Dragon Ball Canon’s Real Saiyan Power Rankings — Not Who You Think

Power levels in Dragon Ball are a headache. Fans love to slap non-canon upgrades on their favorites and run wild with what-if matchups, which is fun, but it totally muddies the waters. So here’s a clean, canon-only temperature check: the strongest Saiyans as the series actually depicts them. No headcanon. No video game feats. Just what Akira Toriyama’s story puts on screen and on the page.

Ground rules

This is about what the narrative shows, not fan theories. If a character’s ceiling is unclear, I’m going by proven feats and how the story frames them. Where things get weird or underspecified (looking at you, Trunks’s Rage form), I’ll spell that out.

1. Mastered Ultra Instinct Goku

   Right now, he’s the mountaintop. MUI lets Goku fight without the hesitation or wind-up everyone else needs. He reads attacks in motion like he’s already seen the future, and he’s the most battle-tested user of god-tier techniques in actual combat. Between his base strength and that reactive, automatic fighting style, he’s a nightmare matchup for basically anyone.

2. Gohan Beast

   People love to argue this might be the single strongest Saiyan form, period. The honest answer: we don’t know yet. What we do have is nasty proof of concept — Beast pulls Gohan’s latent potential all the way to the surface, and he absolutely manhandled Cell Max with it. The catch is it’s emotional and unrefined, so until the series shows more, it sits just under Goku.

3. Ultra Ego Vegeta

   On the manga side, you could talk yourself into Vegeta being the top dog. The anime hasn’t backed that up yet, but Ultra Ego is ridiculous regardless — it weaponizes his pride and even turns taking damage into more power. It’s raw, it’s risky, and it lets him scrap with Gods of Destruction. The trade-off: unlike Ultra Instinct, it doesn’t play nice with calm detachment, which Vegeta does not do. High risk, high reward, still terrifying.

4. Full Power Broly

   Broly is what happens when someone forgets to install a power cap. He grew stronger mid-fight, overwhelmed Goku and Vegeta at the same time, and forced them into Gogeta just to shut him down. He did all that basically on instinct, without formal training, which implies his ceiling is even higher. The story hasn’t fully explored that yet, so he lands here.

5. Future Trunks (Rage form)

   Trunks hacked his way into a one-off evolution that let him clash with fused Zamasu — a god-level opponent — despite having no god ki and no divine training. The form’s mechanics are fuzzy (and probably unstable), but what it did on the day counts: for a brief window, Trunks jumped to a level most Saiyans have no business reaching.

6. Kale

   Think Broly, but from Universe 6. Kale’s Berserk mutation cranks her physical power to absurd levels — enough to roll through multiple Super Saiyans during the Tournament of Power. Once she learned to stabilize it, she got much more dangerous. Experience is still the limiter. Fused with Caulifla via Potara, she becomes Kefla, who hits Super Saiyan 2.

7. Caulifla

   A pure prodigy. Caulifla snapped into Super Saiyan and then Super Saiyan 2 like it was nothing, which tells you how high her base potential sits. She lacks refined technique and tends to fight on instinct, so her ceiling in practice is lower than her raw power suggests, but the destructive output is undeniably there.

8. Gotenks

   One of the wildest fusion power spikes in the series. Gotenks hit Super Saiyan 3 with a level of casual ease that gave even Goku trouble to sustain, and he had the brute force to push around Majin Buu. The downside: he fought like a kid because he was one — cocky, distractible, sometimes literally leaving mid-fight. Even so, on power alone, he clears a lot of adult Saiyans.

9. Bardock

   Not as hyped as his descendants, but Bardock kept smashing his limits. Canon shows him taking on Gas, and his experience advantage was a huge deal. He stood up to enemies stronger than him and still pushed through. He’s nowhere near modern god-tier territory, but for his era he’s way above the pack.

10. King Vegeta

    The old king wasn’t just a titleholder. He’s credited with wiping out multiple planets in a single strike and was feared by Frieza’s forces — which says plenty. Saiyan society follows strength; if you sit on that throne, you earned it. He did it without relying on the modern transformation stack, making him a clean snapshot of pre-Frieza Saiyan dominance.

Why some of this feels odd

Trunks’s Rage form is basically a DIY evolution with no manual, so the show never really explains the rules. Ultra Ego is the mirror opposite of Ultra Instinct — one needs zen and the other thrives on pride and punishment — which makes direct comparisons messy. And Gohan Beast looks like a nuclear option, but we’ve only seen it in one major fight, so its true ceiling is still a question mark.

The basics if you want to dive back in

Dragon Ball is created by Akira Toriyama and animated by Toei Animation. The franchise sits in the Action/Adventure/Fantasy pocket. IMDb scores at a glance: Dragon Ball at 8.5/10, Dragon Ball Z at 8.8/10, and Dragon Ball Super at 8.3/10. You can stream the series on Crunchyroll.

That’s the list if we’re sticking to canon receipts. Disagree? Of course you do — it’s Dragon Ball. Drop your order in the comments and tell me who I criminally underrated.