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The two things that decide it
What the protein is. A wild betta eats insects and insect larvae. It is not a herbivore and it is not a general omnivore, and a food built on fish meal, wheat and soy is further from what it evolved to process than a food built on insect larvae.
Whether it fits. A betta’s mouth is small and upturned. The single most common food failure is a pellet the fish physically cannot swallow - it takes it, works at it, and spits it out. That granule then becomes ammonia in a very small volume of water.
Everything else - color enhancers, added vitamins, brand - is secondary to those two.
The disclosure problem here as well
We could not read a guaranteed analysis off the product page for the food in this roundup, and that is a genuine gap - protein percentage, fat, fiber and ash are exactly what you would want to compare foods on. It is printed on the tub you receive, which is not much help before you buy.
We record that absence in the specification table rather than reproducing figures from a retailer listing as though they were a manufacturer document. It is also why this roundup is short: we are not going to rank six foods on the strength of their marketing copy.
How much, which matters more than what
Two or three granules once a day. A betta’s stomach is roughly the size of its eye - that is the standard heuristic and it is a useful one, because it is far smaller than any portion that looks reasonable in a hand.
One or two fasting days a week is good practice, not neglect. Bettas are prone to constipation and to the bloating that follows it, and a fasting day gives the digestive tract a chance to clear.
Remove anything uneaten after a couple of minutes. In 4.3 gallons of water there is very little dilution available.
Overfeeding causes three problems at once
An ammonia load the filter has to absorb; constipation and bloating in the fish, which is then frequently misdiagnosed as dropsy; and a pest snail population explosion if any are present, because snail numbers track available food almost exactly.
If your tank has suddenly filled with small snails, you are overfeeding. That is the diagnosis, and removing the snails is not the fix.
A varied diet, done cheaply
A staple granule five days a week, with frozen or freeze-dried food once or twice, is a better diet than any single product. Frozen bloodworm and daphnia are widely available, cheap, and closer still to a wild diet.
Two cautions. Freeze-dried food expands when it rehydrates, so soak it in tank water before feeding or you are putting a dry sponge into a small fish. And bloodworm is a treat, not a staple - it is high in protein and low in almost everything else, and a betta fed exclusively on it bloats.
What we will not tell you
That a particular food produces better color, longer fins or a longer life. Those claims are on most of the packaging in this category, none of them come with published evidence, and demonstrating any of them would require a controlled feeding trial we have not run and cannot run.
What we can say is what the protein is built from, what the granule size is intended for, and what the manufacturer declines to publish. That is the whole method.
Storage, which is not nothing
Fish food degrades. Fats oxidize and vitamins break down within a few months of opening, especially somewhere warm and humid - which describes the shelf above an aquarium precisely. Buy the smallest tub you will use in three months, keep it sealed, and keep it away from the tank. A 30 g tub is many months of food for one betta, so the small size is not a false economy.
