We test an alternative proposal by Bruno and Hansen (J High Energy Phys 2021(6), 10.1007/JHEP06(2021)043, 2021) to extract the scattering length from lattice simulations in a finite volume. For this, we use a scalar $$\phi ^4$$
ϕ
4
theory with two mass nondegenerate particles and explore various strategies to implement this new method. We find that the results are comparable to those obtained from the Lüscher method, with somewhat smaller statistical uncertainties at larger volumes.