Short answer, folks: Mind Lab Pro is the better-studied product and Beyond Raw Nootropic is the cheaper one. Neither has caffeine. They share four ingredients, bacopa and L-theanine plus rhodiola and tyrosine. Beyond Raw is a GNC gym-brand powder you stir into a drink, at about $1.17 a serving. Mind Lab Pro is a two-capsule serving at about $2.30 before any discount, and it’s the only one of the two with trials of its own. If you lift and want something to mix into your shake, Beyond Raw makes sense. If you’d rather swallow capsules and read the studies first, Mind Lab Pro does.
I read both labels and both shop pages again on November 2, 2026 (yes, the fine print too). It all went into my notes. These two get compared a lot in the comments here, and honestly they aren’t built for the same person. One lives on the sports shelf next to the protein tubs. The other sells itself to anyone who wants a sharper workday.
Quick and important: I’m not a doctor, and none of this is medical advice. If you take any medication, you’re pregnant or nursing, you’re under 18, or you have a health condition, talk to your doctor before you try either one. Beyond Raw’s own label says much the same, and it adds that you should stop two weeks before any surgery. I’m also leaving the amounts out on purpose. How much of anything to take is a talk for your doctor, not a blog.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
- who makes each one, and why that tells you who it’s for
- the four ingredients they share, and what each one adds on its own
- what a bitter scoop and two capsules are like to live with
- the studies behind each, and who paid for them
- the cost per serving at full price and on a subscription
- which one fits a lifter, a student or a tight budget
A Gym Brand and a Brain Brand
Beyond Raw is GNC’s own sports brand. You’ll find it next to the pre-workouts and the protein, not next to the fish oil. Chemistry Labs is the Beyond Raw line of plain, single-purpose powders, and the Nootropic tub sits in that line. That tells you who it was made for: someone who already mixes a drink before training and wants a focus add-in.
Mind Lab Pro comes at it from the other side. The maker calls it a “universal nootropic,” meant for anybody who wants a clearer head at work or school, and it comes as capsules. There’s no gym anywhere on the bottle.
Stack3d, a supplement news site, wrote up the Beyond Raw powder in August 2026 and made the gym angle plain. Since the label has no caffeine, they pointed out that you can stack it with a pre-workout that doesn’t already carry nootropics. That’s the clearest picture I’ve seen of who should buy it.
READ: Beyond Raw Nootropic Review: What’s Really in GNC’s Focus Powder
The Four Ingredients They Share
Put the two labels side by side and four names show up on both. Bacopa and L-theanine are two of them, rhodiola and tyrosine the other two. Beyond Raw lists its tyrosine as acetyl L-tyrosine. Mind Lab Pro calls it N-acetyl L-tyrosine, which is the same form with a longer name. Beyond Raw also uses branded versions of two of them, Synapsa for the bacopa and Suntheanine for the L-theanine.
The amounts aren’t the same, and I’m keeping the numbers out on purpose. What I can tell you is that Beyond Raw’s scoop holds roughly twice as much bacopa as a Mind Lab Pro serving, while the rhodiola matches on both labels. Neither one hides anything inside a proprietary blend, and I always give a company credit for that. Every ingredient shows its own amount, so you and your doctor can read exactly what’s in there.
Bacopa is the shared ingredient with the most research behind it. One 90-day trial at Swinburne University in Australia, published in 2008, started with 107 healthy adults, and 62 of them finished. The bacopa group did better than the placebo group on a working memory test, spatial working memory in particular. That’s one study of one herb, though. It isn’t a study of either product.
What Only Beyond Raw Puts in the Tub
Beyond Raw adds four things you won’t find in Mind Lab Pro. TeaCrine is a branded form of theacrine. NeuroFactor is a coffee fruit concentrate, made from the cherry that coffee beans grow inside. GABA is on there, and so is huperzia leaf extract, the plant that huperzine comes from.
That’s eight ingredients packed into a scoop of about 3 grams, and one tub holds 30 servings. It’s a lot of names for a small scoop (I counted twice), which is why I always check a powder like this for anything underdosed. Here, at least, every amount is printed where you can see it.
Now the part that matters most to me. I couldn’t find a single trial of the Beyond Raw powder itself. Each ingredient has its own small pile of research, but nobody has published a study of these eight together in this tub. That isn’t a red flag on its own, and in my experience it’s normal for a store-brand powder. It just means you’re trusting a recipe that was built from studies of single ingredients.
One more note. If you take any medication at all, show your doctor the whole Beyond Raw label before you start, and the Mind Lab Pro label too if you’re weighing both.
What Only Mind Lab Pro Puts in the Capsules
Mind Lab Pro has 11 ingredients, so seven of them are its own. Citicoline comes as the branded Cognizin. Then there’s organic lion’s mane mushroom, from both the fruiting body and the mycelium, plus phosphatidylserine and maritime pine bark extract. It finishes with three B vitamins: B6, B9 (folate) and B12.
So it’s the wider formula of the two. Beyond Raw goes heavy on alert-and-awake ingredients you’d expect near a pre-workout. Mind Lab Pro spreads out into the mushroom, the vitamins and the phospholipids instead. Neither approach is proven better for you, and I’d be making it up if I said otherwise.
