Many women take a daily multivitamin because it helps them ensure they get all the micronutrients and vitamins they need for the day—especially for women on-the-go.
Women have nutritional needs that are different from men. These encompass nutrients like vitamin B, iron, vitamin D, calcium, and more.
For vitamins, supplement companies have created female-specific vitamins. But which ones are the best? We looked through the options to rank the best women’s multivitamins, plus dove into the science on the key micronutrients to look for in a women’s multivitamin.
Our advisory panel and our research team rank the best health products and supplements based on performance, label accuracy, and the efficacy of the ingredients in the products.
- Best Overall: Ritual Essential for Women
- For Women Over 50: Performance Lab Whole-Food Women’s Multi
- Garden of Life Vitamin Code for Women
- For Teenage Girls: Optimum Nutrition Opti-Women
- Now Foods Eve Women’s Multivitamin
Research
Rankings
Last updated: October 11, 2022
Multivitamins considered: 29
Hours of research: 54
Experts reviewed: 7
Scientific papers referenced: 13
| IMAGE | PRODUCT | |
|---|---|---|
Best Overall  | 1. Ritual Essential for Women
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For Women Over 50  | 2. Performance Lab Whole-Food Women’s Multi
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 | 3. Garden of Life Vitamin Code for Women
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For Teenage Girls  | 4. Optimum Nutrition Opti-Women
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 | 5. Now Foods Eve Women’s Multivitamin
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 | 6. Naturelo One Daily Multivitamin for Women
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 | 7. MegaFood Women’s One Daily
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 | 8. New Chapter Every Woman’s One Daily
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Best Gummy Multivitamin  | 9. Smarty Pants Women’s Complete
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 | 10. GNC Women’s Ultra Mega
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1. Ritual Essential for Women
Ritual designed Essential for Women to be the only daily vitamin you need.
Ritual’s developed a cult-like following for its simplicity, traceability and ingredients that work best in the body. It has completely traceable and transparent ingredients — you can see all of the suppliers and their sources on their website — so you know exactly what you’re putting in your body.
The average multivitamin contains 20+ ingredients, and most of those are things women already get enough of in their diets.
Plus, not all ingredient forms are created equal: most multis use forms that don’t work well in the body. Ritual’s team of in-house scientists identified the essential nutrients women actually need and put them in a single non-GMO, vegan, gluten-free, patent-pending capsule without any synthetic fillers or colorants.
Then they created a capsule that actually absorbs the vitamins better:
The result?
Vitamins of the future.
They’ve received praise from Wired and The New York Times for their no-nonsense approach and transparency in the “shady” vitamin industry.
One of the better daily habits any women can have.
BodyNutrition.org 2020 women’s multivitamin winner.
2. Performance Lab Whole-Food Women’s Multi
Performance Lab is one of the most innovative supplement companies out there, and their multivitamin offerings are no exception.
Performance Lab Whole-Food Multi for Women is designed to cater to the unique hormonal and dietary needs that women face.
It provides 100% or more of the daily value of 18 nutrients and includes another 10 in generous dosages. It earns its place on our list because of its industry-leading production standards in quality and manufacturing.
Performance Lab also uses a prebiotic and probiotic-infused capsule to help deliver the essential vitamins and minerals into the body with superior bioavailability. The added fiber and enzymes can also help to improve digestive health.
Performance Lab Whole-Food Multi for Women is one of the cleanest products you’ll find on the market. It is free from GMO, soy, gluten and synthetic additives, vegan-friendly, and it’s allergen-friendly as well.
3. Garden of Life Vitamin Code for Women
Garden of Life is known for its unique approach to vitamin and mineral supplements, and it shines in the multivitamin category.
Its vitamin and mineral contents are bolstered by the inclusion of fruit and vegetable powders which have an untold number of nutrients that support the main “alphabet vitamins” and minerals. Independent lab testing ranks its purity and quality very high, which makes it a winning choice.
4. Optimum Nutrition Opti-Women
Optimum Nutrition shows that they’ve done their homework with their women’s multivitamin.
Instead of just amping up the vitamin B content and throwing in some extra calcium like second-rate women’s multivitamins, they put in some extra nutrients that are truly useful for women, like soy isoflavones.
5. Now Foods Eve Women’s Multivitamin
Now Foods provides standard doses of pretty much everything except B vitamins, which come in hefty-sized mega-doses.
The presence of mineral ingredients as chelates, instead of inorganic salts, is an attractive feature; these are absorbed much better by your body.
