PewDiePie vs MrBeast: Who Is the Greatest YouTuber? 14 Lists

PewDiePie and MrBeast have never been further apart than they are this month. On 21 October Fortune profiled Beast Industries as a company valued at $5 billion by PitchBook, and quoted Steven Bartlett saying it "resembles a Fortune 500 holding company".¹ In May, Felix Kjellberg and his wife Marzia told their audience that the Japan vlogs end in September, because their son Björn is three and they want him off camera.²

One of them is building the largest media company a creator has ever owned. The other is winding a channel down from a house outside Tokyo. The search "pewdiepie vs mrbeast" has stayed on Google's autocomplete through all of it, and the 14 YouPickBest rankings below ask the question 14 different ways: greatest, favorite, funniest intro, best for charity, best businessman, most overrated, and four lists with room for just one of them.

PewDiePie built the audience YouTube measured itself by; MrBeast built the company. The lists that reward one almost never reward the other.

PewDiePie vs MrBeast: the 17 greatest YouTubers of all time

The greatest-YouTubers ranking holds 17 names, and PewDiePie and MrBeast are two of them. The other fifteen include Markiplier, Jenna Marbles, Casey Neistat, KSI and Marques Brownlee, so here the two subjects stand among their own generation rather than against each other alone.

MrBeast's case is the number. His channel shows 523 million subscribers, more than any channel on the platform.³ He took the most-subscribed-YouTuber title from PewDiePie on 14 November 2022, when both channels stood at about 112 million and 111 million; PewDiePie had held it since 2013.⁴

PewDiePie's case is the years. His channel joined YouTube on 29 April 2010 and carries 1,422 videos and 109 million subscribers.⁵ For nine of those years every other creator, MrBeast included, was measured as a fraction of him.

Greatest is a different word from biggest. Casey Neistat changed how vlogs are cut, Jenna Marbles was the most-subscribed woman for most of a decade, and neither has a tenth of MrBeast's audience. The ranking asks the reader to decide what the word means.

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T-Series, MrBeast and PewDiePie: the 17 best YouTube channels

The best-channels ranking is about channels, not people, and that changes who the competition is. Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Vsauce and Cocomelon are on it, and so is T-Series, the Indian music label that shows 316 million subscribers on its own page.⁶

T-Series is the name that connects PewDiePie and MrBeast. It passed PewDiePie in 2019 and reached 100 million subscribers first; when PewDiePie got there in August of that year he became the first individual creator to do it, and Tubefilter noted that the label already had 109 million.⁷ MrBeast later passed T-Series itself, which no individual had done.

A channel is also a body of work. PewDiePie's channel holds fourteen years of uploads across horror games, Minecraft, meme reviews and Japan. MrBeast's holds fewer videos and far more views per upload, each one a production with a crew.

For a reader who cares about the archive, the PewDiePie channel is the fuller object. For one who cares about reach, no channel on the list comes close to MrBeast's.

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Best YouTuber of the 2010s: PewDiePie's decade, MrBeast's late entry

The 2010s ranking is the one PewDiePie should own outright, and MrBeast is on it anyway. Between them stand Smosh, Ryan Higa, Lilly Singh, Logan Paul, David Dobrik and the rest of the decade's front page.

PewDiePie was the most-subscribed YouTuber from 2013 to the end of the decade, which makes him the decade's default answer.⁴ Amnesia screams, the Bro Army, the T-Series race and the first 100 million all happened inside those ten years.

MrBeast's channel existed from 2012, but the MrBeast the world knows arrived in 2017, with a video of him counting to 100,000 and the giveaway format that followed. He had three years of the decade, and used them to become its fastest-rising act.

Ryan Higa and Smosh were the biggest names when the decade began. Logan Paul and David Dobrik owned 2017 and 2018. The ranking is about who defined the ten years, not who ended them on top, and that is a harder question than it looks.

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Favorite YouTube creator: PewDiePie, MrBeast and no trophies to count

The favorite-creator ranking has no statistics in it at all. PewDiePie and MrBeast share the list with The Try Guys, Safiya Nygaard, Casey Neistat, KSI, Jenna Marbles and Markiplier, and the only question is which one a reader would choose to watch tonight.

This is the ranking where PewDiePie's style matters more than his numbers. A PewDiePie video is a man in a chair talking to a camera, and the people who kept watching for fourteen years did so because of the man, not the format.

MrBeast's videos are built the opposite way. The premise is the star, the edit is relentless, and Jimmy Donaldson spends most of a video explaining the rules. Millions of people love exactly that.

A favorite is a personal verdict. The frame below shows the two channels' own icons, the panther and the pixel man, because that is how most people first met them.

