Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers: two peanut candies from two rival companies, born two years apart. H.B. Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman for Milton Hershey, began selling his cups around 1928;1 Mars introduced Snickers in Chicago in 1930 and named it after a family horse.2
Halloween is fifteen days away, and both are standard issue in American trick-or-treat bags. The fifteen rankings below put them on the same list eleven times, and four more times on lists only one of them can enter.
Reese's sells peanut butter and Snickers sells relief from hunger, and nearly every candy list ends up asking which of those two jobs matters more.
Kit Kat vs Reese's: the best chocolate candy bars ever made
This 24-bar ranking covers the American candy aisle plus a few imports such as Toblerone, Kinder Bueno and Aero. Reese's and Snickers both made the cut, alongside Kit Kat.
Snickers brings the strongest outside record. It is widely described as the best-selling candy bar in the world,2 built on nougat, caramel and roasted peanuts under milk chocolate.
Reese's has a technical problem on a list of bars: it is two cups in a sleeve, not a bar at all.
Kit Kat is the one wafer in the field. In the United States Hershey makes it under license, so the cup and the wafer leave the same company's factories.
Reese's vs Snickers: the best Halloween candy
Halloween is the one season when these two meet as equals, in fun-size packs dumped into the same plastic pumpkin. The best Halloween candy ranking holds eighteen options, including candy corn, Skittles, Nerds and Tootsie Roll.
Reese's has seasonal shapes Snickers lacks: pumpkins in October, trees at Christmas, eggs at Easter. They keep the brand on shelves under a holiday label all year.
Snickers has the more filling answer. A fun-size bar still carries nougat, caramel and peanuts, the full recipe in a smaller wrapper.
Candy corn is in the same ranking and splits every household that buys it.
Ferrero Rocher vs Reese's: chocolate candy, imports included
Count every chocolate candy, boxed or bagged, and the field changes shape. Ferrero Rocher, Lindt, Godiva and Ghirardelli join the American staples, and price stops being equal.
Reese's and Snickers are both here as drugstore candy among boxed gifts. Neither costs more than a couple of dollars, and neither comes wrapped in gold foil.
That makes this the fairest test of what each one is for. Ferrero Rocher is chocolate as a present. Reese's and Snickers are chocolate as a habit, bought for yourself at a register.
Peanut candy: Reese's, Snickers, Baby Ruth and a tin of brittle
Peanuts are the one ingredient both candies are built on, which makes this the most direct comparison on the page. The ranking also holds Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Chunky, Take 5, 5th Avenue and peanut brittle.
Reese's uses the peanut as a paste. The filling is sweet, salty and slightly dry, and the ratio of filling to chocolate is what fans fight about.
Snickers uses whole roasted peanuts, pressed into caramel on top of a nougat layer. You can see them in every bite, and they give the bar its chew.
Baby Ruth is the closest relative, with the same peanuts, caramel and nougat in a different proportion. Its fans say Snickers refined an existing idea rather than inventing one.
Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar vs Snickers: classic American candy
Classic American candy is a ranking of survivors. Tootsie Roll, Necco Wafers, Circus Peanuts, Good & Plenty, Peeps, Cracker Jack and Bit-O-Honey all made it into the 2020s.
Reese's and Snickers are the younger generation here, both from the years around the start of the Depression. Several options on the list were decades old by then.
The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar is the reason Reese's tastes the way it does. Reese worked for Milton Hershey and coated his peanut butter in Hershey chocolate from the start.3
Snickers came out of the other tradition: Mars built candy around fillings, with chocolate as the wrapper.
The most overrated candy: Reese's and Snickers on the defensive
This is the inverted list, and it only works because both candies are popular. A candy nobody buys cannot be overrated.
Reese's critics point at the filling. The peanut butter is sweeter and drier than the kind in a jar, and the crimped cup carries more chocolate per bite than fans like to admit.
Snickers critics point at the nougat, which they call filler between the parts people actually want. The bar's ubiquity works against it too: a default choice is easy to call boring.
Candy corn, Toblerone and the plain Hershey's bar share the ranking, so neither faces the charge alone.
Frozen Snickers vs frozen Reese's
Freezing candy bars is a habit with its own fans, and the freezer changes these two in opposite directions. The ranking also tests Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Twix, Kit Kat and York Peppermint Patty.
Snickers firms up. The caramel turns stiff and chewy, the nougat stays soft, and a frozen bar takes real effort to bite through.
Reese's goes dense. Cold peanut butter loses its crumble and turns closer to fudge, and the thin chocolate shell snaps.
3 Musketeers has a strong case of its own: whipped nougat freezes into something close to an ice cream bar.
Beef jerky vs Snickers at the gas station
The gas station counter asks one thing of a snack: will it keep a driver going until the next exit with food.
Snickers has spent years answering that exact question in its advertising. Its campaign "You're not you when you're hungry" sells the bar as a fix for hunger rather than a treat.2
Reese's makes no such claim. Its case is the two-cup orange pack by the register, cheap and easy to split between the front seats.
Beef jerky, Slim Jim, sunflower seeds and Corn Nuts make the hunger case louder than either candy. Jerky is the protein option on a rack full of sugar.