6. Naturelo One Daily Multivitamin for Women
Naturelo might be the company that does “natural” best. The vitamins and minerals in their women’s multivitamin are extracted from a wide range of naturally-occurring sources, ranging from acerola cherries (vitamin C) to kelp (iodine).
Naturelo’s main attraction is using amino acid chelates to increase the bioavailability of its key mineral ingredients.
7. MegaFood Women’s One Daily
MegaFood Women’s uses nutrients isolated from specially-bred strains of brewer’s yeast, which helps improve their bioavailability.
The downside is that the product takes a purity hit: the label-stated contents of the multivitamin isn’t always in line with independently-verified dosage data.
8. New Chapter Every Woman’s One Daily
New Chapter takes a naturally-produced vitamin and mineral approach like a few of its competitors, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. Purity and label accuracy are still big sticking points for vitamins and minerals derived from bacteria, algae, and yeast.
9. Smarty Pants Women’s Complete
Smarty Pants delivers at least 100% of 3 important nutrients: iodine, folate and vitamin D.
The downsides? One serving six gummies from the bottle, but there are only 72 mg of EPA and 54 mg of DHA, the two most important and influential omega three fatty acids. It’s definitely convenient, but the dosage is lacking.
Category winners
Best overall multivitamin for women: Ritual Essential for Women
Ritual Essential for Women puts great care into providing highly bioavailable forms of all of the essential micronutrients supplied in their multivitamin for women. Thanks to the wide range of nutrients and the ease with which they are absorbed, Ritual Essentials is our top pick.
Best multivitamin for women over 50: Performance Lab Whole-Food Women’s Multi
After age 50, women’s nutritional needs change. Performance Lab takes these changes into account, providing less iron and higher doses of B complex vitamins, making it an excellent choice for older women.
Best multivitamin for women who are pregnant: Ritual Essential Prenatal
Women who are pregnant or who might become pregnant in the near future should take a designated prenatal vitamin that has all the essential nutrients for your baby’s health. Ritual makes an ultra-pure prenatal vitamin with all the right micronutrients for fetal health.
Best multivitamin for teenage girls: Optimum Nutrition Opti-Women
Teenage girls need additional calcium, vitamin D, and iron for optimal health, and Optimum Nutrition provides an excellent dose of all three of these critical nutrients, making it the best option for teens.
Best multivitamin for women with iron: Ritual Essential for Women
Ritual Essential is a great pick for an iron-containing multivitamin for women, because it provides iron without also providing high doses of calcium. This might seem counterintuitive, but calcium has potent inhibitory effects on iron’s absorption, so if you want to boost your iron with a multivitamin, go with Ritual.
Best gummy multivitamin for women: Smarty Pants Women’s Complete
If you can’t stand swallowing a pill every morning, Smarty Pants is the best option on the market. It has a hefty dose of vitamin D, alongside ample doses of iodine and folate. Although gummies can’t measure up to capsule-based multivitamins on every front, Smarty Pants is the best if you know you want gummies.
Who should buy a multivitamin for women?
A multivitamin for women is a catch-all supplement that provides your body with all of the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that it needs.
Women whose diet doesn’t have enough trace minerals can get a lot out of a multivitamin. While it’s possible to get all of your nutrients from healthy food, women who are busy, travel a lot, or who are on a restrictive diet often lack key micronutrients in their diet like calcium, folate, and iron.
Older women can benefits from a multivitamin tailored for women. As you get older, your nutritional needs change even more. After menopause, older women often have deficits in copper zinc magnesium, calcium, vitamin E, and vitamin A (1).
Maintaining appropriate intake levels of nutrients like calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin K is particularly important for women who are getting older.
These vitamins and minerals interact in a synergistic way to build and maintain bone density.
Many cases of osteoporosis and osteopenia are associated with a diet that’s deficient in these nutrients and as your body gets older, you become more vulnerable to fractures if your bone density is decreasing.
Prenatal vitamins are special subset of A women’s multivitamins. A prenatal vitamin is formulated specifically for women who are currently or soon to be pregnant. Many women will switch from a standard multivitamin for women to a prenatal vitamin when they are pregnant, then switch back after giving birth.
How we ranked
To form our rankings, we pooled products spanning the range from flagship vitamins from big brand-name companies to smaller products from specialty labs, then looked at several key features.
No extra fillers or coloring agents: Our first requirement was that anything that had excessive fillers, bulking agents, or coloring agents was eliminated. After clearing the field of these lower-quality products, like store-brand offerings from Centrum and Solimo, we started looking at nutritional content.
High levels of key nutrients for women: some of the key ingredients we were looking for were calcium, vitamin D, vitamin K, iron, and B-complex vitamins.
