If you search "which energy supplier is best," you'll find a neat answer: Octopus. Scroll a bit further and you'll see Ecotricity at the top of the official Citizens Advice table. Look at Trustpilot and EDF is right there alongside Octopus on 4.8 stars.
This isn't a contradiction. It's the point. Different data sources measure fundamentally different things, and most comparison articles collapse them into a single "best" that papers over real, meaningful distinctions. This one doesn't.
So we pulled four independent datasets — Citizens Advice, Which?, Trustpilot, and a social media sentiment index tracking half a million posts — and put them side by side. The picture that emerges is more useful, and more damning in places, than any single ranking.
The Four Data Sources — and What They Actually Measure
Before getting to the rankings, it's worth being precise about methodology. These sources are not interchangeable.
Citizens Advice Star Rating
Statutory quarterly rating. Covers complaints volume (weighted by severity), call wait times, billing accuracy, and customer commitment scheme membership. Updated Q4 2025. Only includes suppliers with 25,000+ customer accounts.
What it captures: The structural behaviour of a supplier's complaints handling — not customer perception.
Which? Customer Survey
Annual survey of ~12,000 energy customers (Sep–Oct 2025). Scores include satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, and a behind-the-scenes assessment of supplier practices including complaints performance, smart meter targets, and switching processes.
What it captures: Lived customer experience, blended with process auditing.
Trustpilot
Self-selected public reviews. Scores are heavily skewed toward engaged customers who switched recently (often prompted to leave a review) — and toward customers who had a strong enough reaction (positive or negative) to bother writing.
What it captures: Switching experience, not ongoing service for the silent majority.
DataEQ Social Sentiment
Analysis of 500,000+ social media posts (verified by human annotators) across energy brands, with a net sentiment score. Also measured response rates and response times to critical posts.
What it captures: Unsolicited public sentiment — the closest thing to unfiltered customer opinion.
The Full League Table: Citizens Advice Q4 2025
This is the authoritative statutory benchmark. Citizens Advice has a legal remit to publish this data quarterly. The complaints component is weighted by severity — a complaint that reaches the Energy Ombudsman carries more weight than a single call to the Citizens Advice consumer service. The model specifically penalises suppliers where consumers had to contact multiple organisations because their problem wasn't resolved.
Citizens Advice Domestic Supplier Star Rating — Q4 2025 (Oct–Dec 2025)
Scores out of 5. Suppliers with fewer than 25,000 customer accounts are excluded from the main table. Source: Citizens Advice, published March 2026.
| Rank | Supplier | Overall | Fewer Complaints | Wait Times | Billing & Metering | Commitments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ecotricity | 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.3 | 5/5 | |
| 2 | Outfox Energy | 3.0 | 4.4 | 4.1 | 5/5 | |
| 3 | Octopus Energy | 3.5 | 4.0 | 3.4 | 5/5 | |
| 4 | Co-Op Energy | 3.5 | 4.0 | 3.3 | 5/5 | |
| 5 | E.ON Next | 3.0 | 3.6 | 4.3 | 5/5 | |
| 6 | 100Green | 3.5 | 4.8 | 3.8 | 0/5 | |
| 7 | Good Energy | 4.0 | 3.0 | 3.4 | 3/5 | |
| 8 | E (Gas & Electricity) | 1.0 | 4.4 | 5.0 | 3/5 | |
| 9 | ScottishPower Ofgem action | 2.0 | 4.0 | 2.8 | 5/5 | |
| 10 | OVO Energy | 2.0 | 2.0 | 3.8 | 5/5 | |
| 11 | So Energy | 1.5 | 3.4 | 2.6 | 5/5 | |
| 12 | Utility Warehouse | 2.5 | 3.0 | 2.3 | 3/5 | |
| 13 | EDF Energy | 2.0 | 2.2 | 3.0 | 5/5 | |
| 14 | British Gas Ofgem action | 1.0 | 3.6 | 1.4 | 5/5 | |
| 15 | Utilita Ofgem action | 0.5 | 3.6 | 2.7 | 3/5 | |
| 16 | TruEnergy Ofgem action | 2.0 | 2.4 | 1.9 | 0/5 |
A few things stand out. Ecotricity and Outfox Energy top the table despite being small suppliers with limited brand recognition — a reminder that scale and service quality are not correlated. 100Green scores 4.8/5 for contact wait times but gets zero for customer commitments (it has not signed up to the Energy Switch Guarantee or Vulnerability Commitment), which costs it dearly in the overall ranking. And E (Gas & Electricity) earns a perfect 5/5 for billing and metering — the highest score in the table — while sitting eighth overall because its complaints volume score pulls it down.