The capsules are pullulan, a plant-based shell, and the maker says the product suits vegans and is third-party tested. The label lists no caffeine and no stimulants.
READ: Every Mind Lab Pro Ingredient, and the Dose the Research Actually Used
A Bitter Scoop or Two Capsules
Beyond Raw is unflavored. The label tells you to mix one scoop with 8 ounces of water or another drink. When I wrote my Beyond Raw review, the buyer comments I collected kept saying the same thing: in plain water it tastes bitter and earthy. Their usual fix was juice or a flavored protein shake, which hides it well, according to those buyers. One buyer said it upset their stomach. That’s one person, not a pattern, but it’s worth knowing.
Mind Lab Pro is a two-capsule serving, so taste never comes up. You swallow them with water and move on with your day. If you hate powders, that settles it for you. If you already shake up a protein drink every morning, though, a scoop kinda disappears into it and you won’t think about it again.
Travel is the other small difference, and I’ll admit it’s a petty one. A tub and a scoop are fine at home and annoying in a bag. A bottle of capsules goes anywhere.
The Studies: Three on One Side, None on the Other
Mind Lab Pro’s product page lists three studies of the finished formula. One looked at information processing and reaction time, one at memory, and one at brain activity on an EEG. Two of the three, the page says, were paid for by the maker’s parent company.
I read the memory study closely, because it’s the one people quote. It ran in Human Psychopharmacology in 2023. 49 healthy adults finished it, aged 20 to 68, split 36 on Mind Lab Pro and 13 on placebo, for 30 days. The authors call the setup “pseudo randomised.” The Mind Lab Pro group improved on every memory subtest, and the placebo group improved on two of them too, auditory memory and immediate recall.
So it’s small, it’s short, the groups are uneven, and the company paid for it. That’s still more than Beyond Raw has. I looked for a trial of the Beyond Raw powder and came up empty. When one side has three company-funded studies and the other has none, I’ll call it a win for Mind Lab Pro on paper. Just not a big one.
Cost Per Serving, Full Price and Subscribed
These are the prices I found on November 2, 2026. Beyond Raw Nootropic is $34.99 a tub, which works out to about $1.17 a serving. GNC’s subscribe-and-save takes 10% off, down to $31.49, or about $1.05 a serving.
Mind Lab Pro is $69 for one bottle, about $2.30 a serving. The monthly subscription drops it to $51.75, about $1.73. The four-month plan costs $187.68 for the first order, about $1.56 a serving, and then renews at $207 every four months. The page had a Black Friday banner up when I checked, so expect those numbers to move.
Over a year at full price, you’d pay $419.88 for 12 tubs against $828 for 12 bottles. That’s a gap of $408.12. On the monthly subscriptions it’s $377.88 against $621, so Mind Lab Pro still costs you $243.12 more. That extra money buys the capsules and the wider formula, plus the trials. Whether that’s worth it is your call, not mine.
Neither One Has Caffeine, and Lifters Should Care
Neither label lists caffeine. For Mind Lab Pro that’s the whole pitch. For Beyond Raw it’s a choice, so you can add your own. That’s the point Stack3d made, and it’s why the powder sits next to a pre-workout instead of replacing one.
Here’s why that matters if you train. A stim pre-workout is built around caffeine. If your focus powder had caffeine too, you could stack two doses on top of each other without meaning to. With either of these, going by the label, you won’t.
Your coffee still counts, though. Adding either one doesn’t raise your caffeine total, but it doesn’t make a big total any safer either. Count the cups and the scoops of pre-workout, and ask your doctor what your own limit should be.
READ: Mind Lab Pro vs Caffeine: Which Should You Actually Buy?
Which One Fits a Lifter, a Student or a Tight Budget
If you lift, you already mix a shake, and you don’t mind a bitter taste hiding in it, Beyond Raw is the easy pick. It costs about half as much per serving, and it was made for your gym bag.
If you’re a student, I’d lean toward Mind Lab Pro. A bottle is easier in a dorm than a tub and a scoop, and its trials, small as they are, looked at memory and reaction time. I went deeper on that in Is Mind Lab Pro Worth It for Students? And if you’re under 18, that’s a talk with your doctor and your parents first.
If money’s tight, Beyond Raw wins on cost per serving and it isn’t close. If you take any medication, or you’re pregnant or nursing, neither one is a pick until your doctor has seen the label.
Where I Land on These Two
These two aren’t really rivals. Beyond Raw is a cheap, gym-shelf powder that shares four ingredients with Mind Lab Pro and has no trials of its own. Mind Lab Pro costs about twice as much, comes as capsules, and has three small studies the company paid for. Both labels show every amount, and neither has caffeine.
If your doctor’s fine with you trying one, try one, not both at once, and give it four weeks before you judge it. Jot down how your days feel in week one and again in week four, so you’re not guessing from memory. And if it did nothing for you after that, you’ve learned something for the price of one tub or one bottle.
Got a question about either label? Leave it in the comments, I read every one. That would be it folks!
