When you do compare hearing aids, the first question is whether you want to get analog or a Tempe digital hearing aids. Analog are the least expensive by far. These hearing aids simply receive a signal from a microphone, amplify it, and send the louder sound on to the ear. It's as simple as that.
There is a middle ground between analog and digital. These are sometimes called digital programmable, although they are not 100 percent digital, or they are called analog programmable. The idea here is that it is indeed an analog hearing aid. It just has the advantage of a certain amount of customization in programming through the use of computer software. This can give you a variety of settings you can manually switch to accommodate your listening preferences in different listening situations. The settings can be changed by reprogramming at any time. When you compare hearing aids,these are more expensive than the regular analog ones, but less so than fully digital ones.