Viviscal vs. Nutrafol

Hair loss is something most people would rather not experience, but the unfortunate truth is that it affects a staggering number of people — something like 40% of women and 85% of men before age 50.1 2 It's not just a cosmetic problem, either, as it can have a significant psychological impact relating to a person's self-identity.3 Having the opportunity to restore one's hair is therefore a valuable salve for mental health.

The supplements market abounds with products that promise a return to thick, luscious tresses. The subjects of this comparative review, Viviscal and Nutrafol, are two of the best-known names offering such solutions.

Here, we examine each brand's merits and determine which one provides you the best odds of regrowing your hair or effectively supporting more aggressive hair regrowth treatments. For those in a hurry, we believe most people will experience better results at this time with Nutrafol.

We based our assessments on factors that tend to influence consumers' purchasing decisions. In most instances, we identified a clear winner. Only in the Returns and Customer Support criteria did we determine that Viviscal and Nutrafol were on equal footing. Later, though, you'll see that equality doesn't work in either brand's favor.

Here's a summary of the key factors we measured:

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.

To compare these two major hair-growth brands, we leveraged our existing research on Nutrafol and added to it the myriad scientific and medical sources on Viviscal and its ingredients. All told, we’ve put more than 220 cumulative hours of study into our review. On top of the research, we purchased products from each brand so we could report firsthand about the use experience, customer experience, and other practical areas that are likely to influence your purchasing decision.

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.

As we said, our assessments of Viviscal and Nutrafol revolved around factors that are likely to inform your purchasing decision. We found that we could distill those factors into five evaluative criteria:

• Effectiveness
• Safety
• Cost
• Available treatments
• Customer experience

Below, we summarize how we came to choose our winner in each category.

Effectiveness

Winner: Nutrafol

Nutrafol's products contain ingredients with significant scientific support. That isn't to say that Viviscal’s formulas make little sense from the standpoint of scientific research, only that Nutrafol's ingredient bills boast more research to vouch for their utility in hair restoration.

For example, here's some of what you get from a Nutrafol supplement:

• Ashwagandha: may indirectly mitigate or prevent balding by reducing stress, a known risk factor for hair loss4
• Saw palmetto: reduces the effects of dihydrotestosterone (DHT), high levels of which can lead to pattern baldness5
• Curcumin: may protect against oxidative stress, another hair-loss risk factor,6 and inhibit DHT7
• Horsetail extract: inhibits 5α-reductase and interleukin-6 (IL-6), which contribute to hair loss in different ways8

As for Viviscal, it too includes horsetail extract in its supplement, so that's a plus. The two other main ingredients it has are AminoMar and millet seed. Some studies back their hair-restoration potential, but the research is either mixed or limited.9

Now, something to be said against Nutrafol is that the quantities of its main active ingredients are hidden behind proprietary blends. The ashwagandha, for example, is part of a “Synergen Plant Complex” that totals 1.10-1.72g, but we don’t know the exact ashwagandha dose. That is, we don’t know whether it’s enough to be effective according to clinical research. Viviscal, to its credit, is completely transparent about its ingredient quantities.

Also, when it comes to hair loss treatment and hair regrowth, we want to be clear that even the nutritional supplement ingredients with the strongest indicators of helpfulness don’t carry the magnitude of research-based support that medications like minoxidil, finasteride, and dutasteride bring to the table. More research is needed when it comes to nutritional supplements for hair health.

Safety

Winner: Nutrafol

Nutrafol owes its superior safety to a combination of consumer-oriented operational procedures and the potential for a lower side-effect profile. The company's testing process doesn't just go through third parties but also applies to both raw ingredients and finished products. Furthermore, customers can avoid some of the riskier ingredients by choosing the vegan version of the supplement.

Viviscal doesn't attest to third-party testing, unfortunately, and because its two oral supplements center on the same ingredients — AminoMar and horsetail — there's no avoiding the possibility of side effects or the risk of anaphylaxis associated with the shellfish in AminoMar.

