A Comprehensive Guide to the Best Grills We’ve Ever Reviewed

Here’s the thing: Despite the title of this piece, there is no “best grill.” No, we’re not espousing some utopian “all grills are beautiful in their own way” philosophy. But there just isn’t a definitive way forusto tellyouwhat kind of grill will meet your needs best. Different types of grills come with different pros (Gas grills heat up really fast! Charcoal grills are really affordable!) and cons (Pellet grills need an electricity source! Kamado grills weigh as much as a two-seater airplane!).

Still, we have reviewed dozens of grills and smokers of almost every type: If you already know what you want, you can read our reviews of thebest gas grills,charcoal grills,pellet grills, and more. Here we’ve rounded up our winners and favorites from every category. We’ll also provide an explanation of why a particular type of grill is worth investing in and why it might fit your grilling needs. If you make hot dogs for a crowd every Sunday in the summer, if you like a serious burst of smoky flavor on yourribs, or if youtailgateall fall, read on to find our top picks for all of your grilling needs.

Table of contents

The best charcoal grill
The best gas grill
The best pellet grill
The best smoker
The best kamado grill
The best portable grill
Other great grills to consider
Five necessary grilling accessories

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File this under Simple Is Best. Though there have been changes and updates here and there, Weber’s kettle grills have had the same basic design for close to 70 years, and that’s because it works. The Premium version of the kettle is a step up from the most basic model and comes with several notable upgrades, like a built-in lid thermometer to monitor temps, a hinged grill grate that makes it easy to add coals to the fire, and an ash catcher to keep sparks off the lawn. It’s a Goldilocks situation in terms of size, offering ajust-right363 square inches of cooking area. That is big enough to fit a whole turkey but small enough that the grill is easy to move around. The Weber kettle maintains temperature well, in part thanks to a smooth top damper. It’s easy to set up for two-zone cooking as well as for searing on the stainless steel grates. It’s a grill with fans from every level of the grillosphere—beloved by backyard grillmasters and barbecue restaurant owners alike. When conducting research for our smoker review, we spoke with Jonathan Fox of Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q in Atlanta who fondly recalled his days of learning to cook on this kettle grill.

尽管我们认为尺寸是最完美的grillers, the one potential downside to the Weber Kettle might be its 22" diameter. If you find yourself needing to make two dozen burgers or six racks of ribs, you might need something bigger. In that case, we recommend you consider the smoker and kamado grill below.

Two words: taste and price. Charcoal gives you flavor that propane never will, and while that flavor is, if anything, even stronger in an offset smoker or a kamado grill, both are considerably more expensive than the Weber grill here. This is simply the best grilling bang for your buck.

Read our complete review of the best charcoal grills here.

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We tested propane gas grills at a number of different price points and fell in love with the Weber Genesis series. Even though the E-325s is billed as a three-burner gas grill, it comes with a sizable sear burner for high heat that essentially makes this a four-burner. That means it’s got ample cooking space—513 square inches of cast-iron grates make up the main cooking surface, with a warming rack on top. It’s also compatible with Weber Crafted, the grill maker’s set of additional hardware that includes a two-sidedcast-iron searing grate, agriddle, arotisserie, and apizza stone.

Unlike theWeber Spirit series, which we also tested, the Genesis isn’t a smart grill. Ultimately, we didn’t find Wi-Fi capability was vital, and the Genesis offered a little more cooking space and a little more BTU fire power. It’s also easy to turn a Genesis series grill into a smart grill by adding theWeber Connect Smart Grilling Hub。Generally, we don’t think grills and apps go together very well—we like hands-on grilling and have found apps to be buggy—but Weber’s actually works quite well. Another plus for the Weber grills: They are available in natural gas models to hook up as part of an outdoor kitchen.

Both the Genesis and the Spirit grills are pricey—they start around $900—so we also recommend the Char-Broil Performance 2-Burner Propane Gas grill. It delivered powerful heat at a price tag under $300. There simply wasn’t anything in this price range that performed anywhere close to as well as it did.

