I’m a supervising editor at Wirecutter covering working from home, powering, and hobbies, but I moonlight often on the kitchen team because I love food. I’m a beer brewer, sourdough baker, forager, amateur pizzaiolo, coffee fanatic, and all-around appreciator of consumables. My wife is a professional chef and food photographer. Yes, our neighbors love us.
I’ve eaten my way through the BBQ of the Carolinas, Tennessee, the Midwest, and, of course, Central Texas. And I’ve been using a pellet smoker for nearly five years as part of my outdoor cooking arsenal, which also includes an egg-style charcoal grill, a flat top griddle, and an Ooni pizza oven.

For this guide:

• I spent more than 20 hours researching 57 pellet grills that fit our criteria, and well over a 100 combined hours testing three of the most promising. We have plans to test another eight over the coming year.
• I cooked everything from pork to chicken, and also smoked more delicate foods like cauliflower, salmon, and cheese.
• I read countless articles and watched dozens of hours of YouTube videos from reliable sites like Meathead’s AmazingRibs.com, Hey Grill, Hey, and Mad Scientist BBQ.
• Wirecutter senior staff writer Lesley Stockton tested several Traeger, Green Mountain Grills, and Camp Chef smokers for previous versions of this guide, and some of her original writing appears in the current version.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

They’re the same thing, and the names are used interchangeably. Powered by electricity, pellet smokers allow you to make slow-smoked barbecue at home with a lot less guesswork and babysitting than with more traditional methods.

Instead of wood and charcoal, these grills use pellets made from compressed sawdust—usually hardwood from oak, fruit trees, or nut trees—for fuel. You set the grill to a specific temperature, and it automatically dispenses and ignites these pellets as needed to heat the cooking chamber over the long, slow smoking process.

Here’s how it works: The pellets sit in a hopper attached to the side of the grill. When you start the grill and set the temperature, an auger dispenses pellets into the fire pot. The grill then ignites the pellets, and when the cooking chamber reaches the set temperature, it uses an algorithm to automatically maintain that heat throughout the cooking process. As long as your grill is reliable, you could load it with pellets before you go to bed and have a beautifully smoked brisket by morning, without having to wake up and tend to coals every couple of hours.

Despite the name, pellet grills aren’t the best choice for traditional grilling, which requires direct high heat to produce a seared crust on meats like steaks, chops, or burgers. While some pellet grills attempt to provide some kind of direct-fire cooking, you’ll still get better results from a propane gas grill or charcoal grill.

Pellet grills or smokers are best suited to cooking low-and-slow barbecue: Think brisket, ribs, whole chicken, and pulled pork. You can also use your pellet grill as an outdoor oven, with the caveat that anything you make will pick up a smoky taste. Both Camp Chef and Traeger offer recipes for braises, roasts, and even baked goods.

Compared with offset firebox or bullet smokers, pellet smokers are more expensive but significantly easier to use thanks to their automated temperature control and pellet feeding mechanism. There’s a lot of trial and error in mastering a regular smoker that a pellet grill eliminates, so if you’re a home-barbecue newbie you could save yourself a lot of failed briskets.

To identify the best pellet smoker options for most people, we focused on a few key characteristics:

• Effective temperature control: The average pellet grill has a temperature range of about 160 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, but a wider range is better, because it adds to your grill’s versatility. Most grills let you change the set temperature in 5-degree increments, but finer-grained control is welcome. The ability to cold-smoke at temperatures well below 160 °F is another nice (if rare) bonus.
• Lots of meat probes: Your grill will come with a probe that reads the temperature inside the cooking chamber, but it’s crucial that it also offers at least one meat probe so you can monitor the internal temperature of the food you’re cooking. As ever, more probes are better, so you can track the internal temps of multiple cuts of meat at once.
• Ample cooking area: We prioritized grills that offered more cooking area without drastically increasing their overall footprint. Some grills we considered come with two levels of grates by default, others let you add a second rack later, and still others are limited to a single level. In general, more space is better.
• Large hopper capacity: A key advantage of pellet smokers is that, unlike an offset smoker, they can be operated for a long time without having to load new fuel or tend to coals. A larger pellet hopper means you can cook for even longer without manual intervention.
• Wi-Fi and app integration: We made Wi-Fi capability a requirement for our latest round of testing, since it makes monitoring your cook both simpler and more convenient.
• Reasonable cost: There’s no getting around the fact that pellet grills are expensive. The least expensive grill we considered costs $550, and the most expensive costs $3,800. Heavy-duty, American-made grills from high-end brands like Yoder can exceed $5,000. Keeping all of our other criteria in mind, we focused on testing grills under $1,500, since we feel most first-time smoker buyers won’t want to spend more.
• An ecosystem of accessories: For many people, just the smoker is good enough. But if you want to turn your pellet grill into an all-in-one outdoor cooking solution, it’s handy if your smoker-maker provides add-ons like a propane side burner, rotisserie attachment, and so on.
• Long warranty and solid support: Most pellet smokers come with at least a three-year warranty, but a longer guarantee is always nice. We also prioritized brands with a history of reliable customer service.

