The best UK BBQs for every budget: six gas, electric and charcoal grills – tested

5 hours ago 3

Salmon don’t know that they swim upstream. Some ancient instinct impels them; they don’t think about it any more than trees think about growing. You are a British person of a certain age and bearing. You are buying a barbecue.

But this half-century-old compulsion often ends before it starts. Few products are marketed with as much machismo as BBQs, and the jargon makes them surprisingly tricky to buy. While we all enjoy the unintended high camp of a snap-jet ignition, it’s unclear if such features are essentials or optional extras. Add in the tedious difference between planchas and kamados, and you can easily spend hundreds of pounds on what is essentially a hot metal box.

So, I took on the gruelling, pitiable task of eating a lot of burgers – and in doing so tracked down the best affordable, straightforward barbecues that just make great food. If you need something simple for grilling a few bangers, you’ll find it here.

At a glance

Best BBQ overall:
Weber Bar-B-Kettle charcoal barbecue

£99 at Blacks

Best budget BBQ:
Argos Home drum charcoal BBQ with cover and utensils

£49.50 at Argos

Best gas BBQ:
Weber Spirit E-335

£699 at Weber

Best electric BBQ:
Ninja Woodfire electric BBQ grill & smoker

£229 at Amazon

Why you should trust me

I’ve been a product tester my entire career, and part of that has meant near-annual testing of BBQs. I’ve tested dozens of models over the years, from cheap disposable grills to £3,000 kamados, and written countless articles about how to use them. Besides barbecues, I’ve tested plenty of other indoor and outdoor cooking products, from air fryers and food processors to pizza ovens and camp stoves, so I have years of experience testing cooking gadgets.

How I tested

Starting in drizzly March, I timed how long it took to build every barbecue I’d be testing. Thankfully, you’ll only have to do this once, but it’s worth knowing if it takes 15 minutes or two hours to put your new grill together, or whether it will be a struggle for those with mobility problems. You don’t want to buy a barbecue the day of a party only to faff around with an Allen key while assorted in-laws wait for their sausages.

I cooked the same meals on each BBQ. First, I grilled courgettes, peppers and aubergines to check for cold spots, as some barbecues tend to be cool at the edges and scorching in the middle. Then I cooked halloumi – if the heat is too low, it won’t develop those delicious golden grill marks or release cleanly from the grates.

Next up were pork sausages and veggie burgers, before tackling a whole spatchcocked chicken to show how well a barbecue handles cooking at lower temperatures and retains moisture with the lid closed. And for those concerned about what I did with all that food? Well, it was used in countless curries and pasta bakes, so nothing went to waste.

Where a grill had bonus features – a smoking attachment, a side burner or even the ability to bake a cake – I tested these too.

At every stage, I used an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of the grill grates, the handle and the exterior of the barbecue to assess safety and to time how long each took to reach a good grilling temperature of 200C.

I tested six BBQs from a long list of several dozen of the most popular on sale at British retailers. I looked at customer reviews to avoid testing universally derided barbecues. I also filtered by price – I wanted BBQs below £1,000, and most on this list come in under £500. I wanted models covering different barbecue types, and I also looked at bonus features, such as the ability to use both gas and charcoal.

The best BBQs in 2026

Argos Home drum charcoal BBQ with cover and utensils.

Ninja Woodfire electric BBQ grill & smoker.

The best of the rest

What you need to know

Argos barbecue with meat on while a hand shows a hamburger in the foreground

What are the key features to look for?

Of all the features and extras to consider when buying a BBQ, the one that will make the biggest difference to your outdoor cooking journey is a lid. Not only does it make it easier to light the barbecue, but it also locks in moisture and maximises smoky flavour. A hinged lid is more convenient than a removable one.

To cook safely on a barbecue, it’s essential to have long-handled utensils such as heatproof tongs, spatulas and skewers, as well as heatproof gloves. Hooks are handy to store these tools when not in use. Other useful but non-essential features include an ash catcher for charcoal barbecues, saving you from scooping out used charcoal by hand afterwards. Warming racks, side burners and side tables can be helpful too.

A built-in thermometer can be handy as a rough guide, but it’s essentially giving a reading of the air temperature inside the barbecue rather than the grill. An infrared thermometer gun is more reliable for this, but really, what you need is a cheap probe thermometer to measure the internal heat of whatever you’re cooking.

Smart features and wifi connectivity can be fun to play around with, but they generally aren’t worth the premium you’ll pay for them.

Types of barbecues

Charcoal
Fuelled with either charcoal lumpwood or briquettes, charcoal barbecues are the cheapest and tastiest way to barbecue food. They can be messy, though, and there’s a bit of a learning curve to get the best results.

