Do you want to add muscle and gain power? Look no further than creatine. It’s one of the most effective supplements out there for increasing strength and explosiveness.
And no, it’s not just for bodybuilding. Creatine can improve muscle strength, muscle size, and muscle power, making it a must-have supplement for serious athletes.
First, we’ll review the best creatine supplements on the market. Then, we’ll dive deeper on how creatine works and how you can use it to improve your strength and power.
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: Transparent Labs Creatine HMB
- Best for mass gains: BulkSupplements Pure Micronized Creatine
- Optimum Nutrition Micronized Creatine
- Best for women: MyProtein Creatine
- Naked Creatine
Research
Rankings
Last updated: October 16, 2022
Creatine supplements considered: 29
Hours of research: 48
Experts reviewed: 9
Scientific papers referenced: 17
| IMAGE | PRODUCT | |
|---|---|---|
BEST OVERALL  | 1. Transparent Labs Creatine HMB
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Best for mass gains  | 2. BulkSupplements Pure Micronized Creatine
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 | 3. Optimum Nutrition Micronized Creatine
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Best for women  | 4. MyProtein Creatine
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 | 5. Naked Creatine
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 | 6. NOW Sports Creatine monohydrate
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 | 7. Cellucor Cor-Performance Creatine
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 | 8. Crazy Muscle Three-atine
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 | 9. Evlution Nutrition Creatine 1000
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 | 10. MuscleTech Platinum Creatine
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1. Transparent Labs Creatine HMB
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To be the best you can’t be acting like the rest of the pack. Enter Creatine HMB by Transparent Labs.
Creatine HMB leads the creatine pack because it combines the proven with the new.
- Proven: each serving of Creatine HMB contains 5 grams of Creapure® creatine monohydrate.
- New: each serving of Creatine HMB contains 2.5 grams of HMB, anabolic metabolite from leucine.
That means you’re getting more strength and muscle building potential per serving than any other ‘plain Jane’ creatine product.
Transparent Labs Creatine HMB comes in both unflavored and blue raspberry. In its natural state, Creatine HMB is tasteless with a slight spice taste from BioPerine® black pepper added to increase uptake.
It’s made using the world’s purest, most tested creatine combined with industry leading manufacturing practices.
That’s why Creatine HMB is our top pick.
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2. BulkSupplements Pure Micronized Creatine
Bulk Supplements makes a name for itself by offering cheap, pure, and simplistic supplements, and its creatine offering is no exception.
As you might guess, it has exactly one ingredient: creatine monohydrate. Lab testing confirms this fact; its creatine content is 100%—no binders, fillers, byproducts, flavorings, or colorants.
On top of this, BulkSupplements is careful enough with their manufacturing processes that they can guarantee the product is free of common allergens like gluten, dairy, yeast, and soy.
Other companies will sometimes cut costs by manufacturing other products, like soy protein, on the same equipment as a product that has no soy ingredients. While this is not a problem for the vast majority of people, it’s a nice touch if you’ve got allergies or sensitivities.
3. Optimum Nutrition Micronized Creatine
The creatine supplement made by Optimum Nutrition is simple and straightforward powder-form supplement. Creatine monohydrate is its only ingredient; it passes laboratory analytical testing with flying colors.
As with many other powder forms of creatine, Optimum Nutrition has micronized its product, meaning the powder is ground down into a very fine consistency.
This is good both for absorption reasons and for practicality—it’s easier to mix into a protein shake, and it is also absorbed more readily by your body.
4. MyProtein Creatine
MyProtein Creatine comes in several flavors, but the most popular variant is the unflavored creatine monohydrate, which comes in a simple foil pouch and is 100% creatine monohydrate by weight.
Super simple and super effective: a great option for quality creatine.
5. Micro Ingredients Pure Creatine
Micro Ingredients Pure Creatine is about as simple and pure as it gets.
It’s an unflavored and super-minimalist source of creatine, and it blends up pretty well in water, which makes it a great pick for just about everyone.
