The Best Canopy Tent for Camping and Picnics
Top pick
Our favorite canopy tent is a simply designed, comfortable shelter that offers protection from bugs, sun, and rain.
The REI Co-op Screen House Shelter is an intuitively designed, easy-to-erect picnic tent that offers protection from sun, bugs, and mild rain showers. Though the boxy design is basic, in our tests we found that this camping shelter offered the best combination of functionality, durability, and affordability of all the tents we tried.
The shelter has a 10-by-10-foot footprint—the most common size for tents of this type—and a peak height of 7 feet. It will shelter a standard-size picnic table, but with little room to spare.
The six-pole structure is intuitive to figure out. In our tests one camper took less than 10 minutes to put it up on the first try. Two shorter aluminum poles cross to support the roof while four longer poles join to the roof poles at the top of the tent and slide into pegs at the ground. The tent roof is made of polyester taffeta treated with a DWR (durable water repellent) coating. The walls are made of fine no-see-um nylon mesh edged with polyester taffeta. This polyester material is less susceptible to UV damage than the nylon that previous versions of this tent incorporated, but it generally has a feel that is not quite as soft. Despite the change in fabric, this REI shelter still weighs just 13 pounds, several pounds less than many others of this type.
The canopy tent has mesh walls on all four sides and an edge of polyester fabric (also DWR treated) at the ground that deters mosquitos and other critters from invading from below. There are full-height zippered doors on two sides of the tent, though unlike in the previous version of this tent the mesh walls do not completely unzip to form doorways at either side—which is a nice feature if you’re using the tent for shade but not worried about bugs. Like many tents of this type, the REI Screen House Shelter has a fabric hook in the center of the ceiling that accommodates a small lantern or other light.
We set up the REI Screen House Shelter and L.L.Bean’s similar Woodlands Screen House side by side on a weekend trip to the El Mirage Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, home of world-record-setting land-speed racing and, on our May trip, daytime averages of about 100 degrees. Fellow campers and sun-baked spectators consistently gravitated toward the REI shelter over the L.L.Bean. Though the two tents have the same footprint, the REI’s roof is 6 inches taller; we found that the higher ceiling made the REI shelter feel significantly roomier inside.
The Screen House Shelter packs into a reasonably roomy drawstring bag with a strap that makes the canopy tent much easier to transport than tents, like the L.L.Bean, that lack a strap.
The REI Co-op Screen House Shelter is subject to the company’s one-year return policy if you’re a member (the window is 90 days for non-members). It is, however, covered by REI’s warranty on all REI Co-op branded gear: If you find a manufacturing or material defect, you can return the item at any time. REI sells an add-on rain fly (which we did not test) for $100.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
A handful of REI customers complain that the tent is not stable in strong winds. Though the previous version came with four guylines—the stabilizing lines that allow you to stake out the tent for added security in windy conditions—the current version does not, which is inconvenient.
Several REI reviewers who bought both the tent and the fly for rain protection note that the fly has only two walls, leaving much of the tent exposed. The add-on fly for our runner-up pick, the L.L.Bean Woodlands Screen House, offers four-walled protection, though it’s also more than twice as expensive.
While the previous version of this tent used beachy-feeling aqua and orange, the current version is a drab olive green more typical of other tents. This doesn’t affect the functionality, but the brighter colors were something we previously praised.