Before we opened the first bag of wood pellets, we had to unbox and assemble the grills. During the assembly process, we noted whether the manuals were easy to follow, how useful the included tools were, and the skill level and time needed to put these things together.

Once the grills were set up, we downloaded and connected their apps and checked out their capabilities, including grill control, temperature probe calibration, and recipe selection. During the initial burn-in for each grill, we paid attention to how reliable the apps’ notifications were.

Then, it was time to start cooking. For our latest round of testing, we smoked four items on all three grills: a pork shoulder, some chicken drumsticks, a large salmon filet, and a halved head of cauliflower. The idea was to see how each grill handled different temperature settings, cook lengths, and types of food. We also smoked cheddar cheese using the Woodwind Pro 24’s smoke box, as it was the only grill we tested that allowed for actual cold smoking.

While some grill manufacturers claim that you’ll get best results using their branded pellets, we think that’s mostly marketing. For all of our cooks, we used Costco’s Kirkland Signature Premium Blend BBQ Hardwood Pellets, which are composed of a blend of oak, hickory, maple, and cherry wood.

We cooked each item for the same amount of time at the same set temperature. Where possible, we calibrated each grill’s internal temperature probe to match the readings from our ThermoWorks Smoke external thermometer. Some grills, like the Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0, allow for more fine-grained calibration, and even compensate for ambient temperatures. We utilized these capabilities when we could.

Once the food came off the grills, we anonymized the results and fed them to a three-person tasting panel who ranked them on flavor, juiciness, appearance, and general deliciousness. I also tasted and ranked them myself, though of course I knew which was which.

We also used the famous biscuit test (video) to gauge the evenness of each grill’s heating. In short, we used a can of biscuits for each grill, placing the eight uncooked pieces of dough in a four-by-two pattern on the main cooking grate and smoking them at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour. We then judged the grills’ temperature evenness based on the color and moisture content of the biscuits in each position.

Top pick

Camp Chef Woodwind Pro 24

A well-made pellet grill

We were impressed with this grill’s precise temperature control, straightforward app, cold-smoking capabilities, accessory options, and, most of all, its delectable results.

Buying Options

$1,200 from Home Depot

Buy from Lowe's

The Camp Chef Woodwind Pro 24 checks all the boxes for what we want in a pellet grill: It’s easy to use, provides lots of useful features that let you dial in your cook, is Wi-Fi–connected so you can keep tabs on your brisket from the comfort of your couch, and, most of all, it makes delicious barbecue—the best we’ve ever made at home.

It costs more than other grills we tested, but you get more for your money—more cooking area, more control, and more features. The only real downsides are a complicated assembly process and a slightly barebones app, but these are a small price to pay for everything this smoker does well.

It makes deliciously smoky barbecue. The food that came out of the Woodwind Pro 24 was our tasting panel’s clear favorite in three of our four cooking tests, and it was a close second in the fourth. This grill consistently produced the smokiest results, without veering into acrid or ashy territory.

It also created the most photogenic barbecue—a dark bark and thick smoke ring on the pulled pork shoulder, beautiful mahogany chicken drumsticks, and bright pink-orange salmon. And meat tended to be juicier after cooking on the Camp Chef compared with what we got from our other contenders. The skin on the chicken even came out crispier.

This grill held the most stable temperatures of any we tested. This was especially true at lower temperatures, where most of your low-and-slow smoking will happen. It performed extremely well in the biscuit test, too, with evenly cooked biscuits throughout. Only the right-rear biscuit was slightly less browned than the rest.