6. NOW Sports Creatine monohydrate
Now Sports makes another single-ingredient creatine monohydrate powder which does well on independent lab testing, with fully 100% of its contents being creatine monohydrate by weight, and it contains no impurities or contaminants.
It’s not micronized like some of its competitors, so it will be a bit more difficult to blend up into protein shakes, but it’s still a solid option.
7. Cellucor Cor-Performance Creatine
Cellucor makes a pretty simple creatine supplement that provides micronized creatine monohydrate for rapid absorption and high bioavailability.
While the total dosage provided in the container is middle-of-the-road, it’s still a pure and reliable option.
8. Crazy Muscle Three-atine
Crazy Muscle puts their own spin on creatine by providing it in tablets with three different types of creatine (monohydrate, alphaketoglutarate, and pyruvate), though the bulk of it is in monohydrate.
The tablets are convenient, but you can run out pretty quickly if you’re in a high dosage creatine loading phase.
9. Evlution Nutrition Creatine 1000
Need a high dose of creatine but don’t want to bother with powders? Evlution delivers a full gram of creatine per capsule with this product. The only downside is a few more binders and fillers than we’d like to see.
10. MuscleTech Platinum Creatine
MuscleTech is a widely-known brand that you’re likely to find at your local supplement store as well as on the internet.
Its creatine powder is a simple formulation, but it doesn’t stand out much from the crowd, aside from being micronized.
Category winners
Best creatine overall: Transparent Labs Creatine HMB
Creatine and HMB make a great pair: creatine boosts muscular power and size, while HMB helps accelerate muscle recovery. Transparent Labs puts both to work in an excellent all-around creatine supplement.
Best creatine for women: MyProtein Creatine
MyProtein has a super-clean supplement design and doesn’t have any extraneous ingredients, like flavoring or artificial sweeteners, that can get in the way of improved muscle strength. It’s great for women with serious fitness goals.
Best creatine for mass gains: BulkSupplements Pure Micronized Creatine
For peak muscle gains, you want to absorb your creatine supplement as efficiently as possible. BulkSupplements makes that easy to do with their micronized creatine powder, making it the perfect choice for maximum gains.
Best creatine for muscle power: BulkSupplements Pure Micronized Creatine
Like with mass gains, improving muscle power with creatine is all about increasing your intracellular creatine concentration as effectively as possible. The highly bioavailable form of creatine in this supplement ideal for improving power output.
Best creatine for runners: MyProtein Creatine
Runners taking creatine will benefit in short, high-intensity sprinting workouts. MyProtein Creatine is best for this purpose: the super-pure and moderate-dose formulation makes improving leg speed a breeze, but prevents you from getting muscle-bound.
Best creatine for athletes: Transparent Labs Creatine HMB
The combination of creatine for muscle power and HMB for muscle growth is hard to beat when it comes to athletic performance. If your sport demands strength, power, or speed, Transparent Labs Creatine HMB is the way to go.
Who should buy creatine?
Creatine is great for three things: getting strong, becoming more explosive, and adding muscle mass. If any of these are among your fitness goals, creatine is a great choice for you.
High-level athletes: All of the original research on creatine was focused on enabling high-level athletes to gain muscle mass and strength to sustain better performance in strength and power sports.
At this task, creatine works incredibly well: it’s been highlighted as one of the biggest success stories in nutrition over the last several decades (1).
People looking to add muscle mass: Creatine works in part by encouraging muscle hypertrophy, which makes it great a great option for bodybuilders and anyone else looking to pack on muscle mass: not just elite athletes.
Older adults who want to sustain muscle mass as they get older. Though creatine was originally studied as a way for high level athletes to gain muscle mass and strength, creatine is gaining support as a way for anyone who wants to preserve or build muscle strength—not just elite athletes.
New research suggests that creatine supplementation is an effective way to sustain muscle mass in older adults, even when they are doing relatively tame exercise programs (2).
