VOO is the better fund to own alone. VUG is a growth bet at the same fee.

Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, VOO, is the better fund to own alone. It charges the same 0.03%, or $3 a year on $10,000, as Vanguard Morningstar Growth ETF, VUG, the old Vanguard Growth ETF under a new name.

As of Sept. 30, 2026, companies the S&P 500 fund already held made up 97.5% of the growth fund.

On July 29, 2026, Vanguard renamed it, and a prospectus supplement that day said the investment objective, strategies and policies did not change.

The choice is about weighting, not about two different portfolios, so the growth fund makes sense only if you want that heavier weighting on purpose. If you are choosing one stock fund, choose the S&P 500 fund. If you already hold the broad market, adding the growth fund is a tilt toward names you already own, not a way to spread the bet, and it is not a substitute for the broad fund.

What VOO and VUG hold

The S&P 500 fund tracks the S&P 500 index of large U.S. companies and holds those stocks in about the index's own weights. The growth fund tracks the Morningstar US Large Cap Growth Index, the growth companies inside Morningstar's large-cap index, and holds them the same way.

In the portfolios Vanguard reported as of Sept. 30, 97.5% of the growth fund sat in companies the S&P 500 fund also held. Of the S&P 500 fund, 58.3% sat in companies the growth fund also held. The 20 companies that appear only in the growth fund were 2.4% of it.

The other 41.7% of the S&P 500 fund sat in companies the growth fund did not hold, including Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase and Exxon Mobil.

Where the two funds share a company, the growth fund typically holds it at about 1.9 times the weight. That 1.9 is the median across the shared names, not the ratio for every one of them. General Electric, Texas Instruments, McDonald's and Dell sit at a similar or lighter weight in the growth fund.

Vanguard's Sept. 30 S&P 500 fact sheet and growth fact sheet counted 505 stocks in the S&P 500 fund and 135 in the growth fund. The 10 largest holdings were 65.7% of the growth fund and 40.6% of the S&P 500 fund.

On that date, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet were 44.9% of the growth fund and 27.1% of the S&P 500 fund. Nvidia alone was 13.5% of the growth fund and 8.4% of the S&P 500 fund.

Owning both does not spread a bet. It adds a second helping of growth stocks the S&P 500 fund already owns.

What VOO and VUG returned

The gap in what owners earned belongs to the indexes the funds track, the S&P 500 and the Morningstar US Large Cap Growth Index. Through Oct. 31, 2026, Vanguard's figures put each fund within 0.04 percentage points of its own benchmark over the one-, three-, five- and 10-year periods, so the difference between the funds is the difference between those indexes.

Vanguard's figures assume dividends were reinvested, and they measure the value of the portfolio rather than the price the shares traded at. Periods of a year or more are annual averages.

The growth fund's case is the decade: at those 10-year rates, $10,000 with dividends reinvested grew to about $50,500 in the growth fund and about $41,900 in the S&P 500 fund.

Over five years that lead reversed, and the S&P 500 fund was ahead. Over three years the two were close, with the growth fund ahead. The last year is where the gap is widest, and it went to the S&P 500 fund.

The growth fund has also fallen harder, measured on closing prices rather than the dividend-inclusive returns above. Over the five years through Nov. 10, 2026, the largest drop in its closing price ran from Nov. 19, 2021 to Nov. 3, 2022, a fall of 36%. The S&P 500 fund's largest drop over those five years ran from Jan. 3, 2022 to Oct. 12, 2022, a fall of 25%.

The S&P 500 fund pays more income as well. On Oct. 31 the 30-day yield set by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC yield, was 1.02% for the S&P 500 fund and 0.37% for the growth fund. It annualizes the dividends the holdings earned over the prior 30 days, after fees.

Buy the S&P 500 fund if you are choosing one stock fund. If you already hold the broad market, add the growth fund only as a deliberate overweight of the growth names the S&P 500 fund already holds, not as a diversifier and not as a replacement for the broad fund.

The 10-year record is the case for that overweight. The last year, the deeper drop in price, and the companies the growth fund leaves out are the case against letting it stand in for the broad fund.