Motor Oil Comparison Chart: What the Specs Tell You

The chart you are looking for does not exist. Type “motor oil comparison” and you get ranked lists — six brands to avoid, eight oils ranked by mechanics, a brand-owned page comparing its own product to two rivals. Nobody hands you the same five specifications for eight oils so you can draw your own line.

That is the whole trick of the format. A ranking answers “which one wins” before you know what winning means for your engine. A matrix answers nothing until you supply the column that matters.

So this is the matrix. Seven oils off the same shelf, read with the same five columns, and an honest account of the three things it still cannot tell you.

Every Comparison Chart Is a Sales Page

Here is what ranks for both head terms today. Number one: “6 Full Synthetic Oil Brands To NEVER Buy (And 3 That Are Worth It)”. Number two: “What’s the Best Synthetic Motor Oil? How to Compare” — from a company that sells one. Number three, a manufacturer’s oil finder. Two of the ten results are videos.

None of them are lying about the specifications. They just never put the same specifications in the same table for the same set of oils, because a table invites subtraction, and subtraction is bad for the affiliate business.

You are standing in the oil aisle with two jugs in your hands. Same viscosity, same “full synthetic” badge, one costs twelve dollars more. The ranking you read this morning told you which is better. It did not tell you what the twelve dollars buys, and that is the only question you actually have.

Worth knowing: the whole cluster is small and soft — “motor oil comparison” at 110 searches a month with a difficulty score around 5, “motor oil comparison chart” at 70 with a cost-per-click of $1.69. The high CPC on a low-difficulty term is the tell: advertisers value this query because it sits one click from a purchase.

The Five Columns That Decide It

Forget the ranking. These are the columns, in the order they can hurt you.

1. Viscosity grade. 5W-30, 0W-20, 5W-40. It is printed on the cap of your engine and it is the only number the oil pump cares about at a cold start. Everything else is downstream. Getting this wrong is the one mistake that shows up on a repair bill rather than in a forum argument.

2. API SP and ILSAC GF-6A. They travel together on gasoline oils. ILSAC licenses the fuel-economy side, API licenses the engine-protection side. The low-speed pre-ignition test arrived with SN Plus in 2018; SP, in 2020, kept it and tightened the oxidation and deposit requirements on top. SP is backward compatible: an SP oil can go where the manual says SN.

3. The ACEA letter. This is the column American shoppers skip and European engines live by. ACEA C3 requires a high-temperature high-shear viscosity (HTHS) of at least 3.5 mPa·s. ILSAC GF-6A allows 2.9. Two oils can both say 5W-30 and sit on opposite sides of that line, and the thicker film is what a European turbo diesel was designed around.

4. OEM approvals. dexos1 Gen 3 for GM, MB 229.5 for Mercedes, VW 504 00, BMW Longlife-04, Chrysler MS-12991, Porsche C30. This is the only column with legal force on your warranty, and the only one where the manufacturer did the testing you cannot do in your garage.

5. Base oil group. Group III, hydrotreated. Group IV, PAO. Group V, esters. The column everyone wants and almost nobody prints.

Worth knowing: the difference between a $26 jug and a $34 jug is often not on this chart at all — it is the additive package, the Noack volatility and the oxidation reserve, none of which are regulated disclosure in the US.

The Matrix: Seven Oils, Five Columns

Read this the way you would read a tyre spec sheet. Empty cells are information too.

Seven rows, and the rightmost column is empty in every one. That is not laziness on my part.

Now the honest part, and it stings a little to write it. Four of those five 5W-30 oils are, on this chart, identical. Same grade, same API licence, same ILSAC sequence, no ACEA claim, no manufacturer approval printed. Between the cheapest and the most expensive of the four sits roughly thirty percent of the price and zero difference in the columns.

Something separates them. It is just not something a buyer can verify from the bottle, which means the chart has done its job the moment it tells you the four are equivalent as far as you can check.

Three of the rows above

Mobil 1 Advanced Full Synthetic Motor Oil 5W-30, 5 Quart

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Castrol EDGE 5W-30 Advanced Full Synthetic Motor Oil, 5 Quarts

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Pennzoil Platinum Full Synthetic 5W-30 Motor Oil, 5 Quart

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* Affiliate links. Prices last updated November 11, 2026.

The two 5W-40 rows are the interesting ones, and they are the reason the ACEA column exists. Both carry A3/B4, both demand the 3.5 HTHS floor, and one of them carries Chrysler MS-12991 — the approval the 3.0 EcoDiesel in a Ram 1500 actually asks for. If your manual says MS-12991, that final column collapses the whole shelf to one answer. If it does not, you are paying a European-spec premium for nothing.

What the Chart Cannot Tell You

Three numbers decide whether the $26 oil and the $34 oil are the same oil in different bottles. None of them appear on a label.

Noack volatility measures how much oil evaporates in an hour at 250 °C. Lower is better; it is what keeps your oil level stable between changes and what keeps deposits off the intake valves. ILSAC GF-6A caps it at 15 percent, Mercedes sets a 10 percent ceiling for MB 229.5, and a pure API SP licence without the ILSAC starburst publishes no ceiling at all.