Note on Utilita's position: Utilita finished 15th out of 16. A company spokesperson disputed this, saying Citizens Advice methodology "penalises us unfairly due to its interpretation of complaints, significantly impacting our overall ranking" and that Ofgem and Energy Ombudsman data shows them as consistent top performers. This isn't a trivial objection — the Citizens Advice model weights escalation heavily, and prepayment meter suppliers like Utilita tend to deal with more complex, multi-agency cases by the nature of their customer base. It's a legitimate methodological tension, not a PR deflection.
Which? 2025 Survey: When Customers Vote with Their Words
The Which? annual survey is the largest representative customer satisfaction study in the sector. ~12,000 energy customers were polled in September–October 2025 and asked to rate their supplier on satisfaction and likelihood to recommend. Which? then overlaid its own behind-the-scenes assessment of each supplier's practices.
Top performers: Octopus Energy led at 74%, with nearly 90% of customers expressing satisfaction. Utility Warehouse ranked second at 73%, followed by 100Green at 70%.
Bottom performers: British Gas, Scottish Power, and OVO Energy all scored below 60%. British Gas — despite its 4.3 Trustpilot score — ranked among the worst for complaint volume, complaint resolution efficiency, smart meter target performance, and switching processes. OVO received the lowest customer satisfaction score in the survey at 56%.
Octopus's trajectory is notable. It has risen from 11th place in Citizens Advice rankings two years ago to 3rd now, while simultaneously becoming the UK's largest energy supplier. Achieving that combination — rapid growth while improving service — is genuinely unusual in the sector. The two more commonly go in opposite directions.
Trustpilot: The Self-Selection Problem
Trustpilot scores in the energy sector are almost uniformly high — and that should make you suspicious.
EDF sits at 4.8 stars from over 198,000 reviews. OVO sits at 4.6 stars from over 258,000. British Gas is at 4.3 stars from over 320,000. And yet all three rank in the bottom half of the Citizens Advice table. EDF is 13th, OVO is 10th, British Gas is 14th.
The explanation is structural. Trustpilot reviews are predominantly left by customers at two moments: immediately after switching (when the experience is fresh, the journey was smooth, and a review request landed in their inbox) and after a severe negative experience (when they're angry enough to seek out a platform). The millions of customers who've been on a default SVT for five years and have never interacted meaningfully with their supplier don't leave Trustpilot reviews. They are, in effect, invisible to that dataset.
Citizens Advice, by contrast, captures the complaints those silent customers eventually raise — and weights them by severity. The two datasets aren't measuring the same population.
| Supplier | Trustpilot Score | Citizens Advice Rank | Divergence |
|---|---|---|---|
| EDF Energy | 4.8 ★ | 13th / 16 | ↓ Looks better than it is |
| OVO Energy | 4.6 ★ | 10th / 16 | ↓ Looks better than it is |
| British Gas | 4.3 ★ | 14th / 16 | ↓ Looks better than it is |
| E.ON Next | 4.5 ★ | 5th / 16 | ≈ Consistent |
| Octopus Energy | 4.8 ★ | 3rd / 16 | ↑ Consistent across sources |
| Ecotricity | Fewer reviews | 1st / 16 | ↑ Tops Citizens Advice |
The divergence is starkest for EDF. Its spokesperson attributed its rising Citizens Advice score to staff training and ongoing investment — which is plausible — but also pointed to 170,000 five-star Trustpilot reviews as evidence of strong service. Those two statements aren't incompatible, but they're measuring different things, and conflating them misleads customers.
