Independent supplement ratingsUS and Canada · Updated weekly
A ratings desk for a category that has spent thirty years grading its own homework.
A ratings desk for a category that has spent thirty years grading its own homework.
Three of the biggest names in electrolytes, priced on the ingredient you buy them for. The most expensive stick turns out to carry the cheapest sodium.
The short version: these three products cost $1.00, $1.20 and $1.50 a serving, and that order tells you almost nothing. Price them on the ingredient you are buying them for — sodium — and the most expensive stick becomes the cheapest, by half.
| LMNT Recharge | Liquid I.V. | DripDrop ORS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sodium per serving | 1,000 mg | 500 mg | 330 mg |
| Price per serving | $1.50 | $1.20 | $1.00 |
| Cost per gram of sodium | $1.50 | $2.40 | $3.03 |
| Added sugar | none | ~11 g | present |
| Our score | 8.7 | 6.2 | 7.1 |
Cheapest per serving, most expensive per gram of the active ingredient. That inversion is the single most useful thing to understand about this category, and it survives across every product in our electrolyte ranking.
A thousand milligrams of sodium in a stick is the top of the range that matters for hard training or heavy sweating, and no other product in our ranking comes close. Zero sugar. That combination is why it wins the category.
Two honest caveats. It is polarising to drink — unapologetically salty, and some people never get used to it. And if you are lightly active, 1,000 mg is more sodium than your session justifies. The dose is a feature when you have earned it and a shrug when you have not.
Full breakdown in the review.
Liquid I.V. delivers a respectable 500 mg of sodium — genuinely useful, half of LMNT. What comes with it is around 11 g of added sugar per stick.
That sugar is not a scandal. Glucose assists sodium absorption, which is the principle oral rehydration solutions are built on, and during a long endurance effort the carbohydrate is doing a second job. On a normal day it is roughly three teaspoons of sugar that most buyers do not know they are drinking.
It is also widely available and tastes good, which is most of why it sells. See our review.
DripDrop comes from the oral rehydration tradition — formulated against dehydration from illness rather than against a hard hour in the gym. At 330 mg of sodium it is the lightest of the three, and at $3.03 a gram the most expensive way to buy it here.
Judged as an ORS it is a reasonable product. Judged as a training electrolyte, you are paying twice LMNT's rate for a third of the dose. Our review goes through it.
The answer depends on a number you can work out in one session, not on the brand.
Work out what you actually lose with the electrolyte calculator — most people are surprised in one direction or the other. The reasoning behind those numbers is in how much sodium you lose in a hard training hour.
We ran that arithmetic across all five products we rate in the sodium math on electrolyte labels, where the spread reaches nearly seven-fold.
Prices and formulas change; check the current label before buying. Educational only, not medical advice — if you have high blood pressure or kidney disease, deliberate sodium is a question for your doctor.