12 Differences Between Tim Hortons And Starbucks, Explained

When it comes to coffee chains, both Tim Hortons and Starbucks are iconic in their own way. But there are plenty of differences that set them — and their customer base — apart. Both are among the top coffee chains in the U.S., but the whole experience and feel are different. When you think of one, your mind goes to Canada, Timbits, and Double Doubles, while the other conjures up images of Seattle, green aprons, and highly customizable drinks like Frappuccinos.

If you've been to one and not the other, chances are that you'll be making lots of comparisons the first time you visit. There are differences in everything from their origins and where you can find them, as well as their menus, customizability, and prices. One tries to churn out customers as quickly as possible, while the other seems to take its time a little more, which can often influence the consistency of the coffee drinks you experience. If you're curious what makes Tim Hortons and Starbucks different, we've created a comparison guide for you to better understand what to expect from each one.

The differences between Tim Hortons and Starbucks start with their origins. Tim Hortons came first, followed by Starbucks a full seven years later.

First, there was Tim Hortons, which hockey player Tim Horton started up in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in 1964. Since then, it's become Canada's largest restaurant chain. Nearly all its foods are breakfast foods, and Tim Hortons says it serves over 5 million cups of coffee per day in Canada, a country with only 41 million people. In fact, around 80% of Canadians visit to get some coffee, breakfast food, or both each month.

The first Starbucks opened in 1971, about 37 hours and 2,543 miles Northwest of the first Tim Hortons near the iconic Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. However, it didn't transform into a chain coffeehouse until the 1980s. There aren't any clear stats about how many cups of coffee Starbucks is selling daily in the U.S., but Cafely estimates it to be around 5 million in the U.S., a country of over 341 million people. So, the percentage of people getting Tim Horton's coffee daily in Canada is far, far higher.

If you're looking for a place to get coffee around the world, you're far more likely to run into a Starbucks than a Tim Hortons. Of course, it also depends on where you're looking.

Starbucks had a total of nearly 40,200 locations in 80 countries around the world in 2024. Interestingly, most of those are not even in North America, as the chain has expanded. However, the U.S. still has the most locations, with over 17,000 shops open, with locations in every state. Other countries that have over 1,000 locations include China (with over 6,800 locations), Korea, Japan, Canada, and the U.K.

Tim Hortons might have been around longer, but it hasn't spread nearly as much. Still, it has an impressive 5,500 locations in 13 countries around the world. There are currently over 4,000 locations in Canada and around 660 locations in 11 U.S. states, with most being in the Northeastern quadrant of the country (especially New York), with a few stragglers in Georgia and Texas. However, the only other countries with a significant number of Tim Hortons locations (over 100) appear to be Saudi Arabia and China, with China having about as many as the U.S.

Walking into a Tim Hortons is an entirely different experience from doing the same at Starbucks. Oddly enough, they seem to be shifting places when it comes to the vibe they have.

Tim Hortons has traditionally had a more utilitarian feel, like your average fast-food restaurant, without fancy interiors or exteriors. These earlier designs were meant for people to get their food and coffee, consume them (if dining in), and leave. This type of design has more of a brightly lit industrial feel and doesn't traditionally invite lingering any more than a Taco Bell. However, some of the contemporary remodels and openings worldwide have attempted to make it more cozy and inviting, with comfy chairs and spots for customers to spend time with each other.

While Tim Horton's is getting cozier, many Starbucks locations are going in the other direction, becoming less inviting and cozy than they used to be, with uncomfortable-looking seating that seems designed to eject you from your seat. As of 2025, the chain is also kicking people out if they're not paying customers, making it less of a third place for the community than it used to be. We rarely see anyone sitting in our local Starbucks' large but bright and angular dining area, while plenty of people are hanging out in the more comfy-feeling independent coffee shop down the street.

The average customer is looking for a different experience at Starbucks than at Tim Hortons. One offers an experience that is fast and simple, while the other is slower but has more customizable choices.

If you want to just grab unpretentious food and coffee and go, Tim Hortons is the place for you. The menu options are also less complicated, which allows the service to be super fast, especially at the drive-through. It's far easier to make a choice when you know what to expect from a menu that's largely the same year-round, with just a few standard coffee drink flavors like vanilla, caramel, and mocha. So, you won't be stuck with decision fatigue, and baristas can get you your order lickety split. Yes, you can still make simple customizations, like the type of milk, flavor, or sweetener you want, or add extra shots or whipped topping.

However, if you like fancy customizations and a revolving door of new flavors, drinks, and options, you're more likely to gravitate toward Starbucks. The drive-through lines might take a lot more time to get through, but you don't care because you can customize everything. You can choose the consistency of your foam and heat of your milk, as well as add syrups, sauces, powders, cold foam, toppings, drizzles, sweeteners, shots, and even change cup sizes. So, the type of customer who expects perfection in their personalized drink experience is more likely to head here.

