Rugiet vs BlueChew

As the variety and availability of treatments for erectile dysfunction (ED) have evolved, some companies have innovated far beyond just a single drug in a pill that you swallow. BlueChew was one of the first, coming to market with chewable ED medications. Rugiet followed soon after, offering a combination of drugs — a multitherapy — delivered in a single lozenge.

Both companies continue to evolve, and both now offer effective multitherapies that combine several drugs to fight ED from multiple angles. Choosing between them is no easy task, but we’ve extensively reviewed and tested both companies for the better part of a decade, and our research has revealed a clear winner, depending a bit on your specific needs. We go deep into the differences between these companies and their respective products throughout this guide, but here’s a very quick summary if you’re in a hurry.

The battle between Rugiet and BlueChew is almost entirely fought between each company’s flagship product: BlueChew Gold and Rugiet Ready. And between the two, BlueChew Gold holds nearly every advantage. Prices and effective dosing are either nearly identical or sway in BlueChew’s favor. Even taste favors BlueChew. The margins between them are slim, and if Rugiet’s specific dosing strategy aligns with your safety or efficacy needs, you might be better off there. But that’s liable to be the exception to the general rule that BlueChew is the better place for most men seeking a comprehensive multitherapy for ED to start their journey.

At Innerbody Research, we carefully scrutinize every product and service we review, including both Rugiet and BlueChew. We’ve spent several years covering developments from both companies, seeing their offerings and customer service systems evolve and trying numerous products for ourselves.

We’ve also immersed ourselves in the scientific literature pertaining to ED and men’s sexual health, consuming more than 100 scholarly articles and dedicating nearly 2,000 hours to comparing and interpreting results. Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this guide was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy and will continue to be monitored for updates by our editorial team.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

To pit Rugeit and BlueChew against one another, we focused on the same core criteria we turn to when evaluating either company in its isolated reviews: effectiveness, potential safety concerns, cost to the consumer, taste, and convenience.

But the real heart of the comparison between Rugiet and BlueChew is a comparison between Rugiet Ready and BlueChew Gold, their respective flagship multitherapy products, so we’re going to focus this section, and much of our comparison throughout our guide, on those two key products.

Effectiveness

Advantage: BlueChew

BlueChew clearly wins on potential efficacy when comparing the two companies’ flagship multitherapies; its doses are higher and it includes oxytocin, which Rugiet Ready does not.

Here’s how those two multitherapy formulas compare:

Rugiet has a lower-dose option that BlueChew doesn’t, but at just about every stop along the way thereafter, BlueChew either has slightly higher or equivalent doses of every drug. The only exception is the tadalafil dose between BlueChew’s Base strength and Rugeit’s Medium strength. But BlueChew still boasts its included oxytocin dose, which Rugeit doesn’t offer.

Safety

Advantage: Rugiet

Rugiet and BlueChew both get high marks for safety. Both provide you with well-researched prescription medications through FDA-regulated compounding pharmacies only after you’ve been evaluated for suitability.

If you’re denied treatment on medical grounds, you might understandably be disappointed, but at least you’ll remain healthy. And the intake processes we’ve experienced in our countless interactions with these two entities lead us to believe they could effectively identify any significant contraindications for treatment.

Where Rugiet edges out BlueChew is in a direct comparison of their flagship products, Rugiet Ready and BlueChew Gold. As multitherapies, both potentially pose a higher risk of side effects than a monotherapy would, but Ready is the simpler of the two products, and it comes in four dose levels instead of BlueChew’s three. That extra dose lives on the low end of the spectrum, making for a much more reasonable place for men new to combination therapies to start if they want to test the waters for potential side effects.

Rugiet Ready’s lower doses of both sildenafil and tadalafil should reduce side effect risk and make it more suitable for more men, especially those new to multitherapies.1 Rugiet also doesn’t include oxytocin in its multitherapy formula. That might be a point against it from an efficacy perspective, but likewise makes for a slightly safer treatment path.

There may be some instances in which neither company is right for you. Specifically, men who experience vision-related side effects commonly attributed to sildenafil would have to go elsewhere to seek alternative ED therapies.2 In that case, the only possible course of action within Rugiet’s catalog would be to try one of its multitherapies combining tadalafil for ED with other drugs for other targets, like minoxidil for hair loss.

