss in both men and women is androgenetic alopecia.15 You've probably heard it called male- or female-pattern baldness. A common biochemical characteristic among people with androgenetic alopecia is elevated levels of dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a testosterone derivative converted by the 5α-reductase enzyme.16 Many hair-loss treatments work by inhibiting 5α-reductase, thereby preventing the conversion from taking place. That includes prescription treatments such as finasteride and dutasteride,17 18 as well as non-prescription solutions like Vegamour (GRO, GRO+ Advanced) and Nutrafol.

At the same time, numerous other factors can contribute to hair loss notwithstanding of DHT. The top preventable factors are probably physical and psychological stressors and hygiene.19

So, the question is: Which brand's ingredients are better at addressing the various causes behind hair loss, Vegamour's or Nutrafol's?

The available scientific literature suggests Nutrafol may have the upper hand because its products attack the problem from slightly more angles, although Vegamour has substantial merit. The following sections cover the research behind each brand's top ingredients.

Top ingredients in Vegamour

According to one customer support representative we chatted with, the Vegamour product line best formulated for moderate-to-severe hair loss is the GRO+ Advanced System. The GRO Collection, they say, is for overall hair health and addressing the early signs of loss/thinning.

We think the rep is partly right. Most of the GRO Collection seems formulated for outcomes like strength, shine, and hydration. For example, the GRO Biotin Gummies are essentially a multivitamin that delivers key nutrients for maintaining healthy tresses.

However, GRO Hair Serum has a few ingredients that exhibit decent potential for inhibiting DHT and treating hair loss past just the earliest stage:

• Red clover: In 2003, an in vivo study showed that red clover has anti-androgenetic action, such that it could reduce DHT levels in rats.31 Later, in 2012, a human trial that administered a red clover–based treatment found that it increased active hair growth by an average of 13% in subjects with recessing hair.32
• Turmeric: Turmeric’s anti-inflammatory action may help mitigate pattern hair loss, which itself has an inflammatory aspect.33 Not only that, but its main active component, curcumin, can inhibit DHT’s effects and protect the hair against oxidative stress.4
• Caffeine: A 2012 in vitro study suggests that topical caffeine can inhibit the enzyme phosphodiesterase. The effect is an increase in cyclic adenosine monophosphate levels, which in turn stimulates the growth of hair cells.34

As for the GRO+ Advanced System, the whole line is really just three topical products — a serum, a shampoo, and a conditioner — with significant overlap in ingredients. The following are the highlights of their formulations:

Top ingredients in Nutrafol

While Vegamour seems to focus mainly on addressing the biochemical factors that lead to pattern hair loss (e.g., DHT, oxidative stress), Nutrafol does one better by adding an ingredient that can address another underlying cause: physical or mental stress.

The Mayo Clinic notes that high physical or mental stress levels are associated with three types of non–androgenetic alopecia hair loss: telogen effluvium, trichotillomania, and alopecia areata.24 To address the stress factor, Nutrafol adds ashwagandha to four of its five oral hair-growth supplements (the outlier is the Postpartum formula, as ashwagandha isn't recommended during lactation). The Office of Dietary Supplements acknowledges that ashwagandha is an effective botanical for managing stress and anxiety,1 so it may serve as an important preventive component in Nutrafol's formulations.

Of course, Nutrafol aims to address the biochemical side of hair loss, too, using the following ingredients:

A word on efficacy

No hair-loss treatment, prescription or otherwise, will work ideally for everyone. Those developed by Vegamour and Nutrafol may serve relatively narrow populations because they target very specific mechanisms. Even Nutrafol, which aims to address a slightly broader range of causes, won’t address hair loss stemming from medications, various underlying health conditions, or other non-DHT-related causes. For example, if your hair loss is due to an autoimmune disease process, like alopecia areata, no supplement by itself will help you regrow scalp hair; rather, for the best possible outcomes, you’d need a more complex treatment under the hand of a medical professional.

Beyond that, keep in mind that Vegamour and Nutrafol are supplemental products. They can't claim the sort of weighty research that bolsters prescription hair-loss medications like minoxidil, finasteride, and dutasteride. Decades of scientific research and clinical results reveal those prescription medications to be the more reliably effective hair loss treatments.

At any rate, speaking with a trichologist, dermatologist, or another medical professional is your best bet for identifying the best treatment for your hair loss, though not all treatments are safe or suitable for everyone with pattern hair loss.

Vegamour is generally more affordable than Nutrafol. If we compare only parallel products between the brands — the only sensible way to compare cost between brands — we see the Vegamour option usually has the potential to save you a few dollars at least, and several dozens at most.

This table presents the one-time and subscription price ranges for comparable Vegamour and Nutrafol products (bundles and size variations excluded):

The operative word we used is "potential." Apart from the topical serums, where both brands start at $49, Vegamour always has a lower limit in its price range. It also has a higher limit in four product categories: serums, shampoos, conditioners, and scalp masks.

Neither Vegamour’s nor Nutrafol’s return policy is great, but Vegamour’s is slightly better. Vegamour gives you 30 days from the date of purchase to return your products for a refund. After the 30-day point, you can make a return for store credit or an exchange within 90 days of your purchase date.

In contrast, Nutrafol’s return window is a strict 30-day period, and the product must be in its original packaging and condition.

