Lykyn vs North Spore: An Honest Side-by-Side From Someone Who Ships Both

You searched for a mushroom kit and ended up on two tabs

Both brands are real. Both ship. Both have customers who swear by them. The reason you ended up comparing is that they solve the same job in two completely different ways.

North Spore is a Portland, Maine company. Their catalog is wide: dozens of species as spawn, sealed sawdust blocks, liquid culture, agar, foraging books, cordyceps powder on grocery shelves. They are a mushroom supply house that happens to also sell beginner kits.

Lykyn is a hardware company. We make one physical thing: the Smart Mushroom Grow Box. It is a countertop chamber with a sealed humidity loop, air exchange on a timer, and a phone dashboard. We also sell four species as pre-colonized blocks that slide into the chamber. That is the whole lineup.

If you want a mushroom supply house, North Spore is the answer. If you want the growing to run itself, Lykyn is the answer. Most of the rest of this piece is how to tell which one you actually want.

What North Spore does best

They are strong in three places and we will say so plainly.

Catalog breadth. If the species you want is King Trumpet, Blue Oyster, Nameko, Chestnut, Reishi on a log, or Cordyceps on rice, they probably stock it. We stock Lion's Mane, Shiitake, Pink Oyster, and Pioppino. That is it. For a cultivator who likes to rotate species every month, their catalog wins on reach.

Foraging and education. North Spore co-founder Jon Carver has a book on wild mushroom identification. Their blog has long entries on bolete walks and the deep foraging culture of the US Northeast. Their newsletter reads like a nature magazine. We do not match that. We write about the chamber and the four species inside it.

US retail footprint. You can find North Spore kits in Whole Foods, independent garden centers, and a growing list of specialty grocery stores. If you want to touch the box before you buy, they are easier to find on a shelf. Lykyn is online only.

For a specific product, specific price, or current stock on any of the above, visit northspore.com. We will not quote their catalog figures second-hand.

What Lykyn does best

We solve one problem well: taking the manual labor and the guesswork out of the fruiting stage.

Automation. A North Spore grow bag asks you to cut an X in the plastic, mist two to four times a day, and watch for pins. Miss a day in week two and the caps crack. Our chamber keeps the inside at 85 to 95 percent relative humidity on its own. The air exchange runs on a schedule. You check the phone when you want to.

Countertop form factor. The chamber is roughly the footprint of a stand mixer. It lives next to the kettle. Our top-selling variant is Bone White, 42 centimeters tall, with a sliding glass door. North Spore kits sit on top of their shipping cardboard, under a transparent plastic tent that you build yourself. That tent is honest, cheap, and effective. It is also not something most people want on the counter for three weeks.

In-house R&D. The PCB, the firmware, the mobile app, and the sensor stack are built by five engineers in Kocaeli, Turkey, with the device certification work running out of TUBITAK MAM. We own the moulds. When a sensor misreads, we fix it on the next firmware push and OTA update the fleet. That is a hardware company answer.

EU presence. We ship from the EU for European customers and from the US for US customers. North Spore does not ship fresh spawn outside North America for cold-chain reasons. If you are reading this from Berlin or Lisbon, that matters.

Honest side-by-side

Neither row is a knock on the other brand. We ship both styles of product in our own warehouse and ran a North Spore Lion's Mane bag on the shelf next to a Lykyn chamber for six weeks before writing this. In August 2026 we logged a flush where the shiitake caps browned faster than we expected after a 24-hour FAE pause: that same timeline would have been a dead bag in a plastic tent, because missed days compound. The chamber held it, we got the pins back, and the lesson was that automation forgives the owner more than a manual rig does.

When to pick which

Three short rubrics to short-circuit the comparison.

Pick North Spore if: you want to try six species in a year, you like the ritual of misting, you live in the US, and the plastic tent on the counter does not bother you. If you are already deep in cultivation and want spawn, agar, or liquid culture, they are your supplier.

Pick Lykyn if: you want fresh mushrooms the way you want fresh herbs: on the counter, running on their own, visible through glass, with a phone that tells you when something is off. The chamber is a one-time purchase. The blocks are the refills.

Pick both if: you are a mushroom-curious cook with time on weekends. Run a North Spore spawn project in the garage for the species we do not carry (King Trumpet, say) and keep a Lykyn block cycling on the kitchen counter for weeknight dinners. We know growers who do exactly that.

If you only want to try one species

Grocery stores carry button mushrooms and sometimes a tray of brown shiitake. They almost never carry Lion's Mane, Pink Oyster, or fresh Pioppino. That is the real reason to grow at home: access to species the shelf does not carry.

Two blocks slot into the chamber and give you a first flush that fills the glass. Both ship from our warehouse already colonized, so you are not starting from spawn.

Grow it yourself

Shiitake Grow Kit, 5 lb block

Pre-colonized hardwood sawdust. Tan to chestnut caps with a cracked matte top, umami-forward on the pan.

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Grow it yourself

Pink Oyster Grow Kit, 5 lb block

Coral-pink clusters you will not find on the shelf. Fast pinning, firm bite, holds its colour in stir-fry.

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