The definitive comparison
WGS vs 23andMe vs Ancestry — what they actually read.
Every consumer DNA test on the market falls into one of two technology categories: SNP genotyping (the $99–$229 tests) or whole genome sequencing (the $180–$430 tests). The gap between them is roughly 10,000× more data. Here's the side-by-side that explains why.
The core difference
Two totally different technologies at similar prices.
SNP genotyping and WGS use different lab instruments, different chemistry, and produce different kinds of output. A genotyping test is a chip that checks pre-selected positions in your DNA. WGS is a sequencer that reads the whole thing.
| SNP genotyping (23andMe, Ancestry) | Whole genome sequencing (Dante Labs) | |
|---|---|---|
| Positions read | ~700,000 | ~6,400,000,000 |
| % of DNA read | <0.02% | ~100% |
| Technology | Microarray chip | NovaSeq X sequencer |
| Coverage | 1× call per position | 30× per position |
| Accuracy | ~99.9% at read positions | 99.98% variant-call |
| Variants found | ~700k common SNPs | ~4.6–5M per person |
| Novel variants | No — only pre-selected | Yes — anything present |
| Rare disease | Not diagnostic | Clinical-grade |
| Pharmacogenomics | Limited | Full PGx panel |
| Raw data | Text export only | FASTQ + BAM + VCF |
| Re-analyzable | Locked to chip design | Any future tool |
| Ancestry | Excellent | Yes, plus much more |
| Turnaround | 3–6 weeks | ~12 weeks |
| Price | $79–$229 | $180–$430 |
What genotyping is good at.
Genotyping is not a bad technology — it's just optimised for a different job. If you want ancestry percentages, DNA relatives, and a handful of well-studied health traits, a SNP chip does that fast and cheap. The 700,000-position designs used by 23andMe and Ancestry deliberately over-sample the positions that vary most between populations, which is why their ancestry breakdowns are excellent.
Where genotyping falls apart is anything the chip wasn't designed to find. Rare variants that only occur in a few thousand people worldwide? Not on the chip. Novel variants unique to your family? Not on the chip. Any de novo mutation? Not on the chip. Structural variants, insertions, deletions, copy-number changes? Poorly detected or missed.
Why WGS wins for health.
If your goal is knowing anything actionable about your health, WGS is not just better than genotyping — it's a different category of test. The BRCA1/2 hereditary breast cancer analysis on 23andMe, for example, only checks three specific founder mutations common in Ashkenazi Jewish populations. It misses the vast majority of pathogenic BRCA variants. A WGS BRCA analysis reads every position in both genes.
Same story for CYP2D6 pharmacogenomics (which drug metabolisers you are for warfarin, SSRIs, opioids, tamoxifen), hemochromatosis (HFE compound heterozygotes are frequently miscalled by chips), and every other clinically relevant analysis. If you want reports you can hand to a doctor, you need WGS.
Where a chip is the right pick anyway
If you already have a specific reason to want ancestry results and DNA relatives — genealogy, adoption search, ethnic breakdown — and you don't care about health data, a 23andMe or AncestryDNA test at $99 during Black Friday is a legitimate value. The health data on those tests is more limited than most buyers realise, but the ancestry infrastructure they've built (relative-matching, ethnicity models) is genuinely excellent and hard to replicate.
The "upload your 23andMe data to Promethease" trick.
A common suggestion online is to buy a $99 23andMe kit and then upload the raw data file to services like Promethease or SelfDecode for additional health reports. This works — those tools do surface findings the 23andMe interface hides — but the entire chain is still limited to the 700,000 positions the chip read. You can generate more reports from the same data, but you cannot generate more data.
WGS is data-limited, not report-limited. Buy the sequencing once and you can feed the VCF into Promethease, SelfDecode, Genetic Genie, or any other interpretation service afterward — on top of the 200+ reports Dante ships natively.
Read the whole thing.
If you're comparing consumer DNA tests, WGS is the answer to most of the questions you're actually trying to ask. Save 10% at Dante with GENOME.
Bottom line
Which one to buy.
Ancestry-focused, budget-tight, no interest in health data: AncestryDNA on sale. Health-curious, want raw data you own forever, willing to wait 12 weeks and manage a slow provider: Dante Labs WGS with the GENOME code. Every other combination is a compromise. There is no consumer WGS competitor at Dante's price point that has meaningfully better customer service; that trade-off is unfortunately currently unavoidable if you want raw data at consumer pricing.