A pre-built stack asks a buyer to trust a formulator instead of doing the work themselves. That is a reasonable trade, and it only works in one direction: the buyer has to be able to see what they bought. Some of these products publish every milligram. One publishes almost none of them.
We read seven label panels through the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database and checked each brand's own price and count. Where a brand publishes nothing, we say so.
The five factors, stated before any product appears
- Form. Which chemical or botanical form each active takes, named on the panel.
- Disclosure. Is every amount printed beside its own ingredient, or is anything inside a proprietary blend. In a multi-ingredient product this is the factor that decides everything else.
- Standardisation. For each botanical, is the active percentage stated — bacosides, rosavins, beta-glucans — so the extract can be compared with the one used in a trial.
- Cost per serving. Arithmetic from the real price and count, at the serving printed on the pack. Servings here run from one capsule to seven.
- Buyer confidence. What can be established before paying, including whether the brand publishes a price at all.
What this page does not carry: customer ratings. The stars beside each score are a picture of our own score. There are no vote counts here, for any product, ours included.
The proprietary blend, and the arithmetic it invites
A proprietary blend prints one total for several ingredients. It is legal and it is common. What is less widely understood is that a partially disclosed blend can often be bounded by subtraction.
Alpha BRAIN's panel lists an "Onnit Focus Blend" totalling 240 mg. Inside it, two of the three ingredients are given amounts: bacopa at 100 mg and toothed clubmoss extract at 400 mcg. The third is alpha-GPC. Subtract, and the alpha-GPC in a serving cannot exceed roughly 139 mg — below the range used in any healthy-adult trial we could find. That is not an accusation; it is the panel's own arithmetic.
How the field compares
| Product | Actives printed | Proprietary blends | Serving | Price | Per serving |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weal Focus | 5 of 5 | None | 2 capsules | $39.99 / 60 | $1.33 |
| Mind Lab Pro | 11 of 11 | None | 2 capsules | $69.00 / 60 | $2.30 |
| Thorne Memoractiv | 7 of 7 | None | 2 capsules | Not published on the brand site | Not scored |
| Qualia Mind | 28 of 28 | None | 7 capsules | $139.00 / 105 | $9.27 |
| Genius Consciousness | 10 of 10 | One (AstraGin, 50 mg) | 5.3 g scoop | $37.99 / 15 servings | $2.53 |
| Neuriva Brain Health Plus | 5 of 5 | None | 1 capsule | Not published on the brand site | Not scored |
| Onnit Alpha BRAIN | 4 of 11 | Three | 2 capsules | $34.95 / 30 | $2.33 |
Panels from the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database, August 2026; prices read the same week from each brand's own site. If one of these is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
The rankings
1
Weal Focus
by Weal Supplements
9.0/10 desk score A
- Form
- 9.5
- Disclosure
- 10
- Standardisation
- 9.5
- Cost per serving
- 9.0
- Buyer confidence
- 7.0
See the whole label — then decide
Pros
- Every active printed with its amount, no proprietary blend, and the one botanical fully specified — lion's mane 400 mg, 100% fruiting body, beta-glucans ≥25%
- Cheapest per serving in this field at $1.33, two capsules a day
- Alpha-GPC at 300 mg, inside the band used in healthy-adult research; HPMC capsule, no titanium dioxide
Cons
- The smallest formula here. Five actives against Mind Lab Pro's eleven and Qualia Mind's twenty-eight — part of why it is the cheapest
- No adaptogen, no ginkgo, no phosphatidylserine, nothing for anyone wanting breadth
- A new brand with no track record; alpha-GPC at the lower end of the healthy-adult range
First because it is fully specified and the cheapest way to take five characterised actives daily. It is not the most complete formula on this page and does not claim to be — a buyer who wants a broad stack should read the next entry, which carries twice as much and costs a dollar a day more.
2
Mind Lab Pro
by Opti-Nutra
8.8/10 desk score A
- Form
- 9.0
- Disclosure
- 10
- Standardisation
- 9.0
- Cost per serving
- 6.5
- Buyer confidence
- 9.0
Pros
- More standardised botanicals than anything here, ours included: bacopa at 24% bacosides, rhodiola at 3% rosavins and 1% salidrosides, maritime pine at 95% proanthocyanidins
- Eleven actives, every one printed with its own amount and no blend anywhere
- Citicoline at 250 mg is a real amount of a genuinely researched choline form
Cons
- The lion's mane is the exception: 500 mg described only as "organic", with no part used and no beta-glucan figure
- $2.30 a serving, and the directions permit up to four capsules a day, which halves the bottle
- Sold as a single unflavoured capsule format with no smaller trial size
The best-disclosed multi-ingredient formula on the shelf, and if breadth is what a reader wants it is worth the extra dollar a day. It sits second by a narrow margin: on the one ingredient it shares with us it publishes less, and it costs 73% more per serving.
3
Memoractiv
by Thorne
8.2/10 desk score B+
- Form
- 9.0
- Disclosure
- 9.5
- Standardisation
- 8.5
- Cost per serving
- Not scored
- Buyer confidence
- 7.5
Pros
- Every active printed, and most of them named branded, standardised materials a buyer can look up: KSM-66 ashwagandha 300 mg, Virtiva ginkgo 240 mg, Lutemax 2020
- The caffeine component is broken out inside its branded pairing — 50 mg caffeine with 66 mg pterostilbene — rather than hidden behind the trade name
- Two capsules, seven actives, a formula rather than a list
Cons
- Contains caffeine, which is not obvious from the product name and rules it out for anyone avoiding stimulants late in the day
- No choline source of any kind, despite the positioning
- The brand's own product page did not serve us a price, so cost per serving cannot be scored
Thorne builds formulas the way a supplement company should: named materials, stated amounts, standardisations printed. The reservations are about fit rather than quality — undeclared-by-name caffeine and no choline. We could not price it, and a product whose price is not on its own page is harder to recommend than one whose price is.