Movie theater candy: Reese's Pieces, E.T. and the Snickers box
The concession stand is where Hershey and Mars fought their most famous product battle, and the winner was neither Reese's Peanut Butter Cups nor Snickers. In 1982 Mars turned down a placement for M&M's in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Hershey's Reese's Pieces took the role.4
Reese's Pieces had been on American shelves only since September 1978. After the film, sales rose sharply; published estimates of the jump disagree with each other.
Both Reese's products sit in this ranking, next to Snickers, Milk Duds, Red Vines, Twizzlers and Sour Patch Kids.
The cups and Snickers come in the same tall theater box. In a dark room, the box rewards candy that neither melts nor rattles.
Dairy Queen Blizzard flavors: Reese's vs Snickers in soft serve
Dairy Queen's Blizzard menu turns candy into a mix-in, and both brands are on it. The ranking holds Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, Snickers, Oreo Cookie, Butterfinger, M&M's and a Royal Reese's Brownie.
Reese's has two entries, the classic cup and the brownie version. That gives the Hershey brand a double presence Snickers does not have.
Snickers keeps its texture in soft serve better than most bars. Caramel and peanuts survive the blending where wafer and toffee go soft.
Oreo Cookie has the strongest claim of the third names, and it isn't candy at all.
Baking with Reese's vs baking with Snickers
Baking asks what a candy becomes inside a hot oven, and the answer separates ingredients from snacks. Chocolate chips, Heath toffee bits, Andes mints and marshmallows were made for the oven; most candy bars were not.
Reese's has the deeper recipe book. Peanut butter cups go into brownies, cookie bars and no-bake pies, and Hershey sells Reese's baking chips built on the same flavor.
Snickers has fewer classic recipes, with one regional exception. Snickers salad, a Midwestern potluck dish of chopped bars, apples and whipped topping, is the rare case where the candy bar is the main ingredient.
Snickers and Betty White: the best Super Bowl commercials
Reese's has no entry on this list of the greatest Super Bowl commercials, and Snickers has one of the most quoted. The 2010 spot cast Betty White and Abe Vigoda in a backyard football game and topped USA Today's Ad Meter that year.5
That ad launched the hunger line Snickers still uses, with a different celebrity standing in for each hungry player.
Its competition here includes Apple's "1984", Coca-Cola's Mean Joe Greene, Budweiser's frogs and Wendy's "Where's the Beef?"
Reese's marketing lives elsewhere, in the long-running line that there is no wrong way to eat one.
Reese's Puffs vs Frosted Flakes: the cereal aisle
The breakfast cereal ranking holds 31 cereals and one candy brand: Reese's Puffs, the General Mills cereal flavored with Reese's peanut butter and chocolate.
Snickers has no cereal on this list. The gap shows how far each brand stretches: Reese's has become a flavor licensed onto other products, while Snickers is still mostly a bar.
The best Hershey candy: Reese's vs York, Kit Kat and Heath
Inside Hershey's own catalog, Reese's competes with its parent company's other brands. The ranking holds the original Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar, Kit Kat, York Peppermint Patty, Heath, Almond Joy, Mounds, Twizzlers and Jolly Rancher.
Reese's joined Hershey when the Reese family company merged with it in 1963, and by 1969 the cups were Hershey's best-selling product.3
Snickers is absent for a simple reason: it belongs to Mars. That absence is the clearest picture of the rivalry, two catalogs that never share a label.
The best Mars candy: Snickers vs M&M's
The Mars catalog is smaller and more concentrated. Snickers shares it with M&M's, Twix, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Skittles, Starburst, Dove and Maltesers.
Milky Way came first, and Snickers followed with much of the same nougat and caramel plus a layer of peanuts.
M&M's is the internal rival, and it ties straight back to Reese's. It is the candy Mars kept out of E.T., the decision that put Reese's Pieces on screen instead.
Reese's has no place here, the mirror image of the Hershey list above.
Two companies, one candy aisle
Hershey and Mars have spent nearly a century building parallel catalogs, and Reese's and Snickers are the flagships that meet on almost every candy list. The cup is built for flavor and the bar for appetite, and each ranking above chooses between those priorities without saying so.
A cup against a bar is a fair fight only when voters see them side by side, which is why these lists run on pairwise picks.
Got a candy feud of your own? Build a ranking around it and let strangers pick sides.
More rankings, more angles
- Is Chocolate the Best Dessert? Where It Lands on 15 Lists — chocolate as flavor, drink, cereal and song
- Coca-Cola vs Pepsi Rivalry: The Cola Wars on 15 Lists — another century-old brand feud, Super Bowl ads included
- Starbucks vs Dunkin': Which Coffee Chain Is Better? 15 Lists — pumpkin season, drive-thrus and the rewards app
Sources
- Hershey Community Archives — H.B. Reese and the Reese Candy Company, peanut butter cups introduced around 1928: hersheyarchives.org (checked 2026-10-16)
- Wikipedia — Snickers: 1930 launch in Chicago, named after a Mars family horse, described as the world's best-selling candy bar, the "You're not you when you're hungry" campaign: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-16)
- Wikipedia — Reese's Peanut Butter Cups: H.B. Reese's work for Milton S. Hershey, use of Hershey chocolate, 1963 merger, Hershey's leading seller by 1969: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-16)
- Wikipedia — Reese's Pieces: US launch in September 1978, Mars declining the E.T. placement in 1982: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-16)
- Wikipedia — Super Bowl Ad Meter: 2010 winner, Snickers with Betty White and Abe Vigoda: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-16)