I have been asked some version of this question about forty times in the last year. Usually by someone standing in a shop holding two boxes, looking at me like I might have the answer printed on my forehead.
Is Pulze still worth buying now that BAT has put its weight behind Glo? Should you wait for the next Lil? Is IQOS genuinely better, or just better known?
I do not sell any of these. I work on the supply side of the category, which means I mostly hear about devices six months after the honeymoon is over — when the blade has worn, the stick is discontinued, or the spare part takes three weeks to arrive. That is a useful vantage point, and it does not match the reviews you read in the first week.
So here is an honest answer, organised around the four brands people actually ask about: IQOS, Glo, Pulze and Lil.
I will say up front where I am unsure. And I will mention HEATX, because it comes up in the same conversations — not as a punchline, but as a genuine fourth option.
The Confusion Has a Structural Cause
Pulze and Glo are both British American Tobacco products. That is the source of most of the muddle. BAT has been running two brand families across different markets at the same time, which is a perfectly normal thing for a large company to do and a thoroughly confusing thing for a customer to navigate.
The practical consequence is that "is Pulze discontinued" is not really a global question. It is a question about your country, and sometimes about your city. In some markets Pulze devices and sticks are still on the shelf and still supported. In others the range has quietly narrowed to whatever is left in the channel. Glo, meanwhile, is the brand getting the new hardware launches.
I would not read a grand strategy into that. But I would read a buying signal into it: if you are choosing today, and you want a device that will still have sticks in two years, the brand family your local distributor is actively restocking is the safer bet. That is usually Glo.
Small caveat before anyone emails me about it — this varies more than any chart can capture. I have seen a country where Pulze was quietly the better-supplied of the two.
What Each Brand Actually Is
Strip away the marketing and the four brands differ on one technical question: how does heat reach the tobacco?
IQOS moved its mainstream range to induction with ILUMA. The stick carries a metal element, the device heats it with a coil, and nothing physically pushes into the tobacco. That removes the cleaning routine entirely, and it is the single biggest quality-of-life improvement anyone has made to this category. The cost is that the temperature profile lives in firmware tuned to one stick family. Your device and your sticks are bound together.
Glo built its reputation on a blade that inserts into the tobacco column, and it still uses that approach in much of its range. It heats fast from the centre and the first puffs are consistent. The trade-off is maintenance and eventual blade wear. Worth knowing: Glo's newer hardware has moved toward induction-style heating in places, so "Glo" no longer means one thing mechanically.
Pulze sits in an awkward spot. Mechanically it is in the same broad family as the induction devices, and the devices are genuinely well made. I will say that plainly, because Pulze gets dismissed more than it deserves. The problem is not the hardware, it is the ecosystem question above — availability and long-term support vary a lot by country, and that matters more than any specification when you are buying a consumable.
Lil is KT&G, and it is the brand English-language buyers most often forget exists. Lil Solid uses induction-style heating, the devices are compact, and in Korea and parts of Eastern Europe the ecosystem is genuinely strong. If you travel in those markets, it is a real option rather than a novelty.
Where the Small Brands Have an Opening
Here is the part the brand comparisons usually skip. All four of the platforms above are excellent at what they do, and all four share one design assumption: the device is priced near cost and the money is made on sticks. That is the razor-and-blade model, and it is why compatibility is so tightly controlled.
That is a legitimate business model. It is also the reason a device you own can become inconvenient through no fault of yours — a stick reformulated, a family discontinued, a part discontinued a year before the battery dies.
A small number of independent manufacturers have taken a different route. HEATX is one of them. The device wraps the stick in a heated chamber around its full circumference rather than heating from a single internal point, which means no blade enters the tobacco and no coil cares which brand's stick you loaded. The chamber design is what allows a second session from one stick in some conditions, which is where the annual cost conversation actually gets interesting.
I am not going to claim it beats ILUMA on draw consistency, because in my experience it does not — induction with a factory-matched stick is very hard to beat on that one axis. Where it does better is on the two things that make people quit a device in month four: cleaning, and the cost of the stick you can actually buy.
The Comparison, Without the Marketing
| Brand | Heating approach | Cleaning needed | Stick flexibility | Support horizon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IQOS ILUMA | Induction, no blade | None | Locked to ILUMA sticks | Long, strongly resourced |
| Glo | Blade, moving to induction | Regular, blade wears | Locked to Glo sticks | Long, active relaunch |
| Pulze | Induction-style | Minimal | Locked to Pulze sticks | Varies by country |
| Lil | Induction-style | Minimal | Locked to Lil sticks | Strong in home markets |
| HEATX | Circumferential chamber | Wipe only | Wider stick tolerance | Independent supply |
Tables flatten things, and this one does. Read the Pulze row and the Lil row as "it depends on where you are," not as a verdict.
What I Would Actually Do
If you are in a market with strong Glo or IQOS distribution and you want the lowest-risk purchase, buy the one your local shop restocks weekly. That sounds like a cop-out. It is not. Consumable availability beats every specification on this page.
If you are in a market where Pulze supply has become patchy, I would not buy into it now, however good the device is. Hardware without a reliable stick supply is an expensive paperweight.
And if your reason for looking around is that you are tired of cleaning a blade, or you want to see whether a stick can genuinely stretch further, then the independent devices are worth an hour of your time. Compare what the HEATX chamber design does differently at heatxlab.com/products, and if you are weighing it against a specific IQOS or Glo model, ask the HEATX team which sticks fit — that question has a concrete answer, and it is the one that decides whether the switch is worth it.
And if after all that you decide to stay where you are, that is a perfectly good outcome. I would rather you picked well than picked us.