4
Qualia Mind
by Neurohacker Collective
7.9/10 desk score B
- Form
- 8.5
- Disclosure
- 10
- Standardisation
- 9.0
- Cost per serving
- 3.0
- Buyer confidence
- 8.0
Pros
- Twenty-eight actives, every single one printed with its amount, with standardisation percentages on the botanicals — bacopa at 40% bacosides, ginkgo at 24% glycosides, velvet bean at 50% L-DOPA
- Breaks out the caffeine inside its coffee-fruit ingredient at 90 mg rather than leaving it implied
- Carries both alpha-GPC at 200 mg and citicoline at 150 mg, and says so
Cons
- $9.27 a serving — seven times the cheapest product here
- Seven capsules per serving, taken on an empty stomach; the label acknowledges stomach upset happens
- Twenty-eight actives at once makes it impossible to tell which, if any, is doing something
On disclosure this is the most transparent panel in the category and it deserves saying. Everything else about it is maximalist: seven capsules, twenty-eight ingredients, and a price that puts it in a different bracket from the rest of this page. A remarkable label attached to a formula almost nobody needs.
5
Genius Consciousness
by The Genius Brand
7.2/10 desk score B−
- Form
- 7.5
- Disclosure
- 8.5
- Standardisation
- 8.0
- Cost per serving
- 6.0
- Buyer confidence
- 6.5
Pros
- States the alpha-GPC basis outright — "AlphaSize 600 mg, 50% Alpha GPC" — which resolves the commonest ambiguity in the category and which almost no capsule brand bothers to do
- Also states the phosphatidylserine basis at 50%, and the huperzia at 1% huperzine A
- A powder, so it dissolves in water and needs no capsules at all
Cons
- The lion's mane is described as mycelial biomass — grain included, and not quantified
- 100 mg of caffeine plus methylliberine makes this a stimulant product, not a neutral one
- AstraGin is a proprietary blend, small but undisclosed; $2.53 a serving
One line on this panel is better than anything the capsule brands manage: printing the 50% figure beside the alpha-GPC raw material tells a buyer exactly what they are getting. The rest is a stimulant pre-workout in a cognitive costume, and the mushroom is the least specified on this page.
6
Neuriva Brain Health Plus
by Schiff Neuriva
6.5/10 desk score C+
- Form
- 6.5
- Disclosure
- 9.0
- Standardisation
- 6.0
- Cost per serving
- Not scored
- Buyer confidence
- 5.5
Pros
- Every amount printed, no proprietary blend, and one capsule a day is the simplest routine here
- Widely stocked in ordinary pharmacies, a real advantage over anything ordered online
Cons
- Two non-vitamin actives in total — a coffee-fruit extract at 200 mg and phosphatidylserine at 100 mg — the thinnest formula in this field
- Contains titanium dioxide and carrageenan, neither of which any other product here uses
- The brand publishes no price on its own site; the buying widget hands off to retailers
The disclosure is clean and the routine is the easiest here, which is not nothing — a capsule someone actually takes beats one they abandon. But the panel is very thin for a product positioned this broadly, the excipient choices are dated, and a brand that will not publish its own price is asking for more trust than it offers.
7
Alpha BRAIN
by Onnit
5.8/10 desk score C
- Form
- 7.0
- Disclosure
- 3.0
- Standardisation
- 6.5
- Cost per serving
- 6.0
- Buyer confidence
- 6.5
Pros
- States the total of each of its three blends, and gives cat's claw (350 mg) and vitamin B6 (10 mg) their own amounts — more than several blend products manage
- Caffeine free, which is genuinely useful and increasingly rare in this category
- Long-established product with a large, stable following
Cons
- Three proprietary blends. On the panel filed with the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database, ten of its twelve ingredients carry no amount of their own — including the L-theanine and the alpha-GPC, the two most-bought actives in this category
- The alpha-GPC sits inside a 240 mg blend with two other ingredients, so it cannot exceed 240 mg — and the label offers no way to tell how much less
- $2.33 a serving for a formula that cannot be compared with anything else on this page
Alpha BRAIN is the best-known product in this category and last on the factors this page declared, which is an uncomfortable finding rather than a satisfying one. It is caffeine free and it states each blend's total, which not every blend product does. But the two ingredients a buyer is most likely to be shopping for are precisely the two the blends conceal.
The one thing worth taking away
Count the amounts, not the ingredients. The longest ingredient list on this page belongs to a product that publishes all twenty-eight of its amounts, and the best-known product publishes four of twelve. A front-of-pack ingredient count is a marketing number. The count of printed milligrams is the one that tells a buyer whether they can compare the pack with anything else.
What we make
Weal Focus is five actives in two size 0 capsules: alpha-GPC 300 mg, lion's mane 400 mg at 100% fruiting body with beta-glucans of at least 25%, L-theanine 200 mg, zinc 15 mg, B12 500 mcg. Every amount printed, no proprietary blends. It is the smallest formula on this page, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.
See the whole label — then decide
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.