How this works
This site reads real owner discussion from across the web — Reddit, running forums, and YouTube comment sections — and sorts what people actually said about each shoe for plantar fasciitis. It sells nothing and recommends nothing; it aggregates first-person experience and shows you the split, honestly.
A shoe becomes a named pick once enough different people have weighed in on it. Each person counts once no matter how often they post, and accounts that look planted or promotional are weighted down. The helped and the didn't-help counts are shown at equal weight, because the bad news matters as much as the good.
Why a perfect score doesn't win
Ten people out of ten is a weaker result than 205 out of 246. Ten people could be luck; 246 could not. So rankings are not the raw percentage. Each shoe is scored on the lower end of what its numbers can actually support at 95% confidence — the standard way to keep a tiny sample from beating a large one on a lucky streak. A shoe with a perfect record and eleven reports will sit below a shoe at 83% with 246, and that is the correct order. Anything with under eight reports is left off entirely, and under twenty-five is flagged as thin.
Why some entries are a brand and some are a model
Most entries are a model line — Hoka Bondi, Asics Gel-Kayano. A few are just a brand: Altra, Kuru, Oofos, Birkenstock, Crocs. That is deliberate, not sloppiness. People overwhelmingly write "Altras helped" or "I live in my Birkenstocks" without naming a model, and for these brands the whole line shares one design idea — Altra is zero-drop and wide-toe across the range, Oofos is one foam. Splitting those comments across models would invent a precision the source material doesn't have, and would throw away most of the evidence to do it. Where people do name models consistently, we keep them separate. Where they don't, we say brand and mean brand.
Every count links to the comments behind it, and every comment links to its original source. This is aggregated owner opinion, not medical advice.