Gas grills heat up quickly, with minimal effort on the part of the griller themselves. They also offer the same control over heat you get from a stovetop. So if your idea of a fun cookout revolves more around chatting with your friends than checking your coals, a gas grill might be for you.

Read our complete review of the best gas grillshere。

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最好的颗粒烧烤:韦伯Smokefire

Okay, we know you’re probably seeing a pattern here. But the truth is Weber just makes high-quality grills. The Smokefire, which only hit the market in 2020, eked out a win in our testing over theTraeger Ironwoodand theOklahoma Joe’s Rider series.It didn’t necessarily win because we thought it grilled better food—all three grills got top marks, and we enthusiastically recommend each of them. Rather, it won because of the wide range of features Weber packed into its pellet grill. It has a wide temperature range, listed as 200°-600℉ (although we cranked it up to over 650°), which meant it could easily produce both the smoky low-and-slow cooks pellet grills are known for, as well as beautiful grill marks when searing. It easily offered the most versatility of anything we tested. It also exhibited excellent temperature control, maintaining an internal temperature between 220°-230℉ for over eight hours. The Smokefire has a slow-close, porcelain-enameled lid, a silicone-covered handle (no grill gloves necessary), built-in interior grill lights, four ports for meat probes, and the aforementioned Weber Connect app that allowed us to check on our pork shoulder from miles away. We were also heartened to hear from Smokefire owners whose grills live outside through Midwest winters because, as with any outdoor appliance, durability is a concern. A front or side shelf would have been a nice addition to an otherwise smartly designed piece of equipment, but that shortcoming fades away when held up next to all the positive elements this grill has to offer.

Pellet grills attempt to provide all the benefits of a gas grill and charcoal or wood-fired grills at the same time. Since the grill uses wood pellets as fuel, food takes on a smokier taste—the thing that’s missing from gas. But the addition of thermostats and fans to control the grill’s temperature makes pellet grills as easy to use as a propane grill.

Read our complete review of best pellet grillshere。

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After testing a variety of styles of smoker, including electric, drum, and gravity-fed, we think nothing compares to an offset smoker. An offset smoker has two main pieces: a cook chamber and a firebox. You build a fire of charcoal and hardwood in the firebox and control temperature with a side damper and a chimney on top, opening both wider to raise the temperature and closing them to lower it. The Char-Griller Grand Champ is a heavy-duty offset smoker that maintains temperature incredibly well (important when smoking meat over lower temperatures) and is easy to adjust and control. Adding additional fuel to the fire is as simple as opening the firebox lid and dumping a chimney of lit lump charcoal in the basket, which helps keep the fire burning longer.

It’s also simply huge. Typically, if you see an offset smoker with an astronomical price, it’s because it is bigger and made out of higher-quality materials than its competitors. Considering the Grand Champ’s price point (under $600 at the time of writing), it is absolutely the biggest bang you can get for your buck. It can fit eight racks of ribs comfortably. If all that sounds like too much, Char-Griller makes smaller versions of this model like the Smokin’ Champ and the Competition Pro. All three also come with a charcoal grate right under the cooking grate, so if you want to use it as a charcoal grill and cook with direct heat, you can.

We’re partial to offset smokers, but they also require a lot of work and attention to use. If you want something a little less labor intensive, we’d recommend a gravity-fed smoker, which you can read about in ourfull smoker review。

Charcoal grills require users to create an indirect-heat cooking zone for low-and-slow cooking, but smokers have that functionality built in. Good ones are also quite heavy and maintain consistent temperatures better than lighter-weight grills.

Read our complete review of the best smokers here.