We say neither one is great because you need around 3-6 months before you see results from a hair-loss treatment.14 If Vegamour or Nutrafol isn’t working out, you just have to eat those 3-6 months of expenses. Vegamour’s store credit and exchange allowance is nice, but it falls well short of what we’d consider to be a satisfaction guarantee.

Vegamour has more overall product variety than Nutrafol, but not all Vegamour products address hair loss. This table lays it all out (excluding bundles and size variations):

The thing is, the math is deceptively tricky. Apart from the fact that Vegamour targets more hair care concerns, whereas Nutrafol focuses on treating hair loss, there are several _if_s we have to account for:

• Vegamour's AGELESS line (for anti-graying) contains two products, its HYDR-8 line (for general hair health) has five, and only two of its accessories could feasibly help with hair loss. If we subtract every Vegamour product that doesn't relate to hair loss, then Nutrafol looks like it has the lead on variety, 19 to 13.
• We say "looks like" because seven Nutrafol products are available only as add-ons to supplements, so they can't be purchased on their own. If we subtract those seven, then Vegamour takes the lead, 13 to 12.
• But maybe it's unfair to include Vegamour's hair-loss accessories — a scalp massager and a dermaroller. If we subtract non-formulated products, Nutrafol has a 12-11 advantage.

So, in two technical senses, yes, Vegamour offers more product variety than Nutrafol. However, in a purely hair-loss-formula sense, it's Nutrafol that has the edge on Vegamour.

Generally, yes. Both Vegamour and Nutrafol, like many hair growth supplements, are safe for most non-pregnant, non-breastfeeding people to use. Between the two, Nutrafol is the safer option, as it has better operational processes and a slightly better side effect profile.

Starting with the operational aspect, we like that both companies conduct third-party testing to ensure their products pose minimal risk to their audiences. Vegamour, for its part, even provides some certificates of analysis on its website and tests for gluten. But Nutrafol does just a little better since its testing applies to both raw ingredients and finished products, and its products are free of at least eight common allergens:

Regarding side effects, it's true that Nutrafol uses a couple of ingredients throughout its catalog that may be problematic to certain populations — for example:

On Vegamour's end, the hair-loss products seem largely harmless, but the other product lines are more alarming.

For hair loss, the ingredient with the highest potential to cause adverse effects is probably the microalgae in the GRO+ ADVANCED products. According to a 2022 report in the Journal of Applied Phycology, edible algae in general may have "several components ... shown to induce allergic responses in humans," though the authors note there's little that can currently be said about the prevalence of algal allergenicity.27

Vegamour's AGELESS line has a more pronounced side effect risk. That's because of two ingredients in particular: fo-ti and PABA. The first is a widely used botanical that LiverTox describes as "the most common cause of herbal product-related liver injury,"28 and the second may have cancer-causing potential.29

So, on a purely ingredient-to-ingredient basis, Vegamour appears to be a little more problematic for more people, whereas Nutrafol's risks seem to apply to narrower population swaths. That, along with its tighter operational controls, is why we give the firmer safety nod to Nutrafol.

Vegamour provides a much better customer experience than Nutrafol. We base our conclusion on two factors:

Customer support

Both Vegamour and Nutrafol allow site visitors to contact customer support via phone, email, and chat widget. As we tested these support channels, our question, in each communication, concerned why one product's formula is different from that of a similar product in the brand catalog (e.g., GRO Serum vs. GRO+ Advanced Serum, and Nutrafol Women vs. Nutrafol Men).

Vegamour gave us speedy responses through both communication routes. A representative replied to our email within hours, and another answered on the chat widget within a minute. In each instance, we received a satisfactory answer to our question.

With Nutrafol, we had a different outcome. Our email didn't get a response until a week after we'd sent it, and our chat request never got picked up. Even in the email response we eventually got, the rep’s response didn't answer our question; it only repeated the information that inspired us to ask our question in the first place.

Website user experience (UX)

UX broadly refers to how easy it is to navigate and use a website. Vegamour's site UX is solid. Nutrafol's is frustrating. We were able to make our conclusion here after looking no further than each site's top navigation links and main storefront on a 14" laptop screen.

On Nutrafol's site, the nav link and storefront issues both relate to false bottoms, or points on the page where the visitor may be led to believe there's no more content below a certain point. Case in point: In the Products dropdown menu on Nutrafol's main page, the option for the All Products view isn't immediately visible. Nor is it easy to find, since you can't scroll-view the menu. To be presented with the See All Products option at all, you have to do one of these things:

• Scroll down the main page before activating the dropdown
• Perform another browser action (e.g., hiding or revealing your bookmarks menu) before activating the dropdown
• Reduce the zoom in your browser window

Another case in point: When you do access the All Products view, you first see a massive brand banner, under which is a too-large heading for Nutrafol's oral supplements, under which are images and links for the supplements themselves. Underneath that is another false bottom in the form of two more massive banners. In other words, a visitor has to scroll quite a lot to see that Nutrafol's product catalog actually extends beyond its five oral supplements.

An intuitive UX design for a dropdown menu would let you see all of the available link options in a single go. An intuitive design for an All Products view would make it so you could view all of the products, or as many as possible, within your screen space. That's what Vegamour does successfully and what Nutrafol doesn't do.