The control panel is easy to use. The Woodwind Pro 24 has a large, full-color control screen that’s driven by a rotary dial. You use the dial to select the menu you want, or to adjust temperature and other settings, then press it in to confirm your selection. The menu itself is straightforward and easy to understand, without too many distractions. The screen is protected by a flip-up cover, too.

It’s the only grill we tested that gives you control over how much smoke it produces. Where most other grills simply let you select a cooking temperature, the Woodwind Pro 24 goes deeper with a smoke setting that adjusts the grill’s auger and fan algorithm to produce more or less smoke—on a 1-to-10 scale—to better suit your preferences.

It really works, too: Our results at a setting of 8 were noticeably smokier than what we got at 1. The downside to a higher smoke number is that you get larger swings in temperature, but over a longer cook, these largely even out, and we didn’t notice any negative effects on our barbecue.

Its cold smoke functionality is one-of-a-kind. While you can cold smoke on any pellet grill by adding a smoke box of your own, the Woodwind Pro 24 is the only pellet grill we’ve come across that comes with one built in (video), and its design is pretty ingenious.

It slides in directly above the firebox, and a butterfly valve on the front of the grill lets you use the flame from the pellets to get your wood chunks going. The Woodwind Pro 24 also has a unique fan-only setting (with a five speed settings), so that once the wood is smoldering, you can close the valve, turn off the auger, and let the fan circulate smoke and feed the pellets oxygen. (Alternatively, you can simply use a torch to get the wood going and avoid going through the process of lighting the pellets in the firebox.)

We used this feature to cold smoke a deli-sized chunk of cheddar cheese, and while we overdid it a bit (hey, cut us some slack, it was our first try), the results have aged well after a couple months in the fridge.

There are lots of other thoughtful features. This grill is the only one we tested that comes with an insulated, gasketed door for improved temperature control. It’s also the only one that uses a downdraft design, without a chimney. In theory, when paired with a good convection fan, this means that the smoke circulates more effectively around the food you’re cooking—and it may be why the Woodwind Pro 24’s barbecue had the best smoke flavor we’ve experienced.

In addition to a well-designed pellet dump door (helpful when you want to change from hickory to apple pellets, for instance), this grill also has an ash dump valve. This makes it much easier to remove the bulk of the ash from your grill after each cook, though you’ll still want to use a shop vac to give it a thorough cleaning once in a while.

The pellet hopper can hold 22 pounds of pellets—4 pounds more than the other grills we tested—and its lid is held down by magnets that are strong enough to resist wind and casual bumps, but not strong enough to make it a pain to open.

And yes, like many other pellet grills, this one comes with a built-in bottle opener so you’ll never be without a cold beer (or soda) while grilling.

It comes with lots of probes and plenty of cooking area. The Woodwind Pro 24 comes with four meat probes (the most of any grill we’ve tested) and has four jacks so you can use all of them simultaneously. That’s important, because this grill also has a ton of cooking space, despite its compact design.

Between its two racks, it has a combined 811 square inches, which is 30% more than the Traeger Pro 575 and nearly twice as much as the single-level Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0. If you need even more space, the Woodwind Pro 36 is functionally identical but offers a whopping 1,236 square inches of cooking area.

The top rack on the Woodwind Pro is actually two half-size racks, so you can choose to use one or both depending on how much stuff you need to cook. The racks slide into a slot, which keeps them more securely in place than the upper rack on the Traeger Pro 575.

Its app works well enough, but it’s missing some features. The Camp Chef Connect app (iOS, Android) isn’t going to blow you away with its looks or features, but it’s a perfectly functional way to monitor your cook from the comfort of your couch.

In addition to setting and monitoring your grill’s temperature, smoke setting, and fan speed, it has readouts for each of the four probes, plus a detailed cook history with temperature graphs and optional notes (so you can remember what you did and hopefully replicate it). You can also set timers for your cooks.

Unlike Traeger’s app, Camp Chef’s doesn’t try to sell you more products, and it doesn’t contain a library of recipes. And unlike the Green Mountain Grills app, it doesn’t allow you to calibrate your meat probes or the probe in the main body of the smoker.

It’s a pain to assemble. The Woodwind Pro 24 had the longest assembly of any grill we’ve tested: a grueling 2 hours 10 minutes. As with the other grills we tested, we assembled this one with just one person, rather than the two recommended, and this is a case where an extra set of hands really would have helped.

