Abstract Innovative applications based on two-dimensional solids require cost-effective fabrication processes resulting in large areas of high quality materials. Chemical vapour deposition is among the most promising methods to fulfill these requirements. However, for 2D materials prepared in this way it is generally assumed that they are of inferior quality in comparison to the exfoliated 2D materials commonly used in basic research. In this work we challenge this assumption and aim to quantify the differences in quality for the prototypical transition metal dichalcogenide MoS₂. To this end single layers of MoS₂ prepared by different techniques (exfoliation, grown by different chemical vapour deposition methods, transfer techniques and as vertical heterostructure with graphene) are studied by Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy, complemented by atomic force microscopy. We demonstrate that as-prepared MoS₂, directly grown on SiO₂, differs from exfoliated MoS₂ in terms of higher photoluminescence, lower electron concentration and increased strain. As soon as a water film is intercalated (e.g. by transfer) underneath the grown MoS₂, in particular the (opto)electronic properties become practically identical to those of exfoliated MoS₂. A comparison of the two most common precursors shows that the growth with MoO₃ causes greater strain and/or defect density deviations than growth with ammonium heptamolybdate. As part of a heterostructure directly grown MoS₂ interacts much stronger with the substrate and in this case an intercalated water film does not lead to the complete decoupling, which is typical for exfoliation or transfer. Our work shows that the supposedly poorer quality of grown 2D transition metal dichalcogenides is indeed a misconception.