Glucose monitors, test strips, lancets and lancing devices from the brands people trust — Abbott, LifeScan, Roche, Bayer and more.
Everything you need for at-home blood glucose testing, organized by what it does.
Meters from Contour, Accu-Chek, FreeStyle and iHealth — from simple no-coding meters to wireless smart models.
Strips matched to your meter. Always use the strip made for your exact model.
Sterile single-use lancets in fine gauges for a gentler finger prick.
Adjustable-depth lancing pens for comfortable, consistent sampling.
Watch a step-by-step demonstration of a real at-home blood glucose test using the Contour Next GEN meter — unboxing, loading the lancing device, drawing blood, and reading the result.
Home blood glucose testing looks complicated from the outside and is simple in practice: four inexpensive pieces that work as one system, and a routine that takes under a minute. Here is how the pieces fit together.
Start from the strips, not the gadgets. Pick the strip system whose price and availability suit you — including which brand your drug plan prefers, if you have one — then buy the meter that uses those strips, and any standard lancing device with its matching lancets. Bought in that order, there are no compatibility surprises and no money wasted.
Watch the demonstration video above, then do a couple of unhurried practice runs: set the lancing device shallow, wash and warm your hands, and get comfortable with the order of steps in our step-by-step guide. Most pharmacists will happily walk you through a first test with your own new meter if you ask — and within a week the routine runs itself.
Four things: a glucose meter, the test strips made for that exact meter, a lancing device, and sterile lancets that fit it. A sharps container for used lancets and a logbook or app for results round out the kit. Most meters are sold in starter kits that include a device and a small supply of strips and lancets.
No. Meters, strips, lancets and lancing devices are all sold over the counter in the United States and Canada. Whether your insurance or drug plan reimburses them — and which brands it prefers — is worth checking, since coverage can steer you to a particular meter system.
The meter itself is modest — the systems we compare run roughly CA$40 to CA$70, and starter kits sometimes cost less than the strips inside them. The real expense is strips over time, from well under a dollar to around a dollar per test depending on brand and pack size, which is why we suggest choosing your strip system first.
We compare monitors, strips, lancets and lancing devices from the major home-testing brands — Abbott (FreeStyle), Roche (Accu-Chek), Ascensia (Contour), LifeScan (OneTouch) and iHealth — and focus on the models that are easy to buy and keep supplied in North America.
