BlueChew vs Roman: Where should you get ED meds?

Erectile dysfunction (ED) is incredibly common — probably even more so than you think. Up to one-third of all men will experience it at some point in their lives,1 including more than 25% of men under 40.2 But ED is no longer the death sentence for your sex life that it might have been in the 20th century. Today, there are several well-regarded medications that are known to be effective at helping men with ED to get an erection.

Access to those medications has also gotten easier, with online companies offering a private and convenient way to get a prescription medication shipped to your door. BlueChew and Roman are two such companies that deliver low-cost generic versions of drugs like Viagra and Cialis.

But what are the important differences between these two companies? Our team has been covering their activities for years, and we’ve put together this guide to help you choose between them.

For those in a hurry, right now, we feel the majority of men will do better with BlueChew. However, other companies exist that we sometimes rate more highly than either BlueChew or Roman, and we’ll touch on them throughout this guide to help you take the smartest next steps.

BlueChew may not have quite as many products to choose from, but its flagship treatment, BlueChew Gold, is easily the strongest ED medication on the market, combining four drugs to tackle ED from three different angles. Roman also has a compelling multitherapy, but it’s more expensive, less flexible, and less potent than BlueChew Gold. If Roman has any edge, it’s that it provides a few monotherapies in traditional pill form, which BlueChew does not. That could save men some money, but Roman’s monotherapy prices are poor compared to most other mainstream competitors.

We pitted BlueChew and Roman against one another head-to-head in several key categories we’ve found are most important among men seeking ED medications. Specifically, we looked at effectiveness, safety, cost, and convenience. Roman offers treatments and services for many other health concerns, while BlueChew focuses specifically on ED treatments. This analysis focuses on comparing the two companies on how they help you treat ED.

Let’s see how the two companies stood up in each criterion.

Effectiveness

Winner: BlueChew

Simply put, there’s nothing in Roman’s catalog that can compete with BlueChew Gold in terms of potential efficacy. Gold combines four ED medications that address the causes of ED in three distinct ways, while Roman’s most powerful ED treatment, Ro Sparks, uses the same two PDE5 medications in Gold at like or weaker doses.

Here’s a quick comparison:

As you can see, Gold is both stronger and more flexible than Sparks. Its inclusion of apomorphine and oxytocin expands its ability to treat ED arising from more causes than the blood flow concerns addressed by PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil and tadalafil.5

Specifically, apomorphine, a dopamine receptor agonist, can help balance that brain chemistry issues that lead to neurogenic ED.3 19 Meanwhile, oxytocin, a hormone associated with love and bonding, has been shown to help treat things like anxiety and depression — major factors in psychogenic ED, which accounts for up to 40% of ED cases.17 18

Because Ro Sparks contains only PDE5 inhibitors, it can’t help men whose ED arises from these other places. That makes Gold potentially more effective than Sparks or any other monotherapy in Roman’s lineup.

Safety

Winner: Roman

There are certain risks associated with PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil and tadalafil, both of which are present in Ro Sparks and BlueChew Gold.4 Some of these are a direct result of PDE5 inhibitors’ action on blood flow, while others results from the collateral impact on other PDE enzymes.13

For Sparks, it isn’t a particularly safe approach to offer the medication in only a single dose increment. Still, Roman gets added points for safety for its wide range of traditional monotherapy tablets. By comparison, you can’t get the same variety of monotherapies from BlueChew, but Gold is available in three dose increments, giving you the opportunity to titrate up to an effective dose.

That said, Gold contains two additional ingredients in apomorphine and oxytocin, which can introduce side effects of their own not seen in Ro Sparks. And if the lowest Gold dose causes side effects, you might have to look elsewhere for treatment.

Cost

Winner: BlueChew

Sometimes, when we’re calculating potential costs for a consumer, we have to go pretty deep into our comparisons before a winner emerges. This was not one of those times.

BlueChew Gold is available in three doses, four pack sizes (6, 12, 18, or 24 servings), and three shipping and billing intervals (monthly, quarterly, semiannually). The lower the dose, the higher the quantity, and the longer the billing interval, the less expensive the product is per dose. It’s essentially bulk savings, and it translates to 24 distinct price points. For example, a base dose of Gold in a 24-pack delivered six months at a time gives you the lowest possible cost per dose at $7.30.