This grill comes in several boxes, and unlike the Traeger Pro 575 or Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0 (which was the easiest to assemble, taking us just 50 minutes solo), its auger and pellet hopper aren’t already attached to the cooking chamber. It uses a wide range of bolts, nuts, and tools, and unfortunately the printed instructions didn’t correspond exactly to what was in the boxes. We got it together in the end, but it was a frustrating process.

There are lots of useful accessories. This grill comes with a metal side shelf, but if you prefer, you can buy a 30,000 BTU Sidekick propane burner to put in its place. It comes in a kit with either a Blackstone-style flat top or a cast-iron searing grate, and you can add a pizza oven if you like. You can also get other extras like an insulated blanket for cooking or an all-weather cover, plus a lot more.

It comes with a generous warranty. The Woodwind Pro 24 is covered by a six-year warranty on rust, a three-year warranty against material and manufacturing defects for the main grill body parts, and a one-year warranty on the same for everything else.

Flaws but not dealbreaker

• Our test unit arrived damaged. When we unpacked our Woodwind Pro 24, one of its four leg mounts was bent despite some seriously impressive packaging. That didn’t help with its already grueling assembly process. But we were able to install the leg anyway, minus one bolt, and it has proven to be perfectly stable even on three and a half legs. We reached out to Camp Chef to let them know, and they immediately offered to send a replacement grill body. We declined, in an effort to avoid waste, but it’s good to know that the company stands behind its product.
• The grill sits on tiny casters that are hard to move across uneven surfaces. While the other grills we tested had at least two larger wheels, the Woodwind Pro 24 uses four small casters. On a smooth surface, like concrete, that’s totally fine (and it’s nice to be able to lock all four wheels). But if you need to move your grill across gravel, grass, or other less-than-perfectly-flat terrain, you’re going to need some muscle (and help) to get it done.
• It lacks a front shelf. While the grill comes with a side shelf, and the pellet hopper lid on the other side can be used as a small secondary shelf, it doesn’t have a front shelf and there’s no option to add one. This is something the Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0 includes that we’d love to see on a future version of the Woodwind Pro 24.

Budget pick

Traeger Pro 575

Cheaper, with less smoky results

If you like barbecue with milder smoke flavor, don’t need a lot of accessories, or would appreciate a smaller footprint, this grill is a great choice.

Buying Options

$599 from Amazon

$799 from Home Depot

The Traeger Pro 575 pellet grill is easy to use, good at maintaining its set temperature, and a snap to unbox and assemble. It’s as simple to control via the Traeger app on your phone as it is via its barebones on-grill control panel. And the food that comes out of it tastes great, if not as smoky as the barbecue you’d get out of our top pick.

It’s easy to assemble and get cooking. The Pro 575 comes in a single big box that contains the large cooking chamber, plus several smaller boxes for things like its legs, wheels, and chimney. Like most grills, its instructions recommend a minimum of two sets of hands for setup, but we completed it with just one person. In total, assembly took us 1 hour 10 minutes.

All the tools you need for assembly are included, and the paper instructions are accurate and easy to follow. Unlike with our top pick, the Pro 575’s pellet hopper and auger are already attached to the cooking chamber, which makes the assembly process considerably smoother.

It’s simple to use, for better or worse. While the Camp Chef Woodwind Pro 24 is loaded with features and cooking options, the Pro 575 is comparatively simple. Depending on your interest level when it comes to fine-tuning your barbecue, that could be a positive or a negative.

This grill offers temperature control in 5-degree increments, from 165 to 550 degrees Fahrenheit. And, well, that’s it. You can’t control the fan (there isn’t one), there are no algorithms to control the pellet feed, and there are no accessories to add different cooking methods.

There’s also no way to calibrate the cooking chamber’s temperature probe, though luckily we found we didn’t really need to. Your mileage may vary.

The app is similarly straightforward. Like all the grills we tested, the Pro 575 is Wi-Fi–enabled and can pair with Traeger’s app, which lets you adjust the grill’s set temperature by remote. It also provides timer functionality, displays the meat probe’s current temperature, and provides a huge array of Traeger-approved recipes. If for some reason you prefer it over a regular web browser, you can use the app to buy more Traeger products.

