Best Hedge Trimmers of 2023

These powerful tools can tackle heavy brush and keep your shrubs looking their best

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Hedge trimmers are not only for sculpting boxwoods and bonsai but also the tools of choice for trimming back overgrown forsythia, bamboo, or any other flora that's too tough or abundant to tackle by other means.

In general, hedge trimmers more or less split the difference between a string trimmer and a chainsaw. It's worth buying a hedge trimmer if you have overgrowth that's too thick for a string trimmer but using a chainsaw would be overkill.

Hedge trimmers can cut branches as thick as about an inch. They do that with an oscillating bar of a fixed length, with precut grooves on either side of the blade. The blade oscillates back and forth inside the cutting bar, trimming the brush as you go. A good hedge trimmer will coast along effortlessly, leaving a path of perfectly trimmed shrubbery in its wake. A lousy trimmer will struggle to cut, bogging down on tough brush and leaving you with lopsided hedges and a lot to clean up with manual loppers.

As a whole, you’ll find three types of hedge trimmers: battery-powered, corded electric, and gas. Battery hedge trimmers (that is, cordless hedge trimmers), dominate in home centers and hardware stores, so that's where we focus the bulk of our testing. CR members can jump to our recommendations or our hedge trimmer ratings.

Here's what you need to know about the different types of hedge trimmers:

Most hedge trimmers are sold as stand-alone tools, but you’ll also find gas- or battery-powered bases that you can outfit with different attachments, such as a pole saw, string trimmer, and, yes, hedge trimmer. We recommend avoiding them. Our testing has found that powered bases with different attachments rarely offer performance as good as what you get from stand-alone tools.

Consider the tasks you need to do. Hedge trimmers feature a cutting bar, with lengths ranging from about 18 to 26 inches. Those with a longer cutting bar can tackle larger shrubs and clear more with each pass. But they’re also harder to use; a bar that's too long can feel unwieldy. The size of the bar also has an impact on the run time of a battery hedge trimmer. Longer cutting bars clear more vegetation in a single pass, but that also puts additional strain on the battery. As a rule, consider buying the biggest tool you can handle comfortably.

At our Yonkers, N.Y., headquarters, we have a bit of a bamboo problem. Huge swaths of the invasive chutes dominate much of our outdoor space, but that created an opportunity for our testers to put hedge trimmers into use, testing for cutting capacity on patches of bamboo. They started with small growth, about a quarter inch in diameter, working all the way up to inch-thick pieces, noting how quickly and cleanly each tool worked. And while we focused our testing on corded and battery hedge trimmers, we used a single premium gasoline model for reference to make sure the battery tools packed the same punch and could hold their own against a gas tool.

We also sized up safety, looking for features like a protective sheath for the cutting bar, blade brakes to stop cutting in an emergency, and designs that would prevent the tools from being a danger to children (for instance, interlocks, or cutting bars that keep small fingers away from the cutting path). We also assessed handling, weight, and balance, and evaluated run time and charge time, along with noise at the ear of the operator.

CR members can read on about the top-scoring hedge trimmers from our tests. You can also explore our comprehensive ratings of battery and corded hedge trimmers.

These three cordless models stood out from our testing, particularly for their ability to power through thick brush. Exact run times vary depending upon the cutting-bar length and the type of shrubs you’re trimming.

Corded hedge trimmers often lack the power found in battery hedge trimmers. But the two models below proved they could get the job done, and both cost less than the battery trimmers here.

Paul Hope

Paul Hope is a senior multimedia content creator at Consumer Reports and a trained chef. He covers ranges, cooktops, and wall ovens, as well as grills, drills, outdoor power tools, decking, and wood stains. Before joining CR in 2016, he tested kitchen products at Good Housekeeping and covered tools and remodeling for This Old House magazine. You’ll typically find him in his old fixer-upper, engrossed in a DIY project or trying out a new recipe.