herbsandspices.food The reference guide to herbs and spices
Chilli Compare Spice Finder

🌶️ Chilli Compare

Pick any of 49 chillies and see their heat side by side — from a bell pepper's zero to the superhots past a million Scoville units — with where they come from and how they taste.

1 · Pick your chillies 7 chosen

No heat 0 SHU · 1
Mild under 2,500 · 14
Medium 2,500–30,000 · 14
Hot 30,000–100,000 · 9
Very hot 100,000–500,000 · 6
Superhot 500,000 and up · 5

2 · Scoville range

On the log scale every step along is ten times hotter, so mild and superhot chillies fit on one chart. Switch to linear to see how far the superhots really are from everything else.

3 · Heat groups

Every chilli on the site, by the middle of its Scoville range. The solid part is what you've picked; click a column to add the whole group.

How the groups are drawn

No heat0 SHU
Mildunder 2,500
Medium2,500–30,000
Hot30,000–100,000
Very hot100,000–500,000
Superhot500,000 and up

Heat varies from pod to pod, by variety and with how the plant was grown, so every figure is a range, and the published ranges themselves vary. See the Scoville scale for how heat is measured.

4 · Side by side

ChilliHeatScovillevs a jalapeñoSpeciesNative toFlavour
Bell pepper No heat 0 SHU no heat Capsicum annuum (Grossum Group) Americas (the species); the blocky bell type was bred in Europe and North America Ripe: sweet, juicy, fruity; green: grassy, crisp and slightly bitter
Poblano and ancho Mild 1,000–2,000 SHU 4× milder Capsicum annuum Puebla, Mexico Poblano: earthy, green, rich; ancho: sweet, raisin, prune, coffee and tobacco
Jalapeño Medium 2,500–8,000 SHU about the same Capsicum annuum Mexico Bright, grassy, green-bell-pepper crunch with moderate heat
Cayenne pepper Hot 30,000–50,000 SHU 8× hotter Capsicum annuum Tropical Americas Sharp, clean heat; faintly fruity and dusty
Habanero Very hot 100,000–350,000 SHU 43× hotter Capsicum chinense Amazon basin; long cultivated in the Caribbean and Yucatán Apricot, citrus and tropical fruit; floral; intense slow-building heat
Ghost pepper Superhot 800,000–1,041,000 SHU 175× hotter Capsicum chinense (with some C. frutescens ancestry) Cultivated in northeast India (Assam, Nagaland, Manipur) and neighbouring regions Fruity and slightly smoky at first; then an extreme, long-lasting burn
Carolina Reaper Superhot 1,400,000–2,200,000 SHU 343× hotter Capsicum chinense Bred in South Carolina, United States (the species is South American) Sweet and fruity at first, with hints of cinnamon and chocolate reported; then an extreme burn