Growth-hormone peptides get lumped together in community stacks, but their research bases could not be more different. Ranked by evidence quality they span the entire scale, from an FDA-approved drug to compounds with minimal human data, and the most-stacked pair sits at the bottom.
The single most useful thing to know about this category is that "GH peptides" is a marketing grouping, not an evidence grouping. Tesamorelin is FDA-approved as Egrifta with a real Phase 3 human evidence base, which is why it sits at Strong and leads nearly every dimension. Sermorelin has a long clinical history and reaches Moderate. CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin, the pair most people actually stack, land at Limited and Weak because their human research is thin.
That inversion is the story: the compounds with the most community momentum, CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin, are the least evidenced of the four, while the best-evidenced, Tesamorelin, is rarely the one being casually stacked for anti-aging or body composition. If you are orienting by research quality, Tesamorelin and Sermorelin are in a genuinely different tier.
One dimension ties across all four: funding independence, where every compound scores 4 out of 10. The GH-peptide literature broadly shares a moderate dependence on industry-adjacent work, so that is not a point of differentiation here.
The honest takeaway is not "take Tesamorelin." It is that the popular GH-peptide stack rests on the weakest evidence in this group, and that the strength of the research does not track the strength of the community enthusiasm. Low scores for CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin reflect sparse human research, not proof that they fail to raise GH.