That being said, we should again mention that Viviscal specifies its key ingredient quantities, whereas Nutrafol doesn’t. With ingredients like Nutrafol’s ashwagandha and saw palmetto, it’s helpful to know how much you’re ingesting in case you’re sensitive to such ingredients. At least, though, the blends max out at total doses that are unlikely to contain a potentially toxic quantity of any one component.

Cost

Winner: Viviscal

Viviscal is a top pick for budget-conscious consumers. At $40 for one-time purchases and $36 if you subscribe, Viviscal’s main supplement costs less than half as much as its Nutrafol counterparts.

Viviscal's topical serum and hair-care products also occupy the low end of the cost spectrum in the hair-growth space as a whole — $13-$15 as one-timers and $11.70-$13.50 as subscriptions. In contrast, Nutrafol's versions are $44-$59.

The one cost area where Nutrafol outperforms Viviscal is bundling. For one thing, the set bundles include items that customers would reasonably want to use together, like a supplement and a serum. (Viviscal doesn't offer that.) For another, Nutrafol lets customers bundle individual supplements as three- or six-month bulk orders, which nets modest but helpful savings. (Again, Viviscal doesn't offer that.)

Available treatments

Winner: Nutrafol

In terms of sheer numbers, Nutrafol's products outnumber Viviscal's 19-5. The Nutrafol catalog includes:

• Four oral supplements for women
• Two oral supplements for men
• Two topical serums for women
• One topical serum for men
• A shampoo and conditioner
• A scalp mask
• Five Hair Wellness Boosters as customizable add-ons

Viviscal, however, has just one each of a woman's supplement, men's supplement, topical serum, shampoo, and conditioner.

Having wide variety is a valuable differentiator if the products are wisely formulated. The value lies in being able to meet the hair-growth needs of a broader population. Nutrafol can more easily provide for young, middle-aged, and older women, as well as women post-pregnancy and men. Viviscal, on the other hand, takes a more one-size-fits-most approach.

Customer experience

Winner: Viviscal

In the Viviscal vs. Nutrafol matchup, this factor mainly relates to user experience (UX) and how easy and enjoyable it is to use the products. But we also considered each brand's customer support channels. Here's why Viviscal wins the category:

As for customer support, it's an area where the two companies are on pretty equal footing. That's actually not a good thing, in this case, as we can only say they're equally unhelpful.

We emailed both companies with similar questions, each message going out within one minute of each other. The question in each case was, "Why is X formulation different from Y formulation?" And in each case, we never got a proper answer. Viviscal responded two days later, but the answer we received pretty much amounted to “because we formulated them differently.” Nutrafol’s response came a week later and amounted to the same.

On the one hand, we can understand why a company would be cagey about revealing anything about its proprietary formulation, but a quicker and more meaningful answer would’ve been nice for what feels like a fundamental interest of prospective customers. From where we stand, the lack of helpfulness doesn't fill us with optimism about Viviscal's or Nutrafol's customer support on other matters, like returns and refunds.

Viviscal and Nutrafol are beauty care brands whose product lines center on hair growth and thickening. (Nutrafol also has a same-named skin care brand that currently offers just one oral supplement.) Both seem to cater primarily to women but also have products aimed at men.

Viviscal has a comparably modest catalog. Its products for women comprise:

• An oral nutraceutical supplement (i.e., a compound with pharmaceutical effects)
• A topical serum
• Bath products
• Hair-care accessories
• Bundles

You might consider the entire women's line to be an integrated hair-care system, though you can certainly use each product on its own instead. Meanwhile, its men's line consists of just one oral supplement.

Nutrafol's product catalog is much larger. Where Viviscal has just two core hair-growth nutraceuticals, Nutrafol has five. It also has a broader men's line that includes a hair serum and DHT inhibitor, several hair-care products, and a line of Hair Wellness Boosters meant to support the core nutraceutical of your choice.

We more comprehensively cover the companies' respective catalogs in later sections, "Viviscal vs. Nutrafol for women's hair loss" and "Viviscal vs. Nutrafol for men's hair loss."

Comparing brand reputations

Both Viviscal and Nutrafol have profiles with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and Trustpilot. It's difficult to gauge a company's reputation solely from online reviews, but qualitatively speaking, we can't say that either brand has performed all that well on the consumer-opinion front.