How we ranked
When making our rankings of the best creatine supplements on the market, we looked to the scientific literature for guidance. Since all of the successful research studies use fairly high doses of creatine split up into several servings per day, we prioritized creatine supplements that made it easy to follow this kind of protocol.
Purity was our top priority: We culled anything from the field of candidate supplements that did not focus primarily on creatine as its main active ingredient, so pre-workout supplements or protein powders that added creatine as a secondary ingredient did not make the cut.
So, some popular post-workout blends like Jacked Factory Growth Surge got canned right off the bat.
Effective delivery and flexible dosing: Next, we focused on the method of delivery. Since they’re so much more amenable to variable dosages, powder-based creatine supplements had a clear advantage over capsule based products.
We ended up eliminating almost all of the capsule-based creatine supplements because they couldn’t measure up in terms of purity and dosage flexibility compared to powder-based products.
Certified-pure ingredients: We put a lot of emphasis on products which were certified as being free from common allergens like soy, gluten, and eggs, as these are good indicators of high-quality manufacturing processes. Popular store brands like GNC Pro and GNC Amp didn’t make the cut for this reason.
FAQ
Q: What is creatine?
A: Creatine is a simple molecule that is used by both your brain and your muscles. Creatine can be used by muscles to rapidly generate large amounts of energy through the creatine phosphate energy pathway, and creatine also directly stimulates the growth of muscle tissue.
In the brain, creatine can also be used for energy, and new research suggests that your brain might benefit from creatine supplementation during stressful situations.
Q: What does creatine do?
A: Creatine can be used by your muscles to generate a lot of power in a short amount of time.
Over the course of weeks or months, a regular supply of supplemental creatine can prime your body to increase muscle mass and muscle strength in response to a resistance training program to a greater degree than just doing the same lifting or training program without creatine.
Its ability to stimulate synthesis of new muscle tissue is by far the most popular reason for people to take a creatine supplement, but even if your goals are purely related to short-term anaerobic performance, creatine can still be very helpful.
Q: Should I be taking creatine?
A: Creatine is one of the most effective and safest supplements for building muscle mass and muscle strength. However, it’s not right for everyone.
If your primary focus is an endurance sport like running or cycling, creatine is not going to help you. The benefits of creatine are strictly for short-term anaerobic performance, which includes things like sprinting and weight lifting.
Moreover, while creatine can be helpful for your brain, these cognitive benefits appear to be limited to stressful situations, like brain recovery after a concussion or cognitive performance at high altitude or after sleep deprivation.
Q: What does creatine do to your kidneys?
A: Some initial skeptics of creatine pointed to some hypothetical dangers for kidney function that could be caused by long-term ingestion of high levels of creatine.
The argument was that creatine intake would stimulate the generation of toxic compounds called HCAs, which could damage the kidneys.
However, according to a meta analysis of research on creatine, long-term studies of creatine find essentially no change in blood biomarkers of kidney health (13).
Still, creatine has not been studied in people who have kidney disease, so the official recommendations are that creatine is not recommended for people with kidney disease or renal failure (14).
Q: Is creatine good for bodybuilding?
A: Creatine is a very popular supplement among bodybuilders, particularly when trying to “bulk,” or add muscle mass, as rapidly as possible.
Bodybuilders often use sophisticated loading/unloading strategies when supplementing with creatine, as the water retention effects of creatine supplementation can work against a bodybuilder’s goals when trying to cut body fat (and non-muscle mass generally) as much as possible, and particularly in the run-up to a bodybuilding competition.
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Recap
A dose of five to 15 grams of creatine per day can help you lift more, sprint faster, and see quicker increases in muscle mass and muscular strength.
If you want a safe, reliable way to build muscle, increase power, or recover muscle mass after an injury or accident, taking a creatine supplement is a great choice.
Creatine is one of the most potent and safest ergogenic supplements out there for strength, power, and muscle hypertrophy, so if you’re a serious athlete, it should definitely be in your supplement stack.
For BodyNutrition’s #1 creatine recommendation, click here.