Even though Starbucks has a larger food selection, you may not even be able to name a single food item on the menu since its focus is more on coffee than food. However, you can hardly think of Tim Hortons without thinking of some very specific foods (like donuts and Timbits).

Starbucks has a decent-sized food menu. Its website advertises a breakfast menu of various types of sandwiches, wraps, egg bites and bakes, and rolled and steel-cut oatmeal. Bakery items include croissants, danishes, loaves, cakes, muffins, scones, and bagels. For lunch, there are sandwiches, pockets, and protein boxes. Treats and snacks include cake pops, cookies, protein and snack bars, salty snacks, sweet snacks, and cheese and fruit snacks. The app at my local Starbucks lists 62 distinctive food items you can order.

Meanwhile, we only counted 41 distinctive items on the Tim Hortons menu, most of which are breakfast foods. We found donuts, Timbits, muffins, and cookies that all come with options to order larger quantities of them for a better per-item price. Then, there are breakfast sandwiches with various bread options, breakfast burritos, avocado toast, hashbrowns, omelette bites, bagels, cream cheese, and a few other sweet and savory pastries. There are also sandwiches and chips if you're looking for something more lunch-like.

One thing Tim Hortons is known for is its stupendously quick drive-through, which is probably something you've never experienced at Starbucks. 

When it comes to fast drive-throughs, Tim Horton's ranks fifth among all drive-through chains in the U.S., with QSR reporting an average wait time of 202.66 seconds. So, somehow, they're grabbing all your food choices, whipping up your coffee drink, and collecting your payment in just over three minutes. According to employees posting on social media, managers in some locations get bonuses for pushing drive-through employees to get faster and faster times, with goals like 60, 45, or 25 seconds per order not being unusual. Although some employees admit to slowing customers down at the speaker on purpose to give themselves some breathing room between orders. As you can imagine, these ridiculous drive-through timing goals result in far more mistakes than if employees could slow down just a bit.

Starbucks has notoriously slow lines but announced in 2025 that it has plans to get its wait times down to four minutes. According to QSR (via The Street), previous average wait times per customer after placing their order has been four minutes and 44 seconds. Of course, it may take you even longer to actually get to the speaker to place your order if your Starbucks line looks anything like ours, especially in the morning.

Quick coffee stops may be easier to budget at Tim Hortons since prices tend to be cheaper than at Starbucks. Here's a comparison to help you understand what kind of price differences to expect.

If you're the type of person who opts for the smallest drink, the savings would be fairly significant. For example, the difference between a short Starbucks coffee ($2.55) and a small Tim Hortons coffee ($1.99) is $0.56. The latte price difference is even bigger, with the short Starbucks latte ($4.35) costing $0.86 more than the small Tim Hortons latte ($3.49). There's no option for a short blended Starbucks drink, so you'll find a tall caramel Frappuccino ($5.25) to be $1.26 more expensive than a small caramel Iced Capp ($3.99).

However, it's complicated to make an exact comparison since the cup sizes at the two chains aren't the same. To give a clearer image of the price difference, we compared the price of a Starbucks tall (12 ounces) with a Tim Hortons medium (14 ounces) and adjusted the per-ounce price to reflect what 12 ounces of Tim Hortons would likely cost. Every time, Starbucks' price was higher. Brewed coffee at both places would have a $0.52 difference. Meanwhile, lattes would have a price difference of $1.03. Cold blended coffee drink price differences would be even more with a caramel Frappuccino and caramel Iced Capp having a $1.23 price difference.

The Starbucks drink selection is certainly larger. Plus, the drinks are more customizable than Tim Hortons'.

Not only are there more drink categories at Starbucks with more drinks in each category, but there are loads of ways you can customize any drink except premade ones. There are hot and cold versions of several coffee drinks like brewed coffee, Americanos, lattes, mochas, macchiatos, and flat whites. Plus, you have cappuccinos, cortados, espresso shots, coffee travelers (boxed coffee for multiple people), cold brew, Nitro cold brew, and iced shaken espresso. Then, there are five categories of hot and cold teas, three categories of Refreshers, and three different iced energy drinks. You'll also find Frappuccinos, hot chocolate, lemonade, milk, steamers, and five categories of bottled beverages. That's 39 separate drink categories, not to mention the endless variations possible within those categories with a variety of liquid choices, flavors, add-ins, prep methods, sweeteners, cup options, etc.

