McDonald's and Taco Bell are locked in a cutthroat value menu war - and the winner is clear

• Both McDonald's and Taco Bell have unveiled major overhauls to their value menus recently. The changes have been seen as an appeal to win over budget-conscious customers.
• McDonald's new dollar menu is tiered, ranging in price from $1 to $3, while Taco Bell's menu items are $1 across the board.
• Both menus have pretty fantastic deals, but in the end, Taco Bell's ends up being the best value.

Once again, the drums of war are sounding across the nation - the drums of a fast-food war.

The value menu battles have been waged across multiple fronts in the past few years, with Wendy's, McDonald's, Burger King, and Taco Bell all vying for supremacy over budget-wary consumers.

And with McDonald's release of the new $1 $2 $3 Dollar Menu, the guns are blazing once more. McDonald's has struggled to lure in cost-conscious diners since it axed the Dollar Menu in 2013. The "McPick 2" deal bridged the gap for a while, but this new dollar menu is a huge step forward in the budget battles.

Taco Bell entered the fray yet again with an overhaul of the Tex-Mex chain's popular dollar menu, adding several new items and sneakily calling out McDonald's in a press release. And Taco Bell's CEO, Brian Niccol, is incredibly optimistic about this shot of adrenaline to the dollar menu. "People ask the question: Who orders from the value menu?" Niccol told Business Insider's Kate Taylor. "The real question is, who doesn't? ... It doesn't matter if you're making $40,000 or $140,000, young, old."

But the actual question is this: which chain offers the better deal? We decided to take a look at each menu through the lens of four variables: pricing, quality, creativity, and value, the last of which was determined by a final averaging of the first three.