TBN, total base number, is the reserve that neutralises acid. It is the number that decides whether a long drain interval is safe or a slow way to ruin an engine.

Oxidation resistance is what separates a Group III oil from a PAO blend at 15,000 miles, and it is measurable — just not by you, and not by any ranking page.

This is where PQIA used to matter. The Petroleum Quality Institute of America bought oil off shelves with its own money and published the lab results — viscosity, TBN, Noack, the actual numbers — for anyone who wanted them. For a few years it was the only neutral referee in the aisle. Then the site went quiet: pqia.org now answers with a WordPress login screen, “Private Site”, which I confirmed today. The data that made oil comparisons honest is behind a wall, and the affiliate rankings filled the space it left.

Worth knowing: “full synthetic” is not a regulated term in the United States. A Group III hydrotreated base stock, which is what most of the bottles in that table contain, qualifies for the badge. The label is a marketing claim; the API and ACEA marks are the licensed ones.

What you can do instead costs about one oil change: send a sample to a lab. Thirty to forty dollars buys you viscosity, TBN and wear metals for the oil that is actually in your engine, which beats any chart written about somebody else’s shelf.

Pick the Column Your Engine Cares About

Work backwards. Do not start with the ranking.

1. Open the owner’s manual. Find the specification line, not the viscosity line.
2. Filter the shelf by that code: dexos1 Gen 3, MB 229.5, VW 504 00, BMW Longlife-04, MS-12991, Porsche C30.
3. Among the oils that carry it, buy the cheapest one.
4. Check the viscosity grade matches the cap.

Step three is where people get uncomfortable. It should not. An API SP licence with the right OEM approval is a tested claim, not a brand promise — Supertech and the name brands clear the same licence tests, which is why the store brand performs the same in the specs that count.

Two exceptions are worth the extra money. Turbocharged direct-injection engines benefit measurably from a stricter approval than the manual requires — GM’s dexos1 Gen 3 tightened oxidation, deposit and piston-cleanliness requirements over Gen 2, which is why the SP sequence matters more on those engines. Diesels with a particulate filter normally want a low-SAPS oil, which is the world ACEA C3 describes. The exception is the one that started this article: the 3.0 EcoDiesel runs a particulate filter and still asks for an A3/B4-family oil with MS-12991, because the approval was written for that engine rather than for the filter.

And if two oils in front of you both carry the approval, the tiebreakers are the ones already covered on this site: Mobil 1 against Castrol EDGE on the same spec sheet, and Pennzoil against Mobil 1.

Quick check: if you cannot find an approval code anywhere in your manual, you are driving an engine old enough that the API licence alone is the whole specification. Buy SP, match the grade, spend the difference on the filter.

And if you are still unsure whether any of this matters for a car you drive 6,000 miles a year — that question has its own answer, and it is shorter than this article.

The Spec Sheet Is the Chart

API SQ and ILSAC GF-7A/GF-7B became licensable on 31 March 2025, and new GF-6 licenses ceased on 1 October 2026. Every bottle in the table above still carries SP — which is fine, because API never withdrew it and it remains valid for every engine that asked for SN or later. Each new cycle pushes the tests that no label prints — pre-ignition, chain wear, oxidation — a little further into the open. The label will keep lagging. It always does.

So keep the habit that cost you nothing: match the approval, ignore the ranking, and write down the one number your engine actually asked for. That number is the only column in any chart that was ever about your car.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a motor oil comparison chart actually for?

It is for narrowing a shelf to a shortlist before you read a single review. A useful chart holds the same specifications for every oil — grade, API and ILSAC licence, ACEA sequence, OEM approvals — so you can filter by the one column your manual names. What it cannot do is rank oils by quality, because the numbers that separate a cheap synthetic from an expensive one are not published on the bottle.

Why doesn’t the chart list base oil group, III versus IV?

Because no US label has to declare it. “Full synthetic” is a marketing phrase rather than a regulated grade, and a Group III hydrotreated base stock qualifies for it just as a Group IV PAO blend does. Only a manufacturer’s technical data sheet that names the base oil, or a used-oil analysis, settles which one you actually bought.

What is PQIA and can I still use its test results?

The Petroleum Quality Institute of America was an independent lab that bought oils at retail and published viscosity, TBN, Noack and other measured values for free. As of November 2026 pqia.org returns a WordPress login page rather than the old tables, so the historical results are no longer publicly readable. What remains citable are the specification floors themselves: API SP, ILSAC GF-6A, the ACEA sequences and the OEM approvals printed on the back label.

Is the most expensive oil in the chart the best one?

No, and the chart is the proof. Four oils in the matrix above carry identical grade, identical API licence and identical ILSAC sequence with no additional approval, at prices spread by about thirty percent. When two oils carry the same approval code, the cheaper one is the better purchase — the licence tests are the same tests.

Can I use API SP if my manual says SN?

Yes. SP is backward compatible, so an SP oil can be used wherever SN or SN Plus was specified. The reverse is the mistake: putting an SN-era oil into a 2020-or-later direct-injection engine gives up the low-speed pre-ignition protection that engine was designed around.