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Beast Industries vs Tsuki: the YouTuber turned entrepreneur

The entrepreneur ranking asks which creator built the best business away from the upload button, and here the gap between MrBeast and PewDiePie is at its widest. Logan Paul and KSI with Prime, Emma Chamberlain with her coffee, Huda Kattan with Huda Beauty and Michelle Phan with Ipsy fill out the list.

Beast Industries was founded in 2012 in North Carolina, employs more than 1,000 people, and in February 2026 bought Step, a money-management app for teenagers; Fortune puts Donaldson's own net worth at about $2.6 billion.¹ Feastables, Lunchly and Beast Games sit under the same roof.

PewDiePie's business is Tsuki, the clothing and lifestyle brand he and Marzia launched in 2018 and run from Japan. It is deliberately small, which is the point: he has said many times that he does not want a company.

Logan Paul and KSI are the third name here. Prime Hydration reported more than a billion dollars in sales in its second year, a figure no creator brand had reached before Feastables.

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#TeamTrees vs charity: water: which YouTuber has done the most for charity

The charity ranking holds MrBeast, PewDiePie, Mark Rober, Jacksepticeye, Hank Green, the Yogscast and DrLupo, and MrBeast's scale does its most obvious work on it.

#TeamTrees began in October 2019 as a challenge to MrBeast to raise $20 million; the campaign site now reports more than $24 million raised and 25 million trees funded.⁸ #TeamSeas followed two years later with Mark Rober, and its site counts 34 million pounds of trash removed against a $30 million goal.⁹ Beast Philanthropy, a separate channel, gives its whole revenue away.

PewDiePie's charity work is older and smaller. His 2013 campaign for charity: water, launched to mark 10 million subscribers, closed on 30 September 2013 at $446,462 against a $250,000 goal, and drives for Save the Children and the WWF followed.¹⁰

Jacksepticeye's Thankmas and the Yogscast's Jingle Jam raise eight figures in a single December each. On this list the two subjects are not the only big numbers.

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The 9-year-olds vs the Beast audience: which YouTuber has the best fan community

The fan-community ranking is about the people in the comments rather than the person on screen. PewDiePie, MrBeast, Markiplier, Dream, Dan and Phil, the Sidemen and Hank Green's Nerdfighters are all on it.

PewDiePie's fans have a name, a running joke about their age, and a war they fought. The Subscribe to PewDiePie campaign of 2018 and 2019 put his name on billboards, hacked printers and a Super Bowl ad request, and it kept him ahead of T-Series for months longer than the numbers said he should have been.⁷

MrBeast's audience is the largest on the platform and the least organised. It does not have a name, a chant or a campaign, because it has never needed one; the channel does the recruiting itself.

Dream's fans wrote the Dream SMP into fan fiction and animatics for two years, and the Phandom sold out two world tours. A community is measured by what it builds without being asked, and on that measure PewDiePie's fans have the strongest claim here.

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How's it going bros: the most iconic YouTube intro

The intro ranking asks whose opening line a stranger could finish, and it puts PewDiePie and MrBeast next to Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, Smosh, Vsauce, Fred and Good Mythical Morning.

"How's it going bros, my name is PewDiePie" opened thousands of videos, and the brofist closed them. It is the most quoted intro in the platform's history, and he retired it himself years ago, which has only helped.

MrBeast's intro is famous for being absent. His videos open on the premise, shouted, inside three seconds, and that structure is now copied by half the platform. The hook replaced the greeting.

Jacksepticeye's "top of the morning" and Vsauce's "Hey, Vsauce, Michael here" belong on the same list. Against them, MrBeast's claim is that he killed the intro, and PewDiePie's is that he perfected it first.

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Dream, PewDiePie and MrBeast: the best Minecraft YouTubers

Minecraft is the game both of them played on camera, and the Minecraft ranking is where neither is the obvious answer. Dream, Technoblade, DanTDM, CaptainSparklez, Grian and Stampy built whole careers inside the game.

PewDiePie earned his place with the Minecraft series of summer 2019, which doubled his daily views and carried him to the hundred-million mark that August.⁷ MrBeast's Minecraft videos are challenge formats, a hundred players and a prize, and his gaming channel ran on them for years.

When YouTube marked Minecraft's trillionth view in December 2021, it counted more than 35,000 creators making Minecraft videos and named both PewDiePie and MrBeast among the creators it thanked.¹¹

Dream's Manhunt series made him the fastest-growing gaming channel of 2020, and DanTDM was Forbes' highest-paid YouTuber of 2017 on Minecraft alone. Here the two subjects are guests in someone else's house.