It makes tasty, relatively mild-tasting smoky barbecue. In previous rounds of testing, we noted that the Pro 575 made more efficient use of pellets than other grills, and produced less smoky food as a result.

Our most recent testing again bore this out: The Traeger was noticeably deficient compared with the Camp Chef and Green Mountain Grills smokers we tested when it came to creating a deep, saturated smoky flavor and dark bark on meat. This flavor and appearance difference was evident in every one of our cooking tests, but it was especially noticeable in longer cooks, like our pork shoulder test.

Personally, I like smoky barbecue. If I’m going to spend half a day cooking a piece of meat, I want that effort (even if it’s mostly automated) to translate into something close to the flavor of Central Texas—or at least as close as I can get without sweating over the firebox of a massive offset smoker. But for backyard pitmasters who prefer a gentler smoke flavor, or plan to regularly use their smoker for desserts or baked goods, the Pro 575’s light touch could be a plus.

It maintains a steady temperature and has an evenly heated cooking surface. Across our four cooking tests, the Traeger Pro 575 reliably maintained steady cooking temperatures, producing small swings of around 5 to 10 degrees as it fed pellets and maintained the smolder in the firebox. At the lowest temperature settings, it more routinely overshot the target temperature, but at higher temps it was more consistent. Our ThermoWorks Smoke external thermometer confirmed that the temperature reported on the control panel was roughly accurate, to within about 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

In the biscuit test, this grill produced generally even browning, though the biscuits on the right side (furthest from the chimney) were slightly less dark than the others.

It’s easier to wheel over uneven terrain than our top pick. One of the few things we disliked about our top pick is its four small casters, which make it tough to move over anything but smooth pavement. The Pro 575 isn’t perfect—two of its legs don’t have wheels at all—but the wheels that it does have are large and rubberized, and the end without wheels has a convenient handle. This made it much more convenient to drag across dirt and gravel.

It’s also significantly lighter than our top pick at 128 pounds fully assembled (the Camp Chef Woodwind Pro 24 tips the scales at 152 pounds), which adds to its portability.

It’s covered by a generous warranty and comes with reliable customer support. Like our top pick, the Traeger Pro 575 comes with a three-year warranty that covers defects in materials and workmanship. The company has a solid reputation for customer service, too.

How the Traeger 575 has held up

When Wirecutter editor Daniela Gorny first brought the Traeger 575 home in 2020, she had one small complaint: “The one feature it doesn’t have, which I wish it did, is an alert to tell me if the pellets are running low.” But in the two years since, Daniela has changed her mind about the need for a pellet sensor, mostly due to the Traeger’s efficiency. She mentioned there were pellets still in the hopper after smoking pork butts overnight—we’d experienced the same in our 2020 testing—so not having a sensor hasn’t bothered her too much. If you’re curious, Traeger sells a $90 pellet sensor that, if added to your smoker, then enables the app to alert you.

Daniela successfully connected the grill to her Wi-Fi network using the Traeger app (then called Traeger WiFire), though it took a few tries. At first, she said the app was a bit clunky and would occasionally crash on her. However, it seems Traeger is committed to providing app updates to fix those sorts of bugs, because the app has been working very smoothly for her for at least a year now. (We likewise had a good experience with the app in our 2024 testing.)

Pellet grills work best if you regularly clean and maintain them. Compared with propane or charcoal grills, pellet grills are more prone to grease and soot buildup because the wood pellets burn at a low temperature.

Pellet grills also have electro-mechanical parts, which require extra care and attention—we’re not talking kid gloves here, but you can’t blast your pellet grill clean with a hose or power washer. Your grill will perform better for years to come if you follow these tips.

After each use:

• Power down and unplug the grill.
• Scrape the cooking grates with a grill brush.
• Clean the drip pan under the cooking grates, especially after cooking fatty meats. Fat accumulation can lead to grease fires, and those aren’t fun. The simplest solution: Line your drip pan with heavy-duty aluminum foil so you can easily discard the greasy mess after you cook. But if you forget to do that part, you can remove the drip pan and scrape off most of the fat and gunk with a putty knife or bench scraper. Then scrub it with hot soapy water and a scour sponge before rinsing and drying. It’s easiest to clean the grease pan while the grill is still warm (not hot), so protect your hands with gloves or towels.
• Inspect the grease chute between the grease-collection pan and the bucket that hangs off the side of the grill. Make sure the chute is unobstructed so grease can flow from the pan to the bucket—if the chute gets clogged, you run the risk of a grease fire. But you don’t need to stress about a clogged grease chute if you keep your drip pan clean in the first place.
• Dump the grease bucket when it fills up (into the trash, never down your drain), or sooner if you have curious critters around.