Surprisingly, several top sellers did not make it past this next requirement. Rainbow Light, for example did not make the cut because of its very low levels of calcium.
Since this is one of the most important nutrients for women, it’s very hard to justify skipping given its critical role in bone strength.
After ensuring that our remaining multivitamins for women included all of the key micronutrients that both older and younger women, we turned our eye to the method of delivery.
Effective mechanism of nutrient delivery: Capsules versus chewables or gummies made a difference, with capsules scoring better due to their cleaner design and more effective ingredient delivery. More importantly, however, was the chemical form that the vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients came in.
Top performers like Garden of Life Vitamin Code Women, used ingredients derived directly from natural sources, or used easily water-soluble forms of their ingredients. Lower performing supplements used compounds like magnesium oxide as sources for trace minerals, which are cheaper but rely on stomach acid to make the trace minerals biologically active.
Our top performers were those multivitamins that use capsules that delivered effective doses of all ingredients in an easily bioavailable form and didn’t pose any problems for vegetarians or vegans.
Ritual, our top performer, stood out for its focus on ensuring that the ingredients it delivers were actually bioavailable, even going as far as engineering a capsule that enhances absorption.
FAQ
Q: What’s the best multivitamin for women over 50?
A: Women over 50 are pretty much all going through or have gone through menopause, and as the result of the hormonal changes that go along with this, they should pay extra attention to the trace minerals calcium, zinc, and copper, and vitamins D and K.
For these reasons, we like Optimum Nutrition Opti-Women, as well Ritual Essence. Both have high levels of these essential micronutrients that are especially important during and after menopause. Optimum Nutrition has somewhat more calcium, but Ritual Essence has a cleaner and more focused supplement design.
Q: What’s the best multivitamin for women that also has probiotics?
A: When it comes to probiotic content, Garden of Life Vitamin Code Women has a robust content of beneficial bacteria.
While a multivitamin for women can’t compete with the levels of probiotics present in a dedicated probiotic supplement for women, Garden of Life has a respectable 500 million colony forming units (CFUs) per serving.
Importantly, this supplement also includes prebiotics and digestive enzymes that assist with growing your gut microbiome.
Q: What’s the best gummy multivitamin for women?
A: Our highest-rated gummy multivitamin for women is Smarty Pants Women’s Complete, which boasts 100% of your recommended daily intake of several key nutrients overlooked by some other gummy multivitamins: iodine, folate, and vitamin D.
Q: What’s the best multivitamin for women in their late 20s who want children?
A: If you are a woman in your late 20s and you want children at some date in the future, check out Ritual Essence Prenatal.
We have a separate article with rankings, reviews, and detailed analysis of the science behind the best prenatal vitamins, so check those out if you fall into this latter category.
Q: What is the best whole food vitamin for women?
A: When it comes to whole food ingredients, it’s tough to beat Garden of Life and Naturelo. The entire philosophy of both products is based on sourcing all of its ingredients from plant sources.
Naturelo, for example, uses rice bran to source its vitamin E ,and wild-harvested lichen to source its vitamin D. Garden of Life, on the other hand, uses a careful blend of fruit, vegetable, and plant extracts that delivers the necessary micronutrients.
Q: Are there multivitamins for women that contain fiber?
A: Generally, most women’s multivitamins do not contain much or any fiber. The reason for this is not that fiber isn’t necessary for women’s health, but because fiber takes up a lot of space in a multivitamin capsule. It’s better to opt for a separate fiber supplement instead.
Q: What’s the best multivitamin for women that contains biotin?
A: Biotin is a B-vitamin that’s essential for skin, hair, and nail health, but for women plays a particularly important role during pregnancy and breastfeeding, thanks to its role in promoting fetal development.
You’ll find biotin in any high quality prenatal vitamin, but it’s also abundant in our top picks. Both Garden of Life Vitamin Code Women and NOW Foods Eve are excellent multivitamins for women, and both deliver 100% of your recommended daily intake of biotin in one serving.
Related articles
- Multivitamins for men
- Prenatal vitamins
- Bone density supplements
- Diet pills for women
- Probiotics for women
- Fat burners for women
- Vitamin D
- Calcium
Recap
While it is optimal to obtain all your nutrition from your diet, the reality is that very few people can hit this goal.
For women who want to improve their physical and mental well-being, reduce their risk for chronic disease, and fight off nutritional deficiencies, multivitamins can help bridge the gap between what your body needs and what your less-than-perfect diet is providing.
For BodyNutrition.org’s #1 women’s multivitamin recommendation, click here.