Meanwhile, at Tim Hortons, the options are fewer. They include hot and iced versions of brewed coffee, matcha, chai, lattes, teas, caramel macchiatos, and Americanos. A few hot drinks include French vanilla, hot chocolate, coffee mocha, espresso, cappuccino, and Take Twelve (boxed coffee). Then, there are more cold drinks like Iced Capp, TimsBoost, Tea & Lemonade, Refreshers, Red Bulls, fountain sodas, and three categories of bottled drinks. Counting up, that's only 29 categories, and they're simpler, with only a handful of syrups available, and nothing to customize except the type of milk, sweetener, or number of espresso shots.

With the demand for coffee beans higher from Starbucks, it has to source its coffee beans from far more locations than Tim Hortons does. Even the regions where the two companies source their beans are different.

Tim Hortons' proprietary coffee blend comes from a secret mixture of five different bean types. The beans come from small farms in various countries in Central and South America that are in specific types of high-altitude microclimate. Sourcing from various regions is necessary because the timing of the growing season is a little different for each farm. With beans coming in year-found from different locations, the chain can ensure it's always serving the freshest coffee possible.

Since Starbucks has more locations worldwide, it's necessary to have more coffee suppliers. Rather than just sourcing from Latin American coffee plantations, Starbucks gets some from Africa and the Asian Pacific region as well. The various beans the chain uses comes from 450,000 farmers, and managing that many accounts at once sounds like a daunting task.

We analyzed the sugar content of four notoriously sweet coffee drinks at both chains and found that Tim Hortons versions often have more sugar per ounce than Starbucks. The larger the size, the more significant the difference becomes for certain drinks.

Since the two chains have different cup sizes, after figuring out the amount of sugar per ounce, we imagined how much sugar a 12-ounce drink would have at both chains (the equivalent of a Tim Hortons medium). Mochas were the only ones where Starbucks' version had more sugar, and it wasn't that significant at only 0.3 grams more sugar per ounce (17 grams at Tim's and around 20 grams at Starbucks). However, the sugary difference was far more pronounced in other drinks. Twelve ounces of white hot chocolate has 45 grams of sugar at Tim Hortons, while Starbucks' version would only have around 31 grams.

Surprisingly, some of the drinks had around double or more the amount of sugar than Tim Hortons in a 12-ounce serving. For example, the hot chocolate, which has 43 grams at Tim's, would have only 22.5 grams at Starbucks. The caramel-flavored blended drinks have an even wider divide, with a caramel Iced Capp at Tim Hortons coming in at a whopping 74 grams of sugar, while the equivalent-sized caramel Frappuccino at Starbucks only has around 29 grams.

In most places where you can order drinks of different sizes, the standard is to call them "small, medium, and large." So, walking into a place where the sizes are something different can be a little disorienting and cause a bit of a pause while you recall the chain's specific sizing terminology. Is a proprietary sizing system pretentious? Maybe. Between these chains, you'll only find it at Starbucks and not at Tim Hortons.

Thinking about how quickly Tim Hortons tries to get its orders through, we would imagine that having the customers flubbing over a proprietary sizing system would slow things down. Besides, it doesn't really seem on-brand for down-to-earth Tim Hortons to go with anything besides small, medium, large, and extra large.

Meanwhile, Starbucks has always come off as a little snooty, with its Seattle-roasted beans (if you've ever met a Seattle-born coffee lover, you'll get an earful on that) and its proprietary size names. Instead of small, medium, large, and extra large (and extra extra large), it has short, tall, grande, venti, and trenta sizes. What you may not have known is that one of these size names is actually trademarked. While the chain couldn't trademark short, tall, and grande, since they are words normally used for sizing, it trademarked its venti size name in 1998. However, it doesn't appear as if the trenta size is trademarked yet.

Everyone we've talked to about Tim Hortons grows wistful when they talk about the donuts and how much better they are than those at some of the other leading donut and coffee chains. In Tasting Table's own showdown between Dunkin' and Tim Hortons' donuts, Tim Hortons' donuts came out ahead, with their "layers of nuanced flavors." Unfortunately, you won't find any donuts among Starbucks bakery options if you're wanting to bring a dozen to share at the office one morning.

We found a list of 35 different donuts in the April 2025 Tim Hortons nutrition guide. Granted, you're not likely to see that many on the menu locally at the same time. Our nearest one just stocks 10 flavors, which includes two seasonal ones. Plus, it has apple fritters and Timbits. If you're not familiar with the well-beloved Timbits, they're like donut holes, and we found 15 different types listed for the season on the nutrition guide. Most match available donut flavors, but some are completely different, like birthday cake and Venetian cream Timbits. You can order donuts individually, by the half dozen, and by the dozen. Whereas, Timbits are sold in packs of four, 10, 20, 30, or 40. And, yes, you can choose the flavors you want, whether you're ordering donuts or Timbits.