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The 14 most overrated YouTubers: both of them are on it

The overrated ranking is the honest one. PewDiePie and MrBeast are on it with Logan Paul, Jake Paul, KSI, James Charles and David Dobrik, and the question is whose reputation is furthest ahead of the work.

The case against MrBeast is the formula. Every video is a bigger number than the last, the edit never slows down, and critics have called the result spectacle without a point of view. The case for the defence is that 523 million people have chosen it.

The case against PewDiePie is the opposite: that a man reacting to memes in a chair was never worth the title, and that the Bro Army inflated an ordinary gamer into a cultural figure. The defence is fourteen years of staying watchable.

The Paul brothers are the third name here, and they may be the real answer. On this list, being second is the good result.

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Markiplier vs PewDiePie: the 20 best gaming YouTubers, no MrBeast

The gaming ranking holds 20 names, PewDiePie among them, and MrBeast is not on it. That absence is the section.

PewDiePie began as a Let's Player, screaming through Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010 and 2011, and the gaming audience was the first one he built. Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, CoryxKenshin, DanTDM, Technoblade and Dream are the company he keeps here.

MrBeast runs a separate gaming channel with tens of millions of subscribers, but his name is not what a gaming fan says when asked for the best, and the ranking reflects that.

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CoryxKenshin vs PewDiePie: the 12 best horror-game YouTubers

The horror-game ranking is narrower still: twelve names, PewDiePie among them, and once again no MrBeast.

Amnesia was PewDiePie's first hit. The 2010 and 2011 playthroughs are where the Bro Army got its name, and horror stayed a fixture through Outlast, Slender and Five Nights at Freddy's.

Markiplier and CoryxKenshin are the genre's specialists; CoryxKenshin's Spooky Scary Sundays are a weekly institution. MrBeast has no entry here and no claim to one: there are rooms on this site PewDiePie can walk into and MrBeast cannot.

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The best American YouTubers: a list PewDiePie cannot enter

The American-YouTubers ranking is the mirror of the two gaming lists. MrBeast qualifies by birth, Greenville, North Carolina, and PewDiePie, from Gothenburg, does not.

MrBeast's competition here is the whole American front page: Markiplier, Casey Neistat, Jenna Marbles, Smosh, Marques Brownlee, Mark Rober, Dude Perfect, the Paul brothers and Emma Chamberlain. He is the biggest of them by a distance, and the one who moved into television: Beast Games drew 50 million viewers in its first 25 days on Prime Video and came back for a second season on 7 January 2026 with a $5 million prize.¹²

Casey Neistat is the opposing case in the frame below: a filmmaker whose daily vlogs changed the grammar of the platform without ever chasing scale.

PewDiePie, a Swede who lives in Japan, has no way onto this list, and the next ranking returns the favour.

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Zlatan vs PewDiePie: the most famous living Swede

The last ranking leaves YouTube entirely. It asks who the most famous living Swede is, and PewDiePie is on it next to Zlatan Ibrahimović, Max Martin, Alicia Vikander, the Skarsgårds, Robyn, Björn Borg and Armand Duplantis. MrBeast, an American, is not in the conversation.

Felix Kjellberg from Gothenburg may be the most recognised Swede alive among anyone under thirty, and the only person on this list whose fame was made entirely online. Nobody else here reached a hundred million people without a club, a studio or a label.

Zlatan Ibrahimović is the obvious counter: a striker who scored for seven of Europe's biggest clubs and whose name is a verb in his own country. Max Martin wrote more American number ones than anyone alive.

Only here does choosing PewDiePie mean passing over a footballer, and only here does MrBeast's subscriber count buy nothing at all.

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Where the two careers stop overlapping

Ten of these rankings hold both names, and four hold only one, and the four say the most. PewDiePie belongs on the gaming, horror and Swedish lists; MrBeast belongs on the American one and on every list about business. The years and the audience went one way, the company and the scale went the other, and the rankings that ask about one almost never ask about the other.

Beast Games has already been renewed for a third season, so MrBeast's half of the story is still being written in a different medium.¹² PewDiePie's half ends, by his own choice, in September.

Every ranking above is decided two options at once, and the pair you are shown changes the answer you give. If there is a creator you think belongs beside these two on every list, you can build that ranking yourself.

More rankings, more angles

• Is MrBeast the Biggest YouTuber? 500 Million Subscribers, 12 Lists — the solo version, game-show hosts included
• Where Does Markiplier Rank Among the Greatest YouTubers? 12 Lists — the horror Let's Player who became a film director
• Is Mark Rober the Best Science YouTuber? Where He Lands on 14 Lists — MrBeast's #TeamTrees partner, ranked with NASA engineers