"Are Citadel paints overpriced?" is almost always asked the wrong way round. People compare the number on the shelf edge - one pot against one bottle - when the pots are not the same size. A Citadel Base pot and a Vallejo Model Color dropper can carry a similar price and hold very different amounts of paint, and the gap is bigger than most painters realise.
This site tracks every range's price across the shops that stock it, so the honest version of the question is answerable: what does a millilitre of paint cost you, in each range, today?
Start with the pot sizes
These are fixed facts about the ranges, and they do most of the work before a single price is involved.
| Range | Bottle |
|---|---|
| Citadel Base, Layer, Dry, Glaze | 12ml |
| Citadel Shade and Contrast | 18ml |
| Reaper Master Series | 14.78ml |
| Vallejo Model Color, Model Air | 17ml |
| Scale75 Scale Color, Fantasy & Games | 17ml |
| Green Stuff World Acrylic Colors | 17ml |
| Vallejo Game Color, Xpress Color | 18ml |
| Army Painter Warpaints Fanatic, Speedpaint 2.0 | 18ml |
| AK Interactive 3rd Gen | 18ml |
| Privateer Press Formula P3 | 18ml |
| Monument Pro Acryl | 22ml |
| Vallejo Premium Airbrush Color | 60ml |
Against a 12ml Citadel Base pot, a 17ml dropper is 42% more paint, an 18ml dropper is 50% more, and a 22ml Pro Acryl bottle is 83% more. Two pots at the same price are not the same purchase.
That is why the comparison a shelf edge invites is the wrong one, and why every paint page here shows the per-millilitre figure next to the price at each shop: see Citadel, Vallejo, Army Painter, AK Interactive, Scale75, Green Stuff World and Monument. For sets rather than single pots, every paint set is ranked by price per millilitre with its exact contents.
The dropper-bottle advantage is bigger than the label says
Bottle size is only half of it. A Citadel pot is a flip-top tub you dip a brush into; a dropper bottle dispenses drops through a nozzle. Three consequences, all in the dropper's favour:
- Nothing skins over. An open pot dries at the rim and on the lid every time you use it. A sealed dropper does not.
- You use what you meant to use. Dipping loads more paint than a model needs, and the excess dries on the palette.
- Thinning is repeatable. "Three drops of paint, one of water" is a recipe you can repeat; "a brushful" is not.
None of that appears in a per-millilitre figure, and all of it makes the real gap wider than the arithmetic.
The substitutes, range by range
- Vallejo - the default answer. Model Color is the realistic/military line at 17ml, Game Color the fantasy line at 18ml, and between them they cover almost anything a Citadel recipe asks for. Both are dropper bottles.
- The Army Painter - Warpaints Fanatic at 18ml, with the strongest washes and metallics of the budget ranges and the widest set coverage. The Warpaints Fanatic Starter Set includes primer, a brush and a practice miniature.
- AK Interactive - 18ml 3rd Gen bottles, exceptional on historical and vehicle colours, thinner out of the bottle than Citadel and worth a shake and a moment's patience.
- Green Stuff World - 17ml, and the themed six- and eight-paint sets are consistently among the best value on our set ranking.
- Scale75 - 17ml artist-grade paints with a very matt finish. Not a budget choice; a quality one that happens to be in bigger bottles.
- Monument Pro Acryl - 22ml, the largest standard miniature bottle here, and bought direct from the maker.
- Reaper Master Series - 14.78ml (a US half-ounce), so a smaller step up than the others, but a very deep colour range.
The swaps that are genuinely straight
These are our editorial calls, not official equivalences, and they are the four places where a Citadel pot has an in-hand substitute that behaves the same way on the model:
- Black. Abaddon Black does nothing that Vallejo Black or Army Painter Matt Black does not.
- White. White Scar against Vallejo White or Army Painter Matt White. All three need two or three coats; none of them is a shortcut.
- Steel. Leadbelcher against Vallejo Gunmetal or Army Painter Gun Metal.
- The two workhorse washes. Nuln Oil against Army Painter Dark Tone or Vallejo Black Wash; Agrax Earthshade against Army Painter Strong Tone or Vallejo Umber Wash.
For everything else - a named Citadel colour in a recipe you want to follow in another brand - use the paint matcher, which compares the actual colour values rather than guessing from the name. A short name matching a longer product is the single commonest way a swap goes wrong.
When Citadel is still worth it
Being honest about this is the point of the guide, and there are four real cases.
- You are following a Citadel recipe and you are new. Every official Warhammer guide, every box insert and most of YouTube names Citadel pots. Substituting while you are still learning what a recipe is doing adds a variable you cannot yet judge.
- The Shade range. Citadel Shades are 18ml - the same as a rival's standard bottle - so the size penalty vanishes exactly where the paints are strongest. Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade have very good substitutes; they are still excellent.
- Contrast. Also 18ml, also the widest and most consistent range of its type. See best contrast paints for how it compares with Speedpaint and Xpress Color.
- You can buy it today. A paint you can pick up in a shop on a Saturday beats a cheaper one that arrives on Thursday, if Saturday is when you paint.
What is not a good reason: "Citadel covers better." The current Base range covers well, and so do Vallejo Game Color, Warpaints Fanatic and Pro Acryl. Coverage is a property of individual pigments - yellows and reds are difficult in every brand - not of the label.
The practical answer
Buy your washes and contrasts wherever you like, because the pot sizes match. Buy your bulk colours - the black, the white, the two or three army colours you will empty - in droppers, where the 42-83% extra volume compounds over the ten or twenty bottles you will actually own.
Then check the figure rather than trusting this page: prices move weekly, and every paint page here shows the current one per shop, per millilitre.
Shop dropper-bottle paint sets
A dropper-bottle starter set is the cheapest way to move off single pots.
Vallejo Game Color Starter Kit (16 Paints)
See the paints →
Army Painter Warpaints Fanatic Most Wanted Set (22 Paints)
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