Spent a few minutes compiling the top 500 players win rate matches via
http://sfv.fightinggame.community/
and made a
rough tier list based on it here
To understand this, I pretty much made a list of winRates and excel'd them for all character matchups. I then summed matchup points to get a tier list and ordered it in descending Tier order starting with the highest, working my way down. It's based off the 10 point scale matchup, although I'm off by 0.1 on the 10 point scale, because of rounding which is happening behind the scenes on the community website. (For example, Dhalsim vs Birdie is a 5.5-4.4 matchup in Dhalsim's favor, 5.5+4.4 = 9.9 not 10 like it's supposed to be) So you can look up matchups based on your character VS another, based on the top 500.
I'm sure it's better than Eventhubs' tier list (popularity contest/current flavor of the month) as this is based on actual online matches and results. The problem is, there is never enough data AND the popularity of characters skews the results (Sim is not popular, but there a few very good Sim players beating everyone and Ryu I can say is not bottom tier, but because everyone is using him and losing with him, it makes his winRate low.) so as always take with a grain of salt. I can say for sure, the popularity of the top 500 characters can't be wrong with Ryu/Nash being most popular and Fang/Zangief at the bottom.