Social Media: The Unfiltered Verdict
The most compelling data point in this piece is one that rarely gets cited. Social analytics firm DataEQ, working with Unstructured, analysed over half a million social media posts about UK energy suppliers across a three-month window. Each post was sentiment-rated by human annotators and used to produce a Net Sentiment score for each supplier.
The industry average Net Sentiment was −53.6%. That means even in a normal period, more than half of all public energy-related social conversation is negative. This isn't a crisis reading — it's the sector's baseline.
Octopus Energy achieved the best score in the industry by a significant margin. British Gas ranked last. Scottish Power and OVO were also at the bottom. But the most striking finding was operational: 51.7% of consumers' most critical posts — those explicitly requiring a supplier response — went completely unanswered. Of those that did receive a response, the average wait time was over seven hours.
This matters beyond reputation management. Social media is increasingly where customers in distress turn first — and the sector is systematically ignoring more than half of them.
What the DataEQ data reveals about British Gas specifically: British Gas and ScottishPower drew particular criticism for missed engineer appointments and the handling of vulnerable customers. OVO drew sustained negative sentiment around direct debit increases and billing disputes. Octopus attracted negative posts too — primarily around unmasked door-to-door sales representatives — but at significantly lower volume and intensity than the legacy suppliers.
Ofgem's Enforcement Record: The Regulatory View
Regulators provide a fifth data point. Ofgem's Market Compliance Review assessed how suppliers were treating customers experiencing payment difficulties and identified three tiers of failure.
Severe weaknesses: TruEnergy, Utilita, and ScottishPower. Utilita and ScottishPower were issued with formal enforcement notices. British Gas was subject to a separate urgent investigation by Ofgem following a Times investigation into forcible prepayment meter installations against vulnerable customers.
Moderate weaknesses: A further 11 suppliers, including British Gas, EDF, OVO, Good Energy, So Energy, and Utility Warehouse, were found to have identifiable issues in their treatment of customers facing financial difficulty.
Minor issues only: Ecotricity, Octopus, and a small number of others.
The enforcement notices against ScottishPower are particularly notable given that the same supplier scored 4.3 on Trustpilot. There is no universe in which those two facts reflect the same underlying customer experience.
Where Does This Leave Fuse Energy?
Fuse Energy — the subject of our recent supplier profile — does not yet appear in the Citizens Advice main table. It has fewer than 25,000 customer accounts against the 25,000-account threshold, placing it in the "smaller suppliers" dropdown rather than the ranked table. Its Trustpilot score sits at 4.7 from a growing review base. The absence from the main statutory dataset is not a criticism — it's simply where the company sits in its growth trajectory. As customer numbers scale past 25,000, it will enter the full table.
So Who Is Actually Best?
Honestly, the answer depends on what you're trying to know.
If you want the supplier with the lowest complaint escalation rate and the most accurate billing, Ecotricity tops the statutory data. If you want the supplier most consistently praised by its own customers across multiple independent studies, Octopus Energy leads — and is the only large supplier to perform consistently well across Citizens Advice, Which?, and social sentiment simultaneously. If you want the supplier with the fastest response times, 100Green and Outfox Energy stand out in the Citizens Advice contact wait data. If you want the supplier with the fewest Ofgem enforcement concerns, the answer is broadly any of the smaller independents or Octopus.
What the data firmly and consistently contradicts is any reading that places British Gas, OVO, or ScottishPower in the top half of the market for customer service. Their Trustpilot scores are reasonable; everything else — Citizens Advice, Which?, social sentiment, Ofgem enforcement — points the other way.
The bigger picture: The sector improved meaningfully in 2025 — average complaints fell to roughly 0.9 per 100 customer accounts by late in the year, down from post-crisis peaks. But household energy debt hit a record £4.4bn, and the customers carrying that debt are disproportionately represented in the parts of the data Trustpilot doesn't capture. The gap between how suppliers look on review platforms and how they're actually performing for the most financially pressured customers is one of the clearest diagnostics of what's still broken in this market.