Viviscal’s BBB profile bears only a 1-star (out of 5) customer review rating and a D-minus bureau rating. The customer rating is based on a scant three reviews, however, and the bureau rating is rooted in complaints that were all issued before May 2023. They largely concern unsolicited charges on payment cards after customers were automatically renewed for subscriptions they didn't initiate.

Nutrafol's BBB customer rating is a hair better. It has garnered more reviews, and its bureau rating is A plus. The company is also BBB accredited, which means it has met the bureau's high standards of business practice.10 The negative customer reviews relate to the same payment/subscription issues that have affected Viviscal customers. The complaints section is more active than Viviscal's and mostly concerns non-receipt of items, subscription charges after cancellation, or some combination/variation thereof.

Viviscal’s Trustpilot page looks better than its BBB profile. The page is claimed but not verified and displays a 3.8-star rating, which is "Excellent" by Trustpilot's standards. The customer reviews describe happier experiences, too, but there are only two as of this writing, and neither one is more recent than 2021.

Nutrafol's Trustpilot page, which is both verified and claimed, has only a 1.9-star rating ("Poor") based on 91 reviews. Around 80% are 1-star customer ratings. The reviewers again complain about non-receipt of items and undue subscription charges, but there are also several that concern adverse reactions, including increased hair loss.

Some of the problems described in the reviews (e.g., non-receipt of items) are to be expected with any business, while others (e.g., undue charges) are less excusable. Still, they can all be resolved through robust customer support, but as we discuss at the end of this review, Viviscal and Nutrafol could both do better in that particular area.

On Amazon, meanwhile, both companies attract a high volume of customer reviews, some of which are evidently more authentic and useful than others. Among this much higher volume of reviews, both enjoy higher than 4-star averages. A quick comparison of the companies' women's hair supplements, for instance, shows 4.3 stars for Viviscal (with only 11% of reviews below 3 stars) compared to 4.2 stars for Nutrafol (with only 13% of reviews below 3 stars).

To make things as fair as possible, we examined brand efficacies based primarily on the marquee products — nutraceuticals and serums. Outside of empirical evidence, which would require months of careful and controlled observation, the only way we could evaluate efficacy was to look to the available science. And what the science says is that Nutrafol's ingredient bill is more promising for hair restoration than Viviscal's.

Nutrafol's formulations center largely on the following ingredients, each contained within a proprietary blend and boasting considerable scientific support for mitigating or reversing hair loss:

Because Nutrafol’s key active ingredients are part of proprietary blends, we can’t say how much of each one is present in a given supplement. All we can do is surmise based on an ingredient’s placement in the list: If it’s among the first, it’s present in a larger quantity by weight. For example, in the supplements that contain ashwagandha (all of them except the Postpartum one), it always appears either first, second, or third within a 1.10-1.72g blend, so it stands a good chance of hitting the 240mg lower threshold used in clinical studies.11 The same might be said about saw palmetto (effective in doses as low as 320mg) and pea sprout extract (as low as 100mg).15 34

To be sure, Viviscal's nutraceutical and serum have their own merits, but the research behind their ingredients is less convincing as reliable solutions for hair loss. Aside from horsetail extract, present at a 36.7mg dose in the Hair Growth supplement, the most promising of Viviscal's ingredients are AminoMar and millet seed extract.

AminoMar is a marine collagen complex that contains shark cartilage and oyster extract. According to a 2023 study on Viviscal, AminoMar has the capacity to proliferate dermal papilla cells, which play an integral role in hair growth.16 The findings give reason for us to be optimistic about Viviscal, but we're also aware of the ongoing argument that says collagen's potential to restore hair has less-than-ideal support in the scientific literature.9

Millet seed has shown promise, too, but the research at this time is fairly limited.17

Men's hair loss

Each brand has a small men's line. Viviscal's line, such as it is, comprises a single oral hair growth supplement called Viviscal Man. Its formulation is simpler than the main Viviscal Hair Growth supplement for women. No niacin, biotin, iron, or millet seed extract; instead, it has 50mg of flaxseed extract. The scientific literature describes flaxseed's potential to mitigate hair loss, restore damaged hair, and maintain hair strength.18

Otherwise, Viviscal Man provides many of the same ingredients as the brand's main supplement but in different doses. For example, it has less zinc and horsetail extract (8 and 24.5mg, respectively).

