The Best Gas Grills for Fast, Easy, Hot Outdoor Cooking (2025)

What happens when you ask pro cooks and seasoned grillmasters to recommend the best gas grills? You’ll get a few raised eyebrows from the charcoal purists, but here’s the thing: Gas grills are easy to use, quick to heat up, simple to clean, and great for cooking a lot of food fast. Sure, charcoal might offer smoky flavor and a wide temperature range, but sometimes you just want to throw a damn hot dog over a fire without all the work required to get your coals just right.

With a gas grill, you can cook 10 burgers or 20 hot dogs at a time while your buns warm on the top rack. Or you can char veggies on one side while you cook chicken on the other. And while gas grills have a well-earned reputation for not getting hot enough to sear a steak, the best gas grills will give your rib eye gorgeous grill marks every time. Beyond a large cooking area, many of the freestanding gas models we recommend also come with built-in side tables, which can be a real lifesaver when you’re cooking a lot of food over an open flame.

Gas grills are indeed pricier than charcoal grills of comparable quality and size (you can get a good Weber kettle grill for less than $150), but as you’ll see with one of our top picks below, you can get a really great gas grill for less than $500.

Our experts tested a range of gas grills at different price points to find the models that deliver the best performance, reliability, and value.

The best gas grill: Weber Spirit EP-435

In 2025, Weber released a new version of its entry-level Spirit line; in our testing, it blew every other “entry” level grill we’ve used away. Upgrades from earlier lines include both the cooking area of the grill as well as some new nice-to-have features.

What we love: The first thing to know about this grill is that it gets hot. The new and improved Spirit line includes a sear zone that, on the 435, encompasses half the grill (there are a number of different series within the Spirit line that come at different prices with more or fewer features). You activate it by giving the temperature knobs an extra turn, which means you can choose whether or not you want searing temps or more moderate ones across the entire surface. When we used the sear zone, we were able to get temperatures up above 800°. Without them, temps topped out just under 500°, but the cast-iron grates still produced excellent grill marks.

Another welcome update to the new Spirit line is its snap-to-start igniters. Instead of the push-button igniters of old, the snap ignition lights by simply clicking each burner on—easy enough that you can do it one-handed.

The Spirit line accommodates Weber's Crafted accessories, which allow you to replace your grates with items like a wok station or griddle. There are also drop-in accessories like a cutting board or condiment basket that fit into the side shelf.

Finally, the new Spirit cleans up easier than earlier Weber grills. An angled pan below the burners funnels any mess into a removable grease tray.

We chose the 435 model of the Spirit for a few nice-to-have, but not absolutely necessary features. An included battery-operated thermostat with a huge digital display makes it easy to see exactly how hot your grill has gotten from across the yard, and a side burner lets you simultaneously sauté vegetables while grilling proteins. But you can still get the benefits of the sear zones and everything discussed above in the less expensive versions of the Spirit that we think are the best starter grill you can get.

What we’d leave: Everything in the new Spirit feels very considered, solving almost every typical issue with a gas grill. The one thing to know, though, is that its thicker cast-iron grates take a little bit of extra time to heat up.

A compact budget pick: Char-Broil Performance 2-Burner Propane Gas Grill with Amplifire

What we love: Though it may look like just another two-burner gas grill, I like to think of it like one big sear burner because the whole grill can get so hot. That’s thanks to what the brand calls its Amplifire Cooking System (formerly known as TRU-Infrared). Though it’s not available on all of Char-Broil’s grills, Amplifire is an integrated, proprietary system that relies on an “infrared emitter,” a sheet of wavy, perforated stainless steel meant to concentrate heat and prevent flare-ups. What I noticed when I used it is that the emitter helps this grill to get hot, hot, hot, which many gas grills, particularly those at lower prices that lack a dedicated sear function, don’t. But this little grill performed as well as the high-end grills with sear burners that we’ve tested.

With only two burners, this certainly isn’t the best option for someone who wants a larger grill for bigger projects, but if you’re limited by space or budget, or you’re simply an occasional griller, this is truly the little gas grill that could. And for something with a relatively low price tag, it also has some impressive features, including a stainless-steel lid that has a built-in thermometer and is tall enough to fit a rotisserie. It’s easy to store too; when the side tables are folded down, the whole thing takes up less than four square feet, about the footprint of a large countertop oven, and it’s easy to roll around a patio or in and out of a garage.

The Char-Broil Performance 2-Burner Propane Gas Grill with Amplifire (which some retailers still list as TRU-infrared) is a truly great grill at a great price, but buyer beware: A nearly identical version doesn’t have the Amplifire technology, and you definitely want it.

What we’d leave: Because it’s a smaller grill, it has capacity limitations. It also lacks a side burner. But those are the typical compromises you make when picking a budget option.

How we tested the best gas grills

First things first, we unboxed and assembled every grill. If you’ve never assembled a gas grill before, they have a bit of a flatpack furniture situation going on. So even if a brand offered assembly, we rejected it so that we knew how laborious the process was.

Next, we ran some temperature tests. We used an infrared thermometer to see how hot the grills could get when cranked all the way up.

When it was time to cook, we used chicken breasts and thighs, hot dogs, and thick-cut pork chops. That let us look for the kinds of char and caramelization that we expect out of an effective grill, as well as how well each grill handled indirect cooking.