Measuring and sourcing

Grill Picker covers 227 cookers from 52 brands across 10 types and 5 fuels, from a $65 charcoal grill to a $8,059 gas grill. The hard part of buying one is that a kettle, a pellet cooker and a kamado are sold on completely different vocabularies — burners, hopper pounds, ceramic thickness — and there is no obvious way to put a price on any of it. This catalogue picks one axis they all share and does the arithmetic.

A price here is a tier, not a quote

Prices are the typical street price for the cooker as commonly sold. Grills move on promotion constantly, and a package with a cover, a cart or a griddle plate swings the number by hundreds either way, so treat the figure as the tier a grill sits in rather than what you will pay on the day. Every price is rounded to whole dollars on purpose: an exact mirrored price would be stale within a week.

Grate area is the common denominator

Every cooker here records total cooking area in square inches, and every price is divided by it. That single figure lets a wide cheap barrel and a small expensive kamado be argued about on one axis, and it is usually the moment a shopper realises what they are paying for. Secondary racks are held apart from the primary grate, because makers fold the warming rack into the headline number inconsistently and a grill that claims 1,100 square inches may offer 700 you would put chicken on. Area is also translated into food on the model pages — a twelve-pound turkey, four burgers, a packer brisket with a tuck — because square inches are hard to picture and a brisket is not.

7 product lines, drawn against a three-foot ruler

Brands sell the same cooker in several sizes and name them in a way that hides how different they are. 36 sizes across 7 lines are rendered here at their real width and height against a three-foot rule, so the jump between a mid-size and the next one up can be seen rather than inferred from two numbers in a table. A cooker that will not fit through a gate or under an eave is a problem that shows up on delivery day, not on a spec sheet.

Three different things are sold as “smart”

56 cookers here have WiFi, 58 have app control, and 46 run a PID controller. Those are recorded as three separate fields because they are three separate things, and only the last one is what keeps a cook at 225 degrees through the night. A grill can have an app that reports a temperature it has no ability to hold.

What the manufacturers state, and what they do not

Cooking area, temperature range, burner counts, hopper capacity, build material and warranty terms come from manufacturer specification sheets and product documentation. Prices are typical list figures, and this category discounts on a calendar — the weekend before a summer holiday is a different market from February — so read a price as a tier. Star ratings and review counts are each attributed to one named source, a retailer listing or the maker's own storefront; 72 of the 227 models qualify and the remaining 155 show no stars at all rather than a figure borrowed from somewhere unnamed.

Where the complaints come from

There is no test patio here and no pit crew. The pros, cons and owner notes on each model page are drawn from what owners say in the open — people who have run a cooker through several seasons, long-term write-ups, and retail review sections read in bulk — and are labelled as what owners said, never as a result this site produced. A complaint gets printed when it recurs from owners with nothing to do with each other: a controller that drops its connection in the middle of an overnight brisket, a firebox that rusts through in two winters, a lid gasket that stops sealing. Choosing which of those recur often enough to matter is an editorial call and it is made here, not by a brand.

Two people, no money from any maker

This catalogue is kept by two people around other work. There is no office, no smoker parked out back and nobody on a payroll. No grill manufacturer pays for inclusion, for a position in a list, or for a softer write-up, and no brand gets an advance look at a page. Type, brand and guide pages put owner rating first and settle ties on whichever figure the page is built around, so where a cooker lands follows from the data rather than from a relationship.

Models that have been replaced

The catalogue was last checked on September 29, 2026. 17 of the 227 cookers are flagged as no longer sold new, each pointing at the model that replaced it, because the discontinued generation is often the better buy while old stock clears and is worth knowing about rather than deleting. Entries get added, prices re-checked, and replacements linked as they surface. A figure that disagrees with the spec sheet in front of you is our mistake, and it gets corrected in the one file every page reads from.