The rationale behind the formulation and dosing isn't entirely unclear. Neither is the reasoning for a separate men's supplement, for that matter. After all, Viviscal itself has stated its entire product catalog is actually unisex.

Nutrafol's men's line is larger than Viviscal's. The main hair-growth nutraceutical is similar to the women's versions, except it has more saw palmetto. The other two men's products are a topical serum, which doesn't seem radically different from the women's counterpart, and a DHT Inhibitor.

The DHT Inhibitor is worth examining in greater detail since it's meant to act on a key driver of pattern baldness. It's technically one of Nutrafol's Hair Wellness Boosters, so its role is to support the men's nutraceutical, though it could also play a supportive role alongside other pharmaceutical interventions. It has a simple, four-part formulation, so let's look at each ingredient:

Nutrafol's DHT Inhibitor looks like a solid product — and another reason why Nutrafol as a brand may be more effective than Viviscal.

Though neither brand presents an especially high risk of adverse effects, Nutrafol is probably the safer option for a broader user population.

The reason has to do less with ingredients and more to do with operational procedures. For example, Nutrafol, on its website, attests to in-house and third-party quality testing on both its raw ingredients and its finished products, thereby ensuring proper potency, purity, and microbiological safety. Viviscal makes no such testing claims. Moreover, Nutrafol is free of common allergens such as:

• Soy
• Eggs
• Dairy
• Gluten, wheat, and yeast
• Peanuts and tree nuts
• Shellfish

But Viviscal doesn’t specify its allergen status except to say it’s not suitable for people who are allergic to seafood or shellfish.

To be sure, both brands use ingredients that can cause unpleasant side effects, but Viviscal’s more condensed product line means users can’t avoid the problematic ingredients. AminoMar, for example, is a linchpin component in both the women’s and men’s versions of the Viviscal nutraceutical, one that contains shark cartilage and oyster extract. The former can interact with several medications (antibiotics, immunosuppressants, and antidiabetics), increase calcium levels, and exacerbate autoimmune conditions,24 while the latter can cause gastrointestinal problems and induce anaphylaxis in the shellfish-intolerant.25 Nutrafol’s formulations are absent these ingredients.

There’s also horsetail extract. Mount Sinai warns that horsetail extract can cause decreases in the body's levels of vitamin B1 and potassium, can interact poorly with alcohol, and isn't suitable for anyone with gout, diabetes, or a kidney disorder.26 Additionally, LiverTox notes that some users may experience side effects like diarrhea, nausea, and abdominal discomfort, while hypersensitive users may experience serious reactions such as skin rash and allergic dermatitis.27 While both Viviscal and Nutrafol use horsetail extract, only Nutrafol allows you to avoid it by opting for its vegan formulation.

Horsetail aside, Nutrafol isn't without its safety concerns, but the potential side effects for most of its products are relatively minor. The most worrisome of Nutrafol's ingredients are these two botanicals, used across the nutraceuticals line save for the Postpartum formulation:

• Saw palmetto: mostly associated with minor digestive symptoms and headache; may be unsafe for people who are pregnant or breastfeeding28
• Ashwagandha: potentially unsafe for people with liver disease, autoimmune disease, or a thyroid disorder; not suitable for people who've recently undergone surgery; may cause miscarriage in pregnant women; and unknown as to its safety during breastfeeding29

Viviscal deserves credit for being more transparent about its formulation. Each ingredient’s dose is clearly listed on the label, whereas Nutrafol obscures its most potent components behind proprietary blends. However, all things considered, we feel that Nutrafol can more safely serve larger numbers of people who wish to restore their hair.

Viviscal is by far the more affordable brand. For each comparable product that Nutrafol has, Viviscal beats its price by a vast margin. Excluding bundles, this table compares the one-time and subscription prices for one-month supplies from Viviscal with those from Nutrafol:

The narrowest price differences are between the companies' shampoos and conditioners, and even there, Nutrafol's products cost around 3-4 times as much as Viviscal's.

