The 5 Best Weed Killers and Weeding Tools of 2025

In spring 2025, I tried out three herbicides, from Sunday and Procter & Gamble, that are heavily marketed as safer or greener alternatives to traditional formulas. Before using them in my yard, I spoke at length with Trent Lewis, Sunday’s co-founder and head of R&D, and Mary Jane Watson, research and development senior scientist at Procter & Gamble.

Sunday’s Dandelion Doom uses chelated iron (iron HEDTA) to induce fatal iron toxicity in broadleaf plants. Iron HEDTA is extensively used as a supplemental fertilizer (all photosynthetic plants need some iron), and using it as an herbicide is effectively a matter of vastly overfertilizing. The EPA has found no reports of adverse effects from exposure to iron HEDTA, and it says that “pesticidal usage of this biochemical will not have any harmful environmental effects.”

Sunday’s Weed Warrior is an ammoniated soap. Herbicidal soaps kill by disrupting the protective waxy coating on leaves and damaging leaf-cell walls; this leads to desiccation and cell death. I reviewed the Safety Data Sheets of several widely available brands, including Weed Warrior, and the warnings are that they can irritate the eyes, skin, or lungs and should not be swallowed; these warnings are similar to the warnings on dishwashing soap.

Procter & Gamble’s Spruce meets the EPA’s 25(b) “minimum risk” conditions. Essentially, this means a pesticide can contain only active ingredients that the EPA believes “pose little to no risk to human health or the environment,” and in fact many of those ingredients are widely used in food and cosmetic products. Spruce’s active ingredients are sodium lauryl sulfate (a surfactant found in a lot of soaps and shampoos), geraniol (geranium essential oil), and cornmint oil. Putting aside all other considerations, it smells delicious. (That wasn’t a given. The complete list of 25(b) active ingredients includes dried blood and “putrescent whole egg solids.”)

I didn’t find any of them as effective as the Roundup. Neither did Wirecutter’s Sebastian Companucci, an avid gardener who optimizes his weeding practices.

This was largely expected: They are not systemic herbicides, which are absorbed into and kill every part of a plant. As both Lewis and Watson noted, that means treated plants’ roots can and often do survive and regrow.

It often took two applications of the Sunday and Spruce products to kill the aboveground parts of the grasses, dandelions, and other weeds I used them on. Also, for the products to be the most effective, the plants have to be thoroughly drenched — not just lightly sprayed or wetted with a drop or two. So I wound up using a lot more of the Sunday and Spruce products than I did of Roundup.

Spruce comes in proprietary aerosol cans (they spray straight down), manual spray bottles, and jugs with built-in battery-powered spray wands. Sunday’s Weed Warrior and Dandelion Doom come in manual spray bottles and in jugs and pouches with battery-powered wands. Sunday sells refills for all of them, so you can reuse the original containers, but those wands aren’t built to last, and the batteries will die. Spruce sells refills for its jugs and spray bottles but not for the aerosol cans, and its battery-powered wands aren’t built to last, either. The incongruity between these “earth-friendly” herbicides and all that material waste struck both Seb and me.

All told, I’m happier using tiny, targeted amounts of the Roundup Weed & Grass Killer and durable applicators of my own choosing, and I don’t plan to keep using Sunday or Spruce after the batches we ordered run out. But I absolutely acknowledge their virtues, too.