Creatine and protein powder are the two highest-volume products in the supplement aisle, and the question people put to a search box is which one to buy. The indexed literature has answered it three times. Thirty-seven randomised trials carry both terms; almost all of them are testing something else. This page counts them, reads the three that isolate each supplement, and reports what they administered and found — as journalism, with amounts given as figures from studies and no usage guidance, per our editorial standards.
The comparison almost nobody ran
A PubMed search on 2026-09-20 for whey protein together with creatine, filtered to the randomised-controlled-trial publication type, returns 37 records.
Thirty-seven looks like a literature. Reading the 37 by title and abstract, it is not this literature. Most test protein alone against a carbohydrate or placebo drink; a large block test multi-ingredient formulas in which creatine appears among eight or twelve other things; several use the word creatine only because creatine kinase was a damage marker in the blood. That last group is the same measurement confusion this site unpicked on what creatine means in bloodwork, and here it inflates a search count by a third.
Trials with an arm isolating creatine and an arm isolating protein:
| Trial | Year | Population | n | Weeks | Arms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burke et al. | 2001 | Resistance-training males | 36 | 6 | Whey · whey + creatine · placebo |
| Cribb et al. | 2007 | Resistance-trained males | — | 11 | Creatine+carb · creatine+whey · whey · carb |
| Eliot et al. | 2008 | Men aged 48–72 | 42 | 14 | Placebo · creatine · whey · both |
Two of the three are the comparison. The third is not, and it is the one most often cited for it.
Burke 2001 has no creatine arm
The 2001 St Francis Xavier trial is quoted constantly in this argument, and its three groups were whey protein, whey protein with creatine, and maltodextrin placebo. There is no creatine-only group. Whatever it shows about adding creatine to whey — and it shows something, as below — it is structurally unable to say which supplement is better on its own, because one of the two was never given on its own.
What it did find, over six weeks in 36 men: lean tissue mass increased more in the whey-plus-creatine group than in the other two, and more in whey than placebo. Bench press increased more in whey-plus-creatine than in either whey or placebo. And then the sentence that belongs beside those: squat strength and knee-flexion peak torque increased about equally in every group, supplemented or not. The benefit was specific to some measures and absent from others, in a six-week trial of 36 people.
This is a general hazard in supplement reading, and it is worth naming. A trial's design determines which questions it can answer, and a citation that survives long enough stops carrying its design with it. Checking the arms takes one minute and it changes what the paper means.
The two trials that did run it, and they disagree
Cribb and colleagues, 2007, Victoria University. Resistance-trained men matched for strength, four groups, 11 weeks of supervised training, with outcomes at three levels: one-repetition maximum on three lifts, DEXA body composition, and vastus lateralis muscle biopsies for fibre type, cross-sectional area and contractile protein. Creatine with carbohydrate, whey alone, and creatine with whey all produced significantly greater strength gains on all three lifts and greater hypertrophy than carbohydrate alone. The authors' own caution is the useful part: the hypertrophy responses varied across the three levels measured, so the lean-mass number, the fibre number and the contractile-protein number did not tell one consistent story within a single arm.
Eliot and colleagues, 2008, University of Oklahoma. The same four-arm shape, 42 men aged 48 to 72, 14 weeks, supplements taken three times a week immediately after training, DEXA plus multifrequency bioimpedance for body water. Training worked: arm fat fell, bone-free fat-free mass rose, body water rose. Group effects were absent. The conclusion is stated plainly in the paper — creatine, whey, or both, combined with resistance training in middle-aged men, had "no added benefit to changes that occur to body composition due to resistance training alone".
Two four-arm trials, seven years apart, opposite results. The differences that could explain it are all visible: trained young men against untrained middle-aged men, 11 weeks against 14, daily supplementation against three doses a week taken only on training days, biopsies against impedance. None of those differences was itself randomised, so the honest reading is that the comparison has been run twice under conditions too different to pool, not that one result refutes the other.
They are not competing for the same job
The commercial framing — creatine versus protein — implies two products doing one job with different efficiency. The physiology is not that.
- Creatine is stored in muscle mostly as phosphocreatine and regenerates ATP during efforts lasting a few seconds. It changes the work available in a hard set. Its own effect sizes, and what they rest on, are set out on what creatine is and creatine benefits.
- Protein supplies the amino acids from which muscle protein is built. It is a substrate question, not an energy-system one, and the comparison between protein sources is where its interesting arguments live — see collagen versus whey.
An intervention that increases the quality of the stimulus and an intervention that supplies the material are not substitutes, which is the most likely reason the four-arm trials find the combination arm doing well when they find anything at all. It is also why this site treats creatine with HMB and creatine with collagen as separate questions with separate evidence: "does it stack" and "which is better" are different tests.
The comparison nobody has run at all
In all three trials the protein arm is a powder, measured against another powder, a carbohydrate drink, or maltodextrin. Not one of them compares supplemental protein against the same protein eaten as food, and creatine's dietary route — meat and fish, plus endogenous synthesis from arginine, glycine and methionine — is not an arm in any of them either.
So the buyer's actual question, whether either powder adds anything to an adequate diet, is untested in this set. That is not a criticism of the trials, which were asking supplement questions. It is a limit on what their results can be used to claim, and a gap worth stating rather than filling with inference.
The honest summary
- Thirty-seven randomised trials index both supplements; three give each its own arm.
- The most-cited of the three, Burke 2001, has no creatine-only arm and cannot answer the comparison.
- Of the two that can, one found both supplements beat a carbohydrate control in trained men; the other found neither beat training alone in older men.
- The two do unrelated things physiologically, which is why the combination arms perform at least as well as either alone wherever an effect appears.
- Nobody has tested either powder against food.
Limits of this page
The count is a title-and-abstract classification of one database on one date, and a differently phrased query would return a slightly different set — the figure to trust is the shape, not the last digit. None of these trials was designed to compare supplements against dietary intake. Arm sizes are between eight and fifteen people in every trial named here, which is small enough that absence of a difference is weak evidence of no difference. Nothing here is advice about what to buy or take, and anyone with a health condition should put the question to a clinician.
Sources and dates
- Burke DG, Chilibeck PD, Davidson KS, et al. The effect of whey protein supplementation with and without creatine monohydrate combined with resistance training on lean tissue mass and muscle strength. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab 2001;11(3):349–64 — PMID 11591884
- Cribb PJ, Williams AD, Stathis CG, Carey MF, Hayes A. Effects of whey isolate, creatine, and resistance training on muscle hypertrophy. Med Sci Sports Exerc 2007;39(2):298–307 — PMID 17277594
- Eliot KA, Knehans AW, Bemben DA, et al. The effects of creatine and whey protein supplementation on body composition in men aged 48 to 72 years during resistance training. J Nutr Health Aging 2008;12(3):208–12 — PMID 18309444
- PubMed, searched 2026-09-20:
("whey protein"[tiab] AND creatine[tiab]) AND "randomized controlled trial"[pt]— 37 records.