From our research, Nutrafol’s ingredients generally have more scientific support than Viviscal’s, so the higher prices reflect a stronger potential to delay or reverse hair loss. But, still, $79-$88 for a supplement is a lot, especially considering that even prescription hair-loss treatments, which have the best scientific support, cost much less.

Bundling options

Also, we should talk about bundles, a cost area where Nutrafol does a little better.

Search as you might, you won't find a Viviscal bundle that combines its oral supplement with its serum, even though the pairing seems like a given. There's one bundle that groups the supplement with the hair-care products, and there’s another that groups the serum with the same, but the overlap you might expect is absent.

Nutrafol does offer such bundles, however. For both the women's and the men's lines, a nutraceutical-plus-serum pair costs $137 as a one-time purchase and $123 as a monthly subscription — a cost savings of $14 if you subscribe.

Nutrafol lets you bulk-purchase certain products as well. If you wanted to buy three- or six-month subscription-based supplies of a nutraceutical, you could save around $5-$8 per unit, respectively. The bulk savings aren't terribly high, but they're savings that Viviscal doesn't offer.

Viviscal and Nutrafol have the same return policy. We mean that literally. The following wording is taken verbatim from the companies’ respective websites:

• Nutrafol: "If you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase, you can return the product and get a full refund or exchange up to 30 days from the date of purchase. Any product you return must be in the same condition you received it and in the original packaging."
• Viviscal: "If you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase, you can return the product and get a full refund or exchange up to 30 days from the date of purchase. Any product you return must be in the same condition you received it and in the original packaging."

So neither one is better than the other. Likewise, neither one is good.

Even with prescription-strength hair growth products, you need to undergo consistent treatment for up to six months before you begin to see results.30 A 30-day policy simply fails to account for the combined commitment of time and money that a customer would need to put in to their treatment. Even if the return windows were much longer, the stipulation about being in the "same condition" means your refund eligibility is gone as soon as you use your product.

Nutrafol's catalog makes Viviscal's look minuscule. Here's another table to illustrate:

Even if we focus entirely on marquee products (oral supplements and serums), Nutrafol has Viviscal beat 9-3. Once you start tallying the extra stuff, including five Hair Wellness Boosters as customizable add-ons, then the score comes to 19-5 in Nutrafol's favor.

Product variety is more than just a numbers game. Whereas Viviscal takes a one-size-fits-most approach, Nutrafol's vast product lineup includes multiple formulations that offer better odds of delivering a treatment that meets your specific hair-growth requirements. The Postpartum supplement is a good example. Because its intended audience shouldn’t have ashwagandha or saw palmetto, it substitutes those ingredients with something like shatavari, which itself has scientific support for hair growth.35

Moreover, Nutrafol's customizable Booster add-ons can be especially helpful for fine-tuning your regimen because they address narrower factors that contribute to hair loss, and the broader men's line means male users are likelier to find a solution that suits them.

Viviscal's website is better than Nutrafol's because it offers a superior user experience (UX). UX is a broad concept, but here, it refers to the ease with which visitors can navigate a brand's website and find what they want — for example, a product or information about said product.

We quickly learned that Viviscal has the better UX just from the navigation links on its main page. They were intuitively laid out and entirely accessible on a laptop screen, whereas Nutrafol’s were not.

To explain, we'll shift the focus to Nutrafol's main page — specifically, to the first two options on its menu bar. The first option is a toggle that switches you between Nutrafol Women and Nutrafol Men, and the second is a dropdown menu labeled Products. The dropdown menu looks like this:

It may look ordinary at first glance, but a closer inspection raises at least two questions: "Why's there another link to Nutrafol Men?" and "How do I view the whole product catalog?"

We don't have a clear answer to the first question. The two links take you to different destinations, after all. The toggle switch goes to a page where you can see (after too much scrolling) every Nutrafol product formulated for men, whereas the dropdown link leads to the product page for just one Nutrafol Men product.

