What this compares
The toilet is the one fixture where the old format still holds the shelf: an angle-necked plastic bottle of thickened bleach, bought again every few weeks and thrown away every few weeks. The tablet is the format trying to replace it, and it arrives in two quite different shapes. One is dropped in the bowl, fizzes, gets brushed and flushed, and is gone. The other is dropped in the cistern and dyes the water blue for months. They are sold from the same shelf under the same word, and they are not the same purchase.
We took seven products, six of them from brands that sell themselves on being lower tox, and read each one on six things a reader can check from a product page inside a minute: whether the full ingredient list is published, what that list holds once it is read against our watch list, whether the product puts polyvinyl alcohol into the bowl and whether the page says so, what one clean costs, what the pack is made of, and which third-party marks the product carries. The order they are printed in is our editorial choice, argued product by product rather than produced by a calculation, and where a brand is new or small we say so and give it the benefit of the doubt. Nothing here is a judgement on how well a tablet cleans, and we have not scrubbed a bowl.
What we found
The Unscented Company is the fragrance-free pick on this page, and it holds the cost row outright at $0.51 a clean, less than half what the dearest clean here costs. The full list is on the product page, entry by entry with a function behind each one, there is no film, the formula is a descaler plus a bacterial blend rather than bleach[4], and since 25/08/2026 the watch list catches nothing in it at all, Laureth-7 having gone with the retired entry for PEG and ethoxylated compounds. Where it gives ground is the pack. The page says the tabs come in a recyclable pouch and never says what the pouch is made of, so it is a recyclable single-material pouch rather than a plastic-free one, and the certifications section of that page carries a single Leaping Bunny mark.
Blueland held this page from 21/08/2026 until 25/08/2026, and it still carries the heaviest certification stack in the table. Its list names the scent as lemongrass, eucalyptus, peppermint and lavender oils with limonene declared, so what the watch list catches is sodium lauryl sulfate and the declared oils, nothing upper tier[2]. The full list is on the product page, each entry with a CAS number and a stated function, and it arrives in a modal opened from the page rather than as flat text, so it has to be read in a browser to be read at all. There is no film, and the tablets refill a steel Forever Tin from compostable paper. The pack is the best on this page and the price is not: $1.16 a clean even from the 84-tablet refill, with three products costing less.
Fab Tab led this page under the earlier method and does not lead it now. Nothing on its page has changed. The ingredient table is still there with a function beside every entry, the tablet still carries no film, and the pouch is still called 100 per cent plastic free[5]. What changed is that the list is now read against a watch list, and three of its entries are upper tier: sodium hexametaphosphate is a phosphate, boric acid is a borate, and the table ends in a bare Fragrance that the marketing copy calls lemon and eucalyptus without itemising anything behind it. Three upper-tier entries in one short list is why it sits where it sits, whatever the pouch says. The cost row is strong: from the 90-tablet pouch a clean is $0.78, with two products in the table costing less.
The watch-list read is worth setting out in full, because it does more to shape this order than anything else on the page. Upper-tier entries turn up in Fab Tab, on the phosphate, the borate and the bare Fragrance; in Grove Co., on a natural origin fragrance the page footnotes and never itemises; and in Clorox, on two chlorinated hydantoins and diethylene glycol. The rest carry lower-tier entries only: sodium lauryl sulfate and declared limonene for Blueland, named essential oils for Simply Zero, and, since the read of 26/08/2026, limonene and eucalyptol for our own tablet. The Unscented Company is the exception, and it is a recent one: Laureth-7 was the whole of its catch, and on 25/08/2026 the watch-list entry for PEG and ethoxylated compounds was retired for every product at once, which took that entry with it and left a list the watch list catches nothing in. That is why it stands where it does, as the fragrance-free pick beside our own tablet. The same retirement cleared PEG 8000 from our own tablet, and the fragrance disclosure of 26/08/2026 and the cheapest-pack cost basis read the same day are what moved it up this page.
Vove’s tablets lead this page. We own the site and we make the tablet, so the reasons are printed in full and the case against them is printed with them. Until 26/08/2026 the V1.6 formula carried a Lime and Eucalyptus fragrance that named the scent character and nothing else, no allergen and no INCI component, so it read exactly as Fab Tab’s bare Fragrance and Grove’s natural origin fragrance read, as an upper-tier watch-list entry. On 26/08/2026 the product page was republished with the entry naming limonene and eucalyptol behind the scent, the same substances already declared on the product’s Safety Data Sheet[1]. Whether the substances are named is the whole of the fragrance question, so the entry moves to the lower tier, which is where a disclosed fragrance sits and not where a fragrance-free list sits. This page flagged the gap and the company that owns this page closed it, in public and on a dated page, which is the deal we are offering a reader here. What we put the tablet first on is the rest of the row: the list is on the product page with a source and a function for every entry, the tablet is naked with no film around it, the formula is bacillus spores and citric acid rather than chlorine bleach, and a clean is $0.72 against Blueland’s $1.16. Against it: a disclosed fragrance is still a watch-list entry, the certification row is one FSC mark on the packaging with two products here carrying more, and The Unscented Company’s list is the one the watch list catches nothing in at all.
Grove Co. is the awkward one. The ingredient list sits on the product page under an Ingredients heading, and it reads: sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, sodium lauryl sulfate, cellulose, polyvinyl alcohol, hydrated silica, natural origin fragrance[7]. Higher up the same page, the description says the packs were made for pod-sceptics from renewable and compostable materials. Polyvinyl alcohol is neither. The Amazon listing for the same pack carries the words plastic free in its title[10]. Nothing is concealed, because the polymer is named in the list a shopper can open; what happens is that the two halves of one page point in opposite directions. That is a contradiction on transparency rather than a missing list, the polymer is at least named where a shopper can find it, and a film around every pod is a wrapper as well as an ingredient, which is why the pack does not read as plastic free here. The fragrance entry is footnoted as containing allergens and names none of them, an upper-tier watch-list entry. Grove Co. sits low on this page on all of that together.
Clorox is the incumbent here and it sits in the table with two blank cells. Its Ultra Clean tablet is dropped into the cistern, not the bowl, and the listing says one tablet lasts up to four months[9]. There is no per-clean dose to divide a price by, so there is no cost per clean to print, and we will not place a product we cannot read on the same terms as the rest of the table. The ingredient list is complete and first-party, but it lives on a SmartLabel page reached by a link rather than on the product page a shopper lands on[8]. Read against the watch list it is the heaviest catch in the table: two chlorinated hydantoins as the bleach source, diethylene glycol, a dye and sodium lauryl sulfate.
Simply Zero is the smallest brand on this page and we give it the benefit of the doubt where the reading is close. It publishes its whole list on the product page, ships refills in compostable paper bags and carries no third-party mark of any kind[6]. The scent is given as named essential oils rather than as a fragrance entry, which is the difference between it and Fab Tab, and it is why we put it above a product it used to sit below. A clean is $1.20 against Fab Tab’s $0.78. Simply Zero also asks that the tablets be used within three months, a shelf-life limit none of the others print.