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即使你不认为你知道kamado grill is, you’ve probably encountered one at a hardware store in the form of aBig Green Egg。鸡蛋是第一个kamado mainst炊具ream in the United States, although kamado cooking, which involves cooking over coals in a large, heavy ceramic vessel, is a traditional Japanese method. We tested the Big Green Egg, and while it grilled and smoked wonderfully, we preferred the Kamado Joe Classic. The Kamado Joe grilled and smoked just as well but also came with a number of important accessories, like a stand (essential because kamados are so heavy) and heat deflectors (necessary for smoking and two-zone cooking). You can get both for a Big Green Egg, but they aren’t included. The Kamado Joe also came with side tables for prep and a multilevel cooking grate that lets you keep some items closer to the fire and some farther away. It is expensive, but if you want to cook with charcoal, this is as much of a grill as you will ever need. It can smoke; it can grill; and it can sear.

They’re heavy and they’re expensive, but ceramic kamados hold temperature better than lots of metal grills. They can also get hotter.Senior staff writer Emily Farris fired a kamado up over 750 degrees。That means a good kamado can smoke delicate proteins like fish, as well as bake a blisteredpizza crust。

Read our complete review of best kamado grillshere。

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The Nomad transformed what a portable grill could be. Typically, portable grills are small and quite lightweight—think the mini version of Weber’s kettle, which is at the top of many lists of best portable grills. It’s not that grills like that don’t work, it’s just that the things that make them easy to pack and move also limit what you can do with them. The Nomad doesn’t suffer from those limitations. It’s made of cast aluminum with a heavy-duty stainless steel grate. We found that it could maintain lower temperatures for smoking, as well high temperatures for grilling sausages and turkey burgers. But its suitcase-like design and silicone-padded handle also make it easy to carry despite it’s heavier-than-most 28-lb. weight. We note that the Nomad is a charcoal grill. We tested portable gas grills as well and lovedthe Weber Traveler,which folds up and moves around as easily as a roller bag.

This one speaks for itself. A portable grills is great when you want to grill somewhere that isn’t your backyard. If you’re car camping or tailgating, it’s the best way to go.

Read our complete review of the best portable grillshere。

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The Spark is a smart charcoal grillthat operates with a system similar to (though not identical to) a pellet grill. The fire comes from a charcoal brick in the center of the grill; a fan circulates hot air throughout the cooking chamber. We found it had wide-ranging capabilities, from smoking to searing to high-heat baking at 900℉. It’s also small enough to fit on an apartment patio. So if you’re a city dweller who loves outdoor cooking and you want charcoal flavor without the hassle of managing a real charcoal fire, this is the grill for you.

If you’re a griller who likes a project, theÑuke Deltais loads of fun. It’s a gaucho-style grill, which means you can adjust the grate nearer or farther away from the embers of a wood fire spread out in the grill bed. The wood that powers the Ñuke sits in a log holder to the right of the grate and you use the hot embers that fall from the fire to cook your food. Though it can be used as a regular charcoal grill as well, there’s a joy in maintaining a live fire for an afternoon and cooking in the embers when you’re done.

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5 necessary grilling accessories

Whether you go with lump charcoal or briquettes, you’ll need something that will burn hot for a long time. We tend to prefer lump, like this bag from Jealous Devil, but Kingsford briquettes did the job in a number of our tests. We also quite liked thefruitwood charcoal made by Nomad Grills。It’s more expensive than either standard lump or briquettes but burns quite a bit longer.

Whatever kind of grill you get, you need to keep it clean.We recommend a nylon grill brushto avoid any wire bristles that might unknowingly get stuck on a grate and end up in someone’s burger.

After losing food between slippery grill grates for yearswe found the solution to that problem in this giant spatula, which makes turning meat or veggies a snap.

The vast majority of grilled foods (zucchini slices,chicken thighs,pork chops, you name it) are actually turned more easily with tongs than a spatula.

A nylon basting brush is fine, but after readingRodney Scott’s World of BBQ, we’ve become convinced that when you really want to sauce some ribs or a pork shoulder, a mop is the way to go.

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