PepCue vs PeptIQ.
PeptIQ is the closest thing PepCue has to a direct rival, and the two answer the same brief in genuinely different ways. PeptIQ is a paid app that bets on convenience and community: an AI companion to talk protocols with, a scanner that reads your vials, sync into Apple Health or Google Health Connect, and a social layer where people share certificates of analysis. PepCue is free, and it bets on the evidence layer instead: a graded compound library with the scoring model published so you can argue with it.
Last checked September 2026. Competitor features and pricing change, so verify on their own site or App Store listing before you decide.
You want to know how strong the evidence behind a compound actually is before you track it, you want that grade explained rather than asserted, and you would rather not pay a subscription to log a dose or run vial math.
You want an AI assistant inside the app, a camera that reads your vial labels, your injections flowing automatically into Apple Health or Google Health Connect, or a community where people post certificates of analysis. PeptIQ has all four of those and PepCue has none of them.
PeptIQ is the one competitor here we can describe with any confidence. The features listed below come from PeptIQ's own public description of the product. We have deliberately not printed a price, a rating or a review count, because those change and we have not independently confirmed the current numbers.
Side by side, verifiable rows only.
| PepCue | PeptIQ | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free to use. You can run a full protocol without paying, and there is no subscription gate on logging, schedules, the calculators or the evidence library. | A paid subscription. Weekly, monthly and annual plans are offered through the App Store or on the web. Current amounts are not printed here on purpose; check their listing. |
| Account required | Not required. Tracking starts without an account, and the browser calculators need no sign-up either. | Not verified |
| Evidence grading | Every compound carries an S to F evidence tier scored on six axes: human evidence, preclinical depth, mechanism confidence, safety clarity, regulatory clarity and practical relevance. | Publishes peptide profiles. Whether those profiles carry a graded evidence score is not something we have verified. |
| Scoring model published | Yes. The full six-axis model, the tier thresholds and a worked example on a real compound are published on the methodology page. | Not verified |
| Citations | 306 cited sources across 69 compound profiles, plus a generated research index of 274 unique PubMed records, every one pulled from NCBI and re-resolved against live PubMed by an audit script kept in the repo. | Not verified |
| Compound library | 69 compound profiles covering regulatory status, mechanism, what the published evidence actually shows, and safety. | Publishes peptide profiles. |
| AI assistant | No AI companion. Search is keyword search across the library, so answers come from written, cited pages. | Yes, an AI companion is a headline feature. |
| Vial scanner | No camera or vial scanner. | Yes, a vial scanner. |
| Protocol builder | Per-compound schedules with reminders, a calendar that stamps itself as you log, and a month view of every dose taken. | Yes, a protocol builder. |
| Health app sync | No Apple Health or Google Health Connect sync is advertised. | Apple Health and Google Health Connect sync. |
| Community / COA sharing | No community feed and no certificate-of-analysis sharing. | Yes, a community feature including certificates of analysis. |
| Affiliate codes or vendor rankings | None. PepCue sells no peptides, ranks no vendors, takes no kickbacks and places no affiliate codes. | Not verified |
| Dosing guidance | Never. PepCue explains compounds and does the arithmetic on numbers you enter. It does not tell anyone what to take. | Not verified |
| Calculators without an account | 9, free in the browser with no account and no install: reconstitution, blends, GLP-1 titration, pen clicks, vial longevity, unit conversions and BAC water. | Not verified |
What PepCue does differently.
The difference that matters is not the feature count, it is what happens when you look up a compound. On PepCue every compound carries a letter grade from S to F, and that grade is not an opinion typed into a field. It is computed from six scored axes: how much controlled human evidence exists, how deep the animal and cell work goes, how well the mechanism is actually characterised rather than plausibly asserted, how well the safety profile is known, whether a regulator has reviewed it, and whether the studied outcome is the one people care about. The whole model is published, including the thresholds and a worked example on a real compound, so you can disagree with a grade on specifics rather than on vibes.
That model is deliberately unflattering to the compounds this category is built on. Safety clarity scores how well a safety profile is known, not how safe something is, so a compound with no human toxicology sits at the floor, because unknown is not the same as safe. Preclinical depth can be high while human evidence is zero, which is the exact pattern behind most research peptides, and the tier system exists to make that gap visible rather than to paper over it. Several of the most popular compounds on this site grade badly, and the page says so.
Underneath that sits the sourcing. There are 306 cited sources across 69 compound profiles, and behind the corpus as a whole sits a generated research index of 274 unique PubMed records, each pulled from NCBI and re-resolved against live PubMed by an audit script that lives in the repo, so a citation that quietly stops resolving gets caught rather than sitting there looking authoritative. FDA documents and trial-registry records are cited too, and they sit outside that audited count because they carry no PubMed ID.
Then there is price, which is the blunt part. PepCue is free to use, and the 9 calculators run in a browser with no account and no install. Reconstitution math is the single most common reason someone opens an app like this, and putting it behind a subscription means the person most likely to get the arithmetic wrong is the person least likely to pay to get it right. There are also no affiliate codes anywhere on the site, no vendor rankings and nothing for sale, which removes the incentive to shade a grade in a supplier's favour.
Where PeptIQ is stronger.
PeptIQ does several things PepCue does not do at all, and pretending otherwise would undercut the point of this page. The AI companion is the obvious one. If the way you want to work is to ask questions in your own words and get an answer back in context, PepCue's keyword search over written pages is a slower experience, and no amount of citation counting changes that.
The vial scanner is a real convenience feature. Typing vial details is the most tedious part of setting up a protocol, and a camera that reads the label removes it. PepCue has nothing equivalent.
Health platform sync matters more than it sounds like it does. If your injections, weights and other metrics land in Apple Health or Google Health Connect automatically, they join everything else your phone already tracks and they survive you switching apps later. PepCue does not advertise that sync, so your record stays inside PepCue, which is good for privacy and worse for portability.
The community and certificate-of-analysis layer is the one PepCue has made a deliberate choice not to build, and the tradeoff is real in both directions. A community where people post COAs gives you something PepCue genuinely cannot: other people's experience of a specific batch from a specific source. PepCue stays out of that because the moment a site starts steering people toward suppliers, the incentive to grade evidence honestly starts to bend. That is a defensible position, not a superior one, and if supplier information is what you came for then PeptIQ is the better tool for the job.
FAQ.
Is PepCue free compared with PeptIQ?
PepCue is free to use: you can run a full protocol without paying, and the website calculators and the evidence library need no account at all. PeptIQ is a paid subscription, offered weekly, monthly and annually through the App Store or on the web. We do not print their current price here because pricing changes and we have not independently confirmed it, so check their listing.
Does PepCue have an AI assistant like PeptIQ?
No. PepCue has keyword search across written, cited pages rather than a conversational AI companion. That is a real gap if you prefer asking questions in your own words. The tradeoff is that every answer on PepCue is a page someone wrote and sourced, so you can see where it came from and check it.
Which one has better peptide information?
Both publish peptide profiles, so the honest distinction is not whether information exists but whether it is graded on a disclosed model. PepCue grades every compound S to F on six scored axes and publishes the model, the thresholds and a worked example. We have not verified whether PeptIQ's profiles carry a comparable published grading system, so we are not going to claim they do or do not.
Can I use both?
Yes, and for some people that is the sensible answer. They solve different halves of the problem: PeptIQ for the AI companion, the scanner, health app sync and the community layer, PepCue for graded evidence and free calculators. Nothing about either stops you keeping a tab open on the other.
Last checked September 2026. Competitor features and pricing change, so verify on their own site or App Store listing before you decide.