Ro Sparks’ pricing is much simpler. It costs $12 per dose at every pack size, but you can get it quarterly instead of monthly to save a little more money, bringing the cost per dose down to as low as $10.75. That’s still more than $3 per dose more expensive than Gold for a product that includes half as many medications.

Convenience

Winner: BlueChew

In terms of acquiring a prescription and having the medication shipped to you, both BlueChew and Roman deliver about the same experience. Where the companies ultimately differ is in how you take the medicines themselves.

With BlueChew, its medications are individually wrapped, and you can choose whether to chew them or let them dissolve under your tongue. Ro Sparks, however, is sublingual-only (dissolving but not chewable). Sublingual delivery is convenient, as it can get the medication into your bloodstream more quickly by passing through oral membranes rather than being digested.16 But if you don’t like the taste or want to get back to kissing without having a lozenge under your tongue, the option to chew is an added convenience for Gold.

Aside from Sparks, Roman’s other medications are traditional pills that come in typical prescription bottles. If you wanted to bring one or two out with you to a bar or a club, you’d have to find something to carry them in.

Another important point of convenience comes from dose flexibility. BlueChew offers Gold in three doses, which you can experiment with under the supervision of your affiliated doctor until you find the dose that works for you. With Roman, Sparks comes in only one dose. If it’s too strong or too weak, there’s nowhere else to turn other than the company’s monotherapy pills.

Both BlueChew and Roman offer medications called PDE5 inhibitors.5 This is the class of medications that includes Viagra and Cialis. To understand how they work, it helps to know a bit about the mechanics of an erection and the common physiological symptoms of ED.6

When you get aroused, your body releases cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), which relaxes the smooth muscle tissue in the penis and allows it to engorge with blood. That added blood expands the penis, resulting in an erection.

But what if your erection didn’t go away after climax? That would certainly have posed a problem for our ancestors trying to outrun bears. So, humans developed an off-switch called phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5).

PDE5 is an enzyme that causes the breakdown of cGMP, and as your body runs low on cGMP, the muscles in the penis constrict, blood flow reduces, and your erection goes away. With many ED cases, there’s either too little cGMP produced upon arousal or PDE5 is too abundant or being released too early (before climax). PDE5 inhibitors prevent the enzymatic activity of PDE5, allowing cGMP to continue building up and doing its job: maintaining relaxed smooth muscles and the blood flow needed for a healthy erection.7

This is why the common misconceptions that Viagra will directly cause an erection or result in hours-long erections are incorrect.8 Rather, Viagra and other PDE5 inhibitors allow you to respond to arousal with an erection and to keep that erection long enough to enjoy penetrative sex to climax. They don’t magically make you hard out of nowhere. After climax, your body’s PDE5 production picks up dramatically, typically with more intensity than PDE5 inhibitors are designed to counteract. That way, you won’t have an erection for hours after intercourse (if you do, this is a reason to call your doctor).

Winner: BlueChew

Combination therapies appear to be growing in popularity. The first major player we saw offer them was Rugiet, with its custom-compounded lozenges combining sildenafil, tadalafil, and a less commonly used ED treatment called apomorphine. Then Hims and Roman both launched combination treatments, with Roman’s Sparks combining a middle dose of sildenafil with a high dose of tadalafil in a similar lozenge format.

BlueChew wasn’t far behind, soon launching its own combination treatments, Max and Gold. Max was a direct competitor to Sparks, combining sildenafil and tadalafil in slightly lower doses for a much better price. But Gold added apomorphine and oxytocin to the picture and was such a hit with men that BlueChew essentially consolidated its business around it.

One study looking at the sildenafil-tadalafil combination found no increase in adverse effects compared to monotherapy controls, but the combinations included 50mg of sildenafil with only 5mg of tadalafil, notably less than the 22mg of the latter found in Roman’s combination or the 18mg-22mg in BlueChew Gold.15

BlueChew Gold takes things a couple of steps further than this duo, starting with a base of sildenafil and tadalafil, then adding the apomorphine seen in Rugiet Ready and a fourth ingredient: oxytocin.