As to the second question, the link to view the catalog in its entirety is somewhere below "Men." If you could scroll down, you’d see a link for See All Products. But we couldn't scroll down, not at first. To see the link, we had to reduce the zoom on our web browser (both Chrome and Firefox) or perform some other browser action, like hiding the bookmarks bar, before scrolling became possible. The problem doesn't affect mobile, and we assume it's not an issue on larger computer monitors, but the link being obscured on a laptop screen suggests the site isn't optimized for all devices — not a solid foundation for good UX.

Now, when you finally gain access to the See All Products link, you unlock another UX concern.

What you see is a screen reduced to the lowest possible zoom setting (25%). Notice how much distance is between the nutraceuticals lineup and the Hair Wellness Boosters. On a laptop screen, the block for the GrowthPlan+ Guarantee takes up the entire screen space — so does the bit about "Customize your hair growth regimen with Hair Wellness Boosters" — and the way the blocks are designed, they don't explicitly signal to the viewer, "This is a header for products." The effect is that a casual visitor to the site could easily assume that Nutrafol's product line is limited to five nutraceuticals.

If the layout were intuitive, all of the products would be lined up together in the same general space. It can have category headers, but the categories shouldn't be separated so drastically that relevant information is pushed below the fold.

In contrast, Viviscal's website follows intuitive design logic, so you'll find no such inconveniences, redundancies, or non-functional elements on it. A Shop All link is the first one in the dropdown menu, the whole dropdown fits on the screen, every link for Viviscal Man leads to the same page, and the product catalog is viewable within the same space.

Our takeaway: Viviscal's website makes everything easy to find, and Nutrafol's is just too noisy at the expense of function.

In our testing, we found Viviscal to be much easier to use than Nutrafol. Really, it comes down to product size and serving size, and Viviscal is much smaller on both fronts.

Viviscal Hair Growth is a tablet. It's a diminutive one at that, measuring just 0.5cm thick and 1cm in diameter (around 0.20 and 0.40in, respectively). We had one tester, normally one to struggle with oral supplements, say they rather liked Viviscal because it's so easy to swallow and a daily serving is just one tablet. It doesn't have any fishy taste either, which is surprising given its hefty dose of AminoMar.

Nutrafol, however, is a capsule supplement. We'd describe the capsules as "standard" size, measuring 2cm long and 0.5cm wide at their broadest point (around 0.80 and 0.20in, respectively), but that's big enough to cause difficulty for many people. Then you've got to multiply the difficulty by four because a Nutrafol serving size is four capsules.

The medical term for "difficulty swallowing pills" is pill dysphagia. It's quite common. At least one survey has found that over 40% of the general population experiences pill dysphagia,31 and even some of the more modest statistics report a range of 10-32% within narrower populations.32 33 So there's a good chance you yourself are pill dysphagic, and if you're also among the multitudes who live with pattern hair loss, you'll probably want a hair-growth supplement you can easily take down.

Viviscal is that supplement.

Our experience tells us that Viviscal's and Nutrafol's customer support channels are about equal in quality. That's not something we commend, seeing as both brands' support teams have been unhelpful.

We attempted to interact with their support teams through email. We sent both of them a similar inquiry, asking why one formulation in the catalog was different from another. Viviscal responded two days later with a breakdown of how the formulations are different but never explained the reasoning behind the differences. Nutrafol didn’t respond until the following week, and the response was similar to Viviscal’s.

In the matchup of Nutrafol vs. Viviscal, we declare the winner overall to be Nutrafol. That doesn't mean it's automatically the right choice for you, however. If you deal with pill dysphagia, for instance, you'll have a hard time adhering to Nutrafol's routine and would likely have better luck with Viviscal. And if you’re unable to afford Nutrafol’s higher price, then Viviscal would clearly be the better choice. But, even though we dislike Nutrafol's use of proprietary blends, we believe its formulary decisions mean that it stands a better chance of helping you, based on the available scientific research.

One final caveat: if your goal is to fight hair loss and possibly regrow hair, we'd recommend you speak with a dermatologist and also explore additional, more aggressive treatments involving medication and/or devices like laser caps. in some cases, the more aggressive interventions will cost you less money than either Viviscal or Nutrafol.