Cost

Advantage: BlueChew

In either of their catalogs, BlueChew and Rugiet have only one product that you could compare head-to-head on cost: their two flagship multitherapies, BlueChew Gold and Rugiet Ready. The prices between the two are decidedly similar, but BlueChew wins out for two reasons.

First, when doses are comparable but the lowest possible costs per dose aren’t identical, prices favor BlueChew. Second, even when the doses and lowest monthly costs are both comparable, BlueChew Gold still contains oxytocin, an ingredient missing from Rugiet Ready, which improves BlueChew Gold’s value relative to Rugiet.

It’s also important to compare the costs of other treatments with alternatives from competitors where applicable. For example, Rugiet’s ED and hair loss combination costs $147/quarter, which is $30 more per quarter than a nearly identical product from Hims. There are certainly products from other companies that undercut offerings from both BlueChew and Rugiet, but in a head-to-head comparison, BlueChew is a clear, albeit slight, winner.

Taste and texture

Advantage: BlueChew

While taste is ultimately subjective, and our testing team consists of only so many people, there was a general consensus that BlueChew Gold tasted better than Rugiet Ready. To be clear, neither tasted particularly good. With either product, added flavors quickly give way to a highly medicinal taste. But BlueChew’s initial hit was something akin to SweetTarts or a similar candy, whereas Rugiet's flavor was more quickly bitter.

Consistency was also a big problem with Rugiet, as its lozenges are very sensitive to temperature. They’re best kept in the refrigerator, where they can stay firmer. If you leave them out at room temperature, they get a little soft. That might not seem so dire until you realize that the lozenges come in a blister pack that requires manual pressure to remove them from their packaging. So, when heat-softened, they can become significantly squished and deformed, making it harder to remove them from the packaging, and even leaving a little bit of the lozenge behind on the plastic.

BlueChew’s tablets stay firm, even at temperatures above that of the average room.

Convenience

Advantage: BlueChew

Rugiet Ready lozenges have to be held under your tongue and allowed to dissolve. BlueChew Gold is technically a dissolvable tablet that you can dissolve under your tongue, but you can simply chew it instead. So BlueChew Gold gives you a little more choice about how you take it. And if you’re still more than an hour away from a potential sexual encounter, and you aren’t a big fan of the flavor, you can just chew it up and be done with it.

Between the two companies, Rugiet admittedly offers the better customer service, with a phone line staffed by friendly, knowledgeable people. BlueChew relies on a chat interface that’s fine once you work your way past its relatively useless AI chatbot.

But that slight advantage in customer service isn’t enough to overcome BlueChew’s convenience advantage with its Gold tablets, especially given Rugiet’s temperature sensitivities and packaging issues we’ve described.

Rugiet has some convenience advantages over BlueChew, however, particularly concerning other available medications outside flagship multitherapies. Rugiet offers a handful of other compelling products, including combination therapies that tackle more than just ED, like a single pill to address ED alongside hair loss.

BlueChew carries no such products. Take the additional treatment paths available to you from Rugiet:

• Premature ejaculation + ED treatment
• Testosterone replacement therapy
• Sleep support
• Weight loss prescriptions
• Hair loss + ED treatment

So, if you know you want to treat ED alongside another concern, like hair loss or premature ejaculation, Rugiet is a superior choice. But if your main concern is ED, and you want access to the strongest possible multitherapy, then BlueChew is a better place to start.

One last convenience note: Rugiet Ready is available in a few more states than BlueChew Gold. Specifically, Rugiet can ship anywhere in the U.S. other than South Carolina, whereas Gold can’t be shipped to South Carolina, North Carolina, North Dakota, or Louisiana. There’s also a temporary disruption in shipping to Utah that the company tells us will resolve soon.

If you live in any of those four states to which BlueChew currently can’t ship Gold, that’s pretty inconvenient. But telemedicine shipping regulations are in constant fluctuation, so we’ll keep an eye on the changing landscape there to keep this information current.

Rugiet and BlueChew are telehealth companies predominantly focused on men’s sexual health, specifically on treating erectile dysfunction (ED). BlueChew is exclusively focused on ED, while eight of the ten products in Rugeit’s lineup treat either ED or low testosterone.