Let’s look at how these two additional medications work so we can better understand how BlueChew Gold meaningfully differentiates itself from other multitherapies on the market, including Ro Sparks:

Combined with Gold’s sildenafil and tadalafil doses, these two ingredients round out a formula that can tackle ED from blood flow, neurochemical, and psychological sources. And when you consider that many ED pathologies can include all three contributing factors, it makes total sense to seek a medication that can tackle all of them.

One other really nice thing about BlueChew’s combination offerings is that they’re delivered as a chewable tablet that can also quickly dissolve under your tongue and can theoretically start working faster than drugs absorbed in the gut. Sparks is merely a sublingual tablet — no real option to chew it — and it takes much longer to dissolve than BlueChew.

Winner: Roman

This category is something of an easy win for Roman, though only when comparing it to BlueChew, where a multitherapy is your only real source of relief.

But Roman’s catalog of traditional monotherapies for ED is both smaller than many competitors' and significantly more expensive. The one thing it has going for it, which we’ll discuss under the tadalafil header below, is the taste of its daily tadalafil gummies.

So, as we take a peek at sildenafil and tadalafil from Roman, we’ll let you know where else you might want to turn to get more variety and better prices than Roman offers.

Sildenafil

Sildenafil is the active ingredient in Viagra, and it’s therapeutically identical to Viagra in its generic form. Either one will take around an hour to kick in and should last for 4-6 hours.9 Both have the same side effect profile, too, with some cardiovascular risks and the potential for visual disturbances and muscle pain. But generic sildenafil is a lot less expensive than branded Viagra That being said, several competitors offer traditional sildenafil for a lower price than Roman.

The lowest you’ll pay per dose from Roman is $4 for tablets that each contain 25mg. That price goes up to $6 for 50mg or $10 per dose for 100mg. But you can get sildenafil from Rocket Rx for around $3.50 per 100mg dose, with even lower prices for lower doses. You can even get chewable sildenafil from Hims in 45mg doses for around $5 per dose — $1 less than the 50mg pill from Roman.

Tadalafil

You can take tadalafil either as needed or as a daily medication. When taken as needed, it will last in the body for anywhere from 12 to 36 hours, depending on things like dosage, your metabolism, and whether you took it on an empty stomach.10 Like sildenafil, it can take up to an hour to start working.

When taken daily, tadalafil builds up in your system and is always there if you happen to need it.11 But if you aren’t especially sexually active, taking a daily medication might not be your best course of action.

Again, we find that Roman’s tadalafil tablets are vastly overpriced, with doses for generic tadalafil landing between $8 and $11 each. Compared to Hims’ $1.07 per dose for its tablets or the $1.30 per dose for its chewable tadalafil, Roman’s price is pretty hard to swallow.

Roman’s daily tadalafil gummies at least offer a bright spot in terms of flavor. We’ve tasted every chewable tablet, gummy, and lozenge in this market sector, and we can confidently say that Roman’s tadalafil gummies are the only medication we actually enjoyed. BlueChew Gold is flavored well, but it’s strongly medicinal by comparison.

There are a handful of trustworthy telehealth companies that can provide prescriptions for ED medications, and we’ve spent considerable time evaluating each of them. We’ve even mentioned some of them in this guide. Here’s a quick snapshot, including some options better than either BlueChew or Roman:

In addition to other companies offering PDE5 inhibitors, there are several approaches to treating or working around ED that are worth considering. They include:

• Nutritional supplements
• Penis pumps
• Penis sleeves
• Shockwave therapy

Some of these can be used in conjunction with PDE5 medications, but be sure to speak with your doctor first.

For men seeking the strongest possible ED treatment, especially those with concerns about how mental health could affect their performance, BlueChew is the only real game in town. Roman makes more sense for men who are brand-new to ED meds or wary of advancing toward a more complex treatment until they’ve tried some monotherapies. That said, Roman’s monotherapy prices are poor, so it ends up being better to compare BlueChew with other competitors, like Hims or Rocket Rx, if you’re serious about starting with a monotherapy.