The 3 Best Garden Pruners of 2025
Our former budget pick, the Corona BP 3180D, costs the same as the Okatsune 101 and didn’t cut as smoothly and easily as our other picks. This model has a very wide handle span—when splayed open, these pruners are hard for many users to grasp. Users with small to medium-size hands will find them unwieldy. Corona does offer a smaller model, the Corona BP 3130 Classic Cut Forged Bypass Pruner, but it’s rated to cut branches only up to a half inch in diameter. Most gardeners would be better off with a pair of pruners that can tackle a broader range of branches.
The ARS HP-VS8R Signature Heavy Duty Rotating Handle Hand Pruner resembles our pick, the ARS HP-VS8Z, but has one handle that swivels on a pin in a 90-degree arc as you close your fingers. A rotating handle can reduce hand and wrist fatigue, but this design can also be awkward to use and reduce your power per cut. Our paid testers universally disliked this model’s rotating handle, saying it made them feel like the pruner was unsafe and out of control.
The Felco 7 is similar to Felco’s other pruners but has the same type of rotating handle our paid testers so disliked, with the added negative of a sticky, rubbery material coating the handle.
The Felco 6 model is a smaller version of our top pick. It has the same sharp blades but with slightly shorter handles (7.7 inches), a lighter weight (7.5 ounces, not 8.5), and a smaller blade capacity (0.8 inch, not 1 inch). If you have smaller hands, this pair is a great option, and the Felco 14 is another smaller tool we’ve tested and found to be as consistently excellent as the other Felco tools we’ve tried over the years. But both are nearly double the price of the Okatsune 101.
The Fiskars PowerGear2 tended to crush live branches and dowels slightly, and it required more force to close than other pruners. We needed to reopen and squeeze the PowerGear2 pruners three times to cut through a 0.75-inch buckthorn branch. The blades also didn’t close especially smoothly.
The AM Leonard 1286 Traditional Bypass Pruners are almost as comfortable as the ARS HP-VS8Z, though this model required two hands and force to cut a 0.75-inch branch. These pruners also shut more roughly than the ARS and Felco models.
The Fiskars 7936 PowerGear Pruner required more force than other pruners to cut raspberry canes and cut the 0.25-inch dowel inconsistently, but it was able to cut through a Norway maple branch even when we used just one hand. The clasp, handles, and the gear housing are all made of plastic.
This article was edited by Joshua Lyon and Harry Sawyers.