In that way, the two companies are very similar, but the specifics of their respective lineups reveal very different approaches to treating men’s health.

For example, BlueChew intends to treat ED. Full stop. If there are ancillary benefits conferred by some of its medications, that wasn’t the company’s intention, nor was it likely the intention of an affiliated prescriber. In Rugiet’s case, things are a little different. Its flagship product is undeniably there to treat ED, but the company also has weight loss and sleep medications for men and women. Rugiet also diversifies its ED offerings by combining them with medications to treat other issues, like hair loss.

For men who need to tackle ED effectively, BlueChew Gold is either as strong as or stronger than Rugiet Ready, less expensive than Rugiet Ready, or both. But for men who want to tackle ED and other issues concurrently, Rugiet is superior.

Rugiet and BlueChew company reputations

BlueChew and Rugiet both have relatively well-established reputations, with company profiles on both Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Here’s how they compare at the time of this writing:

As you can see, both companies struggle a bit on the BBB site but perform better on Trustpilot. Rugiet has a slight edge on both pages, but it also has fewer reviews. Negative reviews for both companies often mention taste and occasionally issues with canceling subscriptions.

Rugiet and BlueChew are both smart choices for men seeking a telehealth interface to acquire effective combination therapies for ED. That said, the specific aspects of each company’s catalog make one a better choice for some men, and another a better choice for others.

We touched on this difference a bit in the sections above, and we’ll break down these two companies’ offerings medication-by-medication later on, but suffice it to say that BlueChew is a better for men seeking the strongest possible ED treatment, while Rugiet has a smaller percentage of ED-focused treatments alongside medications for other common men’s health concerns.

Who might want to look elsewhere?

It’s important to understand the limitations of some of these treatments. For starters, they aren’t cures for ED. They can render most men who take them perfectly capable of achieving an erection of sufficient hardness for penetrative sex.3 But they can’t treat underlying causes of ED, like cardiovascular disease or hormonal disruptions.4 5

And even with the dose of oxytocin included in BlueChew Gold, no medication from either company is ideal for treating the psychogenic factors at the root of up to 40% of ED cases.6 Talk therapy and psychiatric medications would be preferable in these cases, and we’ll discuss some of those options in our alternatives section toward the bottom of the guide.

Advantage: BlueChew Gold

Rugiet and BlueChew’s respective flagship products are decidedly similar. Both offer a combination of sildenafil, tadalafil, and apomorphine to treat ED. But between the two, BlueChew Gold has a slight dosing advantage, as well as a fourth active ingredient that can tackle ED from another angle altogether. To better understand how these multitherapies function, let’s quickly break down their key ingredients:

Advantage: Rugiet

Both Rugiet and BlueChew offer effective medications, but we have to give the edge in this category to Rugiet because its variety can appeal to more than just men with ED. Tadalafil — the ED medication — forms the basis of most of its treatments, but it also has weight loss medications suitable for either sex and a suite of TRT options for men with low testosterone, regardless of their erectile health.

That said, if you’re in search of an ED treatment alone, you only have one option from Rugiet in Rugiet Ready. The company offers other medications for things like hair loss and testosterone support that include tadalafil to treat ED, but they aren’t going to be of any use to you unless you want to treat the non-ED conditions they’re meant for, as well.

For example, if you want to treat ED, but Rugiet Ready’s combination seems like too aggressive a place to start, you’d have to select a combination of tadalafil and minoxidil for hair loss or DHEA for low testosterone.17 18 With BlueChew, you also only have one option for ED, but it’s the better of the two complex multitherapies.

Of course, if you’re interested in fighting a combination of ailments such as ED and hair loss concurrently, Rugiet would prove to be the better partner. But Rugiet’s doses of its multi-target therapies are typically very restrictive, providing only one stop for each medication, with no room to titrate. Its ED/hair loss combination, for example, provides 6mg of daily tadalafil alongside 3mg of minoxidil. If you needed more or less of either to improve safety or efficacy, you’d have to seek another provider.

Ultimately, if Rugiet could improve the dose flexibility issue and offer a few simpler ED treatments, it could run away with this category. But for many men, it could be smarter to stick with BlueChew for a better price on a stronger multitherapy that exclusively targets ED, then seek hair loss or PE treatment elsewhere.

