Function Health vs Superpower: Which Lab Membership Wins?

The one-sentence version

Function Health and Superpower are far more alike than their marketing — or their lawsuit — suggests. Both are direct-to-consumer (DTC) lab memberships built around a "100+ biomarker" baseline panel, a retest, a flag-it-against-optimal-ranges dashboard, and physician-ordered labs. Both share the same decisive limit: they test, they don't treat. So the honest comparison isn't "which has more markers" (a near-meaningless axis) but "which more reliably surfaces the four or five cheap, outcome-validated numbers that actually matter, at a price you'll pay, without padding or upsell pressure." On that axis it's close, and the tiebreaker is track record and how you read flags — not the headline count. For the field context, start with our pillar on longevity medicine: what's proven vs hyped and our breakdown of what longevity biomarker panels actually test.

What each one is

• •Function Health is the category's headline act: a membership positioned around ~$499/year built around a 100+ marker baseline panel plus a mid-year retest, with physician-ordered and -reviewed labs and a dashboard flagging results against "optimal" ranges. Full breakdown in our Function Health review.
• •Superpower is the venture-backed challenger (a widely reported ~$30M raise), also selling a 100+ marker baseline plus retest, a polished app, and physician-ordered labs, positioned on aggressive price-per-marker. Full breakdown in our Superpower Health review.

Treat all dollar figures as current market info — DTC lab pricing and tiers shift constantly. The structural product is nearly the same on both sides.

The thing both get right

Give both their due: a standard annual physical orders a basic lipid panel, a metabolic panel, and a CBC, then stops. Both Function and Superpower routinely include markers with strong hard-outcome evidence that your checkup probably skips:

• •ApoB counts the number of atherogenic particles; when it disagrees with standard LDL cholesterol, the particle count is the better predictor of cardiovascular events¹.
• •Lp(a), a genetically set particle, causally raises heart-attack and stroke risk per Mendelian-randomization data² — measured once.
• •hs-CRP predicted cardiovascular events at least as well as LDL cholesterol in a large prospective study³.
• •HbA1c predicted all-cause and cardiovascular mortality continuously in a population study, including below the diabetes threshold⁴.

If either membership gets those four numbers in front of a motivated person, it has earned a real slice of its fee. That core is the same on both — which is exactly why the marker-count war between them is mostly noise.

The thing both get wrong (identically)

Both lean on the "100+ biomarkers" headline, and the framing does the same marketing work on each side:

• •Roughly half is ordinary bloodwork (CBC, metabolic, lipids, thyroid) available cheaper through a primary-care order.
• •Much of the tail is correlated padding — markers that track the cheap Tier-1 core and add line items, not independent signal.
• •A few featured markers mislead as targets — IGF-1, sold as a youth hormone, has a U-shaped mortality curve. And the two biggest longevity levers in epidemiology aren't on any blood panel: cardiorespiratory fitness, among the strongest survival predictors ever measured⁵, and grip strength, which outpredicted blood pressure across 17 countries in PURE⁶.

Decisively, neither treats you. Both flag a high ApoB or a creeping HbA1c; neither titrates your statin or builds and rechecks a plan. For a health-literate buyer with a clinician who'll act, that's fine; for someone hoping the subscription itself improves their health, it's a category error on both sides. We map this whole DTC band in longevity clinics vs lab memberships.

So what actually separates them?

Three honest, second-order differences — none of them the marker count:

1. 1.Track record. Function is the more established of the two with a longer operating history; Superpower is newer and less track-recorded. If "who's been running labs reliably longer" matters to you, Function has the edge today.
2. 2.Price posture. Superpower competes hard on price-per-marker and is often the cheaper way to get the outcome-validated core. If you're buying purely to get ApoB/Lp(a)/hs-CRP/HbA1c at the lowest cost and you'll act on them yourself, Superpower's pricing can win.
3. 3.The lawsuit is a non-factor for buyers. In 2025 Function sued Superpower in a dispute centered on a former Function employee and trade-secret allegations. That's a business-and-personnel fight between competitors. It tells you the space is crowded; it tells you nothing about which panel is clinically better. Don't let it tip your decision.

The grade, and how we got there

We grade each on two axes, because conflating them is the trap both share:

• •As a way to surface outcome-validated markers your checkup skips: moderate-to-strong for both. The core is real and nearly identical.
• •As a "100+ biomarker" health upgrade: weak for both. Half is basic labs, the tail is padding, and neither treats.

That symmetry is the whole story: both land at roughly a B for the actionable core and a C for the model most people think they're buying. The split between them is narrow — Function edges it on track record, Superpower on price — so the right pick is whichever gets the four markers that matter in front of a clinician who'll act, for the price you'll actually pay. If neither sounds like what you want, a targeted outcome-validated panel plus treatment beats either, and we run that cost-benefit in are longevity clinics worth it?.

Who should pick which

• •Pick Function if you value the longer operating track record and a more established dashboard, and the ~$499/year fits.
• •Pick Superpower if you're buying purely on price-per-marker for the outcome-validated core and you'll act on results yourself.
• •Pick neither if you're hoping a subscription will make you healthier. For most of that budget, a targeted panel plus actually treating the few markers that matter does more — and if you mainly want a biological-age number, the open PhenoAge formula derives one from a basic blood draw for free, covered in free biological-age tests. Don't confuse either blood membership with an epigenetic-age test — that's a different product, graded in biological age tests.

Bottom line

Function Health vs Superpower is a near-tie because they're nearly the same product: a 100+ marker baseline, a retest, a flag-it dashboard, physician-ordered labs — and the same decisive limit, that both test without treating. Their real value on both sides is the four or five cheap, outcome-validated markers (ApoB, Lp(a) once, hs-CRP, HbA1c) they surface; their shared weakness is the padded count and the missing treatment. Function edges it on track record, Superpower on price, and the 2025 lawsuit between them is a business story, not a clinical verdict. Pick the one that gets the markers that matter to a clinician who'll act, for the price you'll pay. To see where both rank against InsideTracker and Lifeforce, see our roundup of the best longevity blood test services. For an independently graded look at the labs and clinics selling these memberships, see our longevity clinic rankings.