How we compare drug prices

Where our data comes from

We combine three types of sources:

U.S. pharmacy pricing — cash and discount-card prices collected from licensed prescription discount and pharmacy price-comparison services, plus published prices from Cost Plus Drugs, a direct-to-consumer pharmacy that posts a public, no-insurance price list.
Canadian pharmacy pricing — prices published by licensed and verified online Canadian and international pharmacies that ship to U.S. and Canadian customers.
Drug reference data — generic and brand names, active ingredients, dosage forms, and drug classes, cross-checked against standard drug-naming conventions so the same medicine isn't mistaken for a different one sold under a different name in each country.

How we match drugs across countries

The U.S. and Canada sometimes use different names for the same medicine, or the same name for chemically different medicines. To avoid showing the wrong comparison, every match goes through a multi-step check:

exact match on active ingredient, salt form, and release form (extended-release and immediate-release are never treated as interchangeable);
known brand-name equivalence (a drug renamed between countries, or a Canadian brand not sold in the U.S. under the same name);
for medicines with similar but not identical names, a manual pharmacological review before publishing the match — automated name-similarity alone is never enough to publish a comparison. Look-alike/sound-alike name pairs with real safety implications are explicitly excluded from automatic matching.

Where we couldn't confidently confirm that a U.S. and Canadian listing are the same medicine, we publish them as separate, single-country pages rather than guessing at a match.

Page types on this site

Full comparison pages — a medicine confirmed available in both the U.S. and Canada, with pricing shown for both.
U.S.-only pages — a medicine we found U.S. pricing for but could not confirm as sold in Canada.
Canada-only pages — a medicine we found Canadian pricing for but could not confirm as available in the U.S. market.

How often prices are updated

Pricing data is refreshed on a rolling basis as source listings change. Each page shows the date its pricing was last checked next to the reviewer byline.

What we exclude

We do not list veterinary medications, over-the-counter test or monitoring supplies unrelated to pricing comparisons, or general product-category pages that don't represent one specific medicine. When we can't confidently identify a specific match, we say so rather than publishing an approximate one.

Questions about our data

If you notice a price that looks wrong or out of date, report it to our editors and we'll review it.