After 20 hours of cooking time:

• Clean out the ash that accumulates in the fire pot and the bottom of the firebox. Too much ash collected in the firebox can keep pellets from igniting and, in some cases, redirect the smoke backward and up through the pellet hopper. You should clean out the ash only when the grill is completely cool. Traeger suggests using “a small metal fireplace shovel or other similar tool” (something like this shovel should work just fine) and disposing of ashes in a metal container with a tight-fitting lid.
• You can also vacuum out the ash, but again, do so only when the grill is 100% cold and there’s no possible chance of lingering embers. This is when a shop vac comes in handy.
• Wipe the soot (or creosote) from the thermostat probe with a damp towel. A clean probe helps the thermostat maintain accurate temperatures.

Even though these grills are pretty sturdy and are made to stay outside, that doesn’t mean they’re impervious to the elements. If you live in a humid or rainy climate, remove the pellets from the hopper before storing your grill. Moisture causes wood pellets to expand and possibly dissolve into one solid mass, like cement.

Do not hose down or power wash a pellet grill. They have electronic parts and motors that could short out. If you have a gunked-up grill on your hands, it’s best to spray the affected areas with a degreaser and scrape off the layers of soot with a putty knife. Wipe everything down with a wet rag and then run the grill hot to burn off any residue.

Store your pellet grill in a covered area or, even better, in a garage or storage shed. If you don’t have that kind of storage space, get a grill cover. Both Camp Chef and Traeger make covers (available separately) for their specific models.

Wood pellets are arguably the most sustainable fuel for smoking and grilling. Unlike propane and natural gas (nonrenewable fossil fuels), pellets are a renewable biofuel. And compared with lump charcoal (wood chunks burned in a vacuum) or briquettes (sawdust often bound with chemical fillers), pellets are simply extruded mashed wood pulp—produced without incineration.

Manufacturers of cooking pellets use a combination of harvested trees plus waste from sawmills, like sawdust and scrap wood. Wood pellets that are 100% wood (the only type you should be using) are clean-burning, efficient, and easy to use.

As far as the electricity used to ignite the wood pellets, a representative at Traeger told us that the Pro 575 uses 300 watts to heat up, then 50 watts per hour for the duration of the cook. By contrast, electric home ovens use between 2,000 and 5,000 watts per hour (depending on the temperature setting).

If you want the simplest assembly, best app, and the most control over your grill’s calibration: Consider the Green Mountain Grills Ledge Prime 2.0. This smoker took us only 50 minutes to assemble, start to finish, with just a single person. That’s thanks in large part to its clever use of a single size of bolt for every application. Green Mountain Grills even includes a sturdy socket wrench in the box, making the task even easier.

Assembly aside, the Ledge Prime 2.0 cooks well, with reliable temperature control, ample smoke, and our favorite app so far. In addition to letting you calibrate the internal temperature probe by adjusting the offset on both ends of the temperature scale, it also lets you calibrate each of its meat probes individually, and even provides an offset slider for extremely hot or cold ambient temperatures.

But we found that despite its prodigious smoke production—its billowing clouds blanketed our yard and the neighbors’—and extra-loud auger and fan, it didn’t produce notably smokier meat than our top pick from Camp Chef. Our tasting panel (and I) preferred the Woodwind Pro 24’s output in all but one test, but the Ledge Prime 2.0 was a consistent close second, so it’s worth a shot if you think you’ll need those calibration features.

We’re planning to test grills from more manufacturers over the coming months, including the Cuisinart Oakmont, Grilla Grills Silverbac Alpha Connect, Pit Boss Navigator 850, Recteq Deck Boss 590 and Backyard Beast 1000, Weber Searwood 600, and Z Grills Flagship 700D4E WiFi and Multitasker 7052B WiFi. (If you think there are other models worth our consideration that meet the criteria laid out in How we picked and tested, feel free to let us know in the comments.)

We’ll be testing these grills in waves—typically three at a time—and updating this guide as new grills either unseat our current picks or head to the Competition. Stay tuned!

This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.