Caveat: I've not yet tried other nitrate test kits, but have been using this product for about a year now with my 60 gal freshwater tank. It's pretty easy once you get used to it, but it's multiple steps - dropper 1, shake dropper2 for 30 seconds, shake for 60 seconds, then wait up to 5 mins. So a little bit time consuming. Mainly though, your making a judgement call on the color of the liquid in the tube, matching it vs 7 bands on the indicator card representing 5ppm, 10, 20, 40 80, 160. The tricky part is the mid-range (20-80), which are shades of red that can be hard to discern. In my situation, we have relatively high nitrates, so I've been testing a lot and start to obsess over the details. But if other tests offer similar levels of precision, then I would say this is a perfectly reasonable option :-)

I have used both. Yes, the dipstick will give you quicker results, but the liquid testing will give you better and more accurate results. I have 3 aquariums and 1 pond and I like accurate results for my fish.

I used this product to determine the nitrate level in my 150 gallon saltwater fish only with live rock (FOWLR) tank. This aquarium is loaded with 5 different groupers of various sizes and a 11" long Unicorn Tang. Together, they generate a lot of waste products and I was concerned about excessive amounts of nitrate. With this test, it was very difficult to differentiate between the 40 ppm, 80ppm and 160 ppm color codes as they are all red, but slightly different shades thereof, and they all look pretty much the same. The bottom line is that am still not sure what the nitrate level is in that tank.