Gas
Once set up, gas barbecues are as simple as turning on a hob. They almost always run on tanks of propane, which you can buy from most garden centres, DIY shops or builders’ merchants, as well as some garages. You can also buy natural gas barbecues that draw from the mains in your home, although these require professional installation, which can be expensive. Propane can be a faff to organise, but once you have it, you can barbecue whenever you want.

Electric
Barbecues powered by electricity are the easiest to use – you just plug them in. Increasingly common in the UK, but you’ll need an outdoor power socket.

Kamado
Unlike steel charcoal barbecues, kamados are built with ceramic, which retains heat exceptionally well and reaches higher temperatures. They look good and cook incredible-tasting food, but they’re expensive – expect to pay about £1,000 or more for a mid-range model.

Smoker
Smoker barbecues are designed for American-style barbecue cooking. Rather than the classic blackened British sausage in a bun, these are made to cook low-and-slow dishes such as brisket and ribs.

Pellet smokers are electric barbecues that burn wood pellets at a constant temperature for hours, and often come with smart features, such as Bluetooth and wifi. You can also get offset smokers, which are charcoal barbecues that have a compartment for burning pellets or smoking wood. They’re much more difficult to master, but can cost the same as a standard charcoal barbecue.

Griddle
Also known as a plancha, a griddle is an outdoor grill that has a flat surface rather than a grate, on which you can cook small items such as shrimp and bacon lardons, or liquid ingredients such as eggs or pancake batter.

Gas vs charcoal

Barbecues sit on a spectrum, with maximum flavour at one end and maximum ease at the other.

There’s no two ways about it – food tastes best when cooked on a charcoal barbecue. This is because the juices from whatever you’re cooking drop on to the hot coals and burn into smoke, infusing food with a rich flavour that you can’t get from any other type of barbecue. However, getting great results requires practice, and all the ash and grease can make cleanup a pain.

At the other end sit electric barbecues – you can just plug them in, and they’re ready to go. They’re really just glorified hot plates, however, so sausages cooked on an electric grill won’t taste very different from those fried in a pan.

Gas models sit somewhere in the middle. Once you have the gas, you can have fairly good burgers whenever you want, but the gas bottle itself is a pain to organise. Few things are as tedious as lugging a 13kg propane tank to a DIY shop.

Environmentally, electric barbecues are best. Unlike gas or charcoal barbecues, electric barbecues do not produce direct emissions, and they use about as much electricity as an air fryer.

Charcoal briquettes are technically a renewable fuel, since they’re made from wood, but few sources of charcoal are FSC-certified. More importantly, charcoal barbecues emit more carbon dioxide than any other type of barbecue. Climate scientists at the University of Sheffield found that a charcoal barbecue for four releases more greenhouse gases than an 80-mile car journey.

Gas barbecues produce about half the emissions of charcoal barbecues. However, propane is not a renewable fuel, so it’s hardly environmentally friendly.

Can you buy a secondhand barbecue?

Many people buy barbecues they never actually use, so you can find lots of nearly-new models on sites such as Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree for about half the price of a new model. I found my favourite barbecue, the Weber Kettle, for £40 at the time of writing.

However, there are a few things to look for. While a little rust on the outside isn’t a red flag, much more than that could be a structural concern – you don’t want your barbecue collapsing mid-cook.

If you’re buying a gas barbecue secondhand, check the gas connector and ignition wiring for leaks or breaks. Wiring might prove trickier to sort, since you’ll have to source it directly from the barbecue’s manufacturer. Gas regulators are easy to replace yourself, though.

Once your barbecue arrives, give it a thorough clean to remove any carbonisation that could flake off into your food and make it taste bitter.

How to clean a barbecue

A clean barbecue is crucial for food and fire safety. An unclean grill can make you sick, and a buildup of grease and old food can become a fire risk.

Avoid using a wire grill brush to clean the barbecue, though. Over time, they break down and can leave tiny shards of metal in your food – which, if ingested, can cause internal damage.

Instead, use a nylon brush or wooden scraper to remove carbonisation – or even a scrunched-up ball of aluminium foil held in some tongs. It’s a little fiddly, but I’ve found it lifts all the carbon. For the outside of a barbecue, soapy water and a soft sponge will do the job.

For more, read the kitchen gadgets top chefs can’t live without

Alex David is a consumer journalist with a decade of experience as a product tester, especially in outdoor cooking. He has tested everything from beard oil and exercise bikes to pizza ovens and lawnmowers. When he isn’t testing the latest gadgets, he is pretending to read a book down the pub

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