Advantage: Rugiet

Between BlueChew Gold and Rugiet Ready, Rugiet has what could be the safer product. That’s because it offers a lower-dose introductory level than BlueChew does. That allows men to start at a theoretically safer place to see whether combining these drugs could incite certain adverse effects. If efficacy is merely fine, and there are no side effects, then you could titrate up to a dose that’s more comparable between the two companies.

Rugiet also gets some points here because it excludes oxytocin from its formula. Not that oxytocin is particularly dangerous — research indicates it should be safe for most people19 — but any added active ingredient increases side effect risks, so eliding oxytocin from its formula gives Rugiet a small edge for safety.

Beyond that, the companies are more or less tied. They both carry out thorough medical intakes that lead to legal, legitimate prescriptions provided by licensed medical professionals. The pharmacies they use are FDA-regulated and deliver LegalScript-certified medications. So, what wins this category for Rugiet turns out to be its medication’s simplicity and flexibility.

Advantage: BlueChew

BlueChew Gold and Rugiet Ready are the only two products in these two companies’ catalogs that can be closely compared in terms of cost. And that comparison almost always favors BlueChew, though there’s some nuance to unpack here.

Here’s where a good chart comes in handy:

What’s fascinating about how these prices compare is that there’s a clear shift in the lower half of the chart. At their respective maximum doses, Rugiet’s and BlueChew’s prices are in lockstep, despite BlueChew being the only one of the two to include oxytocin in its formula. But then, when you compare Rugiet’s medium dose with BlueChew’s base dose, BlueChew’s lowest cost per dose is nearly $2 less expensive. That’s such a significant difference that it’s about the same price as Rugiet’s next dose level down, which represents a big drop-off in sildenafil and a small but noticeable drop in tadalafil for Rugiet Ready.

Add to that the fact that you can try BlueChew for less by knocking 10% off Gold using any of the links in this guide, and BlueChew reveals itself to be both less expensive up front and in the long term.

Advantage: BlueChew

To date, the only chewable ED medication that’s actually tasted good to our testers has been Roman’s Daily Rise Gummies, a daily tadalafil chewable. The problem that arises with most other chewable ED meds is that the taste of the medicine is too strong to mask. Some companies use specific flavors and intensities to try to overcome that flavor, while others do their best to complement the medicinal taste.

With BlueChew Gold and Rugiet Ready, we encounter two very different flavor profiles. Rugiet uses mint to mask the flavors of its lozenges, which at least has the benefit of potentially freshening your breath shortly before intercourse. Unfortunately, the taste of its medications shines through very quickly. By comparison, BlueChew uses a flavor it calls Black Cherry Pomegranate. When you first put a Gold tablet in your mouth, you do get a hit of dark, fruity flavor that could almost fit that description. But the taste of the medicine rushes in after that.

Pressed to choose, our testers felt that BlueChew’s flavoring paired a little better with the bitter medicinal taste, though the margins between the competitors were slim. If anything, what made the biggest difference is the fact that you have to keep Rugiet Ready in your mouth for longer, while with BlueChew you can choose whether to let it dissolve or to chew it. In other words, if you don’t like how Ready tastes, you’re stuck with it in your mouth. With BlueChew, you can minimize the duration of the negative flavor experience.

Whether the prospect of lozenges and chewable medications doesn’t interest you enough for you to justify spending more money on the same therapies, or you’re just curious to see whether other companies offer similar novel formulas for less, there’s a growing landscape of telemedical outfits offering products in competition with those you can get from Rugiet and BlueChew.

Here, we examine a handful of the top players in this space to reveal the specific ways they might make superior choices for some men seeking treatments akin to those in Rugiet’s and BlueChew’s catalogs.

If you’re determined to learn more about these options and other alternative treatments for ED, you should check out our complete guide to ED treatment.

While BlueChew’s and Rugiet’s flagship products are decidedly similar, BlueChew retains an edge in efficacy. BlueChew Gold trends slightly stronger, with equal or higher doses and the addition of oxytocin, all at a cost as low as or lower than Rugiet. Men looking to get a comprehensive ED multitherapy for less money should stick with BlueChew, while men looking to combine ED treatment with therapies for things like hair loss or premature ejaculation would do better to stick with Rugiet.