Every kratom vendor says the same three things: cleanest product, lab tested, best price. Because all of them say it, none of it carries information. The only way a ranking means anything is if the person doing the ranking shows their work — the exact inputs, the exact weights, and what would make a vendor lose points. So here is ours, in full, including the parts that are unflattering to us.
Safety & legal note. Kratom is not approved by the FDA for any use, and nothing here is medical advice. This page describes how we evaluate sellers, not how anyone should use the product. Kratom is banned in some US states, is not for anyone under 21, and can cause dependence with heavy use. Check your local law before ordering.
The formula
Every vendor on our rankings page gets a single 0–10 score built from three weighted inputs:
score = testing × 0.45 + reputation × 0.35 + price × 0.20
The result is clamped to a published range of 6.0 to 10 and rounded to one decimal place. The 6.0 floor is deliberate: we do not list a vendor unless it clears a basic bar, so a listed vendor never shows a failing number. The score is a ranking tool among vendors we are willing to name, not a pass/fail verdict on the whole market. Anyone who fails the basic bar is simply absent.
| Input | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Testing | 45% | Verifiable third-party lab testing and GMP qualification |
| Reputation | 35% | Track record, service, shipping, customer-dispute history |
| Price | 20% | Value for money at typical order sizes |
The testing sub-score, exactly
Testing is the heaviest input, and it is the least subjective one. It starts at the same 6.0 floor every listed vendor gets, then adds points for two verifiable facts:
| Condition | Points added |
|---|---|
| Base (listed vendor clears the basic bar) | 6.0 |
| American Kratom Association GMP-qualified | +2.5 |
| Publishes third-party Certificates of Analysis | +1.5 |
| Maximum | 10.0 |
Both of those are things you can check yourself. AKA GMP qualification is a published list maintained by the association, and published COAs are either on the vendor's site, tied to a lot number, or they are not. That is the point of leaning on them: our two biggest testing inputs are externally auditable.
GMP qualification is worth more than published COAs because it covers the system rather than a single result. A COA proves one batch was tested. GMP qualification means the vendor's sourcing, handling, and testing procedures were audited against a written standard by someone other than the vendor. A vendor can post a COA and still have sloppy process everywhere else; that is the gap the extra weight is pricing in. For what those documents actually contain, see how to read a kratom COA.
Why testing outweighs price
On our sister site, which covers research peptides, the formula weights price most heavily. For kratom we deliberately inverted that. The reason is that the buyer's real risk is different.
Kratom is an agricultural product moving through a lightly regulated supply chain. The documented failure modes in this market are contamination and adulteration — the FDA has issued recalls and warnings over salmonella and heavy metals in kratom products, and independent testing has found products adulterated with synthetic 7-hydroxymitragynine. Those are the problems that actually hurt people.
Paying a few dollars more per ounce is an annoyance. Receiving a contaminated or adulterated product is a different category of problem, and it is the one thing a buyer genuinely cannot detect at home — you cannot see, smell, or taste heavy metals. So the score is weighted toward the signal that addresses the risk you can't inspect yourself, and price is capped at 20% so that a cheap vendor can never buy its way to the top of the list on price alone.
What reputation and price actually mean
Reputation (35%) is our editorial judgment, and we label it as such. It reflects how long a vendor has operated, how it handles refunds and shipping problems, whether complaints follow a pattern or are one-offs, and whether its public claims match what we can verify. This is the softest input in the model, which is exactly why we cap it below testing. Where we assign a reputation number, it is our assessment — not a measured quantity, and not a fact about the company.
Price (20%) is value for money at ordinary order sizes, not the lowest sticker price on a single product. A vendor with strong bulk pricing and weak single-bag pricing lands mid-pack. Critically, this input has nothing to do with what a vendor pays us — commission rates are not in the formula at any weight.
A worked example
The arithmetic is simple enough to check by hand. Take a hypothetical vendor that is GMP-qualified, publishes per-batch COAs, has a strong track record, and is priced on the premium side:
- Testing: 6.0 base + 2.5 (GMP) + 1.5 (COAs) = 10.0
- Reputation: 9.0 (our assessment)
- Price: 7.0 (our assessment)
(10.0 × 0.45) + (9.0 × 0.35) + (7.0 × 0.20) = 4.5 + 3.15 + 1.4 = 9.05 → 9.1
Now take a vendor identical except that it is not GMP-qualified. Its testing sub-score drops to 7.5, and the total falls to 8.0 — a full point of difference driven entirely by one auditable credential. That is the model working as intended.
Live numbers for the vendors we currently list are on the rankings page, because editorial inputs get revised as we learn more. Treat any score quoted in an article as a snapshot.
We will down-rank a vendor that pays us
This is the part that matters most, so we will state it without hedging.
We earn commission when a reader buys through our links. Vendors that pay us more do not rank higher, because commission is not an input to the score. And if a vendor we earn from develops a testing problem, starts dodging COA requests, loses a credential, or accumulates a real pattern of unresolved customer complaints, we will lower its score, add a warning to its review, or remove it from the rankings — even though that directly costs us money.
We are saying this in advance, in public, because a promise made before the conflict arises is worth more than one made after. If we ever fail to keep it, this page is the standard to hold us to.
We also decline to list vendors we cannot earn from at all. That is a real limitation you should factor in: our list is the set of vendors that both clear our bar and run an affiliate program. There are almost certainly clean vendors we do not cover.
How we make money
Affiliate commissions, paid by the vendor when a purchase originates from one of our links. It costs you nothing extra, and where a vendor gives us a discount code, using it is generally cheaper than not using it. Every monetized link on this site carries rel="nofollow sponsored noreferrer", which is the machine-readable version of the same disclosure.
We have no ownership stake in any kratom vendor, and we do not sell kratom.
What this score is not
- Not a safety guarantee. A high score means a vendor's testing and track record look strong to us. It cannot promise any individual bag is clean.
- Not a medical opinion. Nothing in the model evaluates whether kratom is appropriate for anyone.
- Not a substitute for checking the current COA. Credentials lapse and batches vary. Verify before you order — here is how.
- Not permanent. Scores move when the underlying facts move.
Audit us
The two heaviest testing inputs are externally checkable: look up the vendor on the AKA's GMP-qualified list, and look for a COA matching the lot number on the product you are actually buying. If you find a discrepancy between what we published and what you found, that is exactly the thing we want to hear about — being correctable is the only version of independence that survives contact with a real market.