Top 6 Backpacking Stoves Compared
Honorable Mentions
There are a ton of tiny stoves out there. Here are a couple of stoves I like, but don’t make the top picks for one reason or another. They’re still fine stoves, and might be a great choice for your next backpacking trip.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Type of Stove Is Best for Backpacking?
Canister? Alcohol? Traditional white gas? There’s a wealth of options out there, so which one is The Best™? The answer is that it depends on where you’re going (altitude, weather, burn bans, etc), what you’re cooking, and how long you’re backpacking. Thru-hikers have a different set of needs than those of us who only get in a few weekends and maybe one 10-day trip a year. That said, our top pick is a great choice for both thru-hiking and weekend warriors. I love alcohol stoves for their silence and simplicity, but burn bans sometimes mean they’re not permitted. When in doubt, a lightweight canister stove setup is your best bet. The exception is cold weather. Inverted canister stoves do better in cold, but personally, I rely on white gas any time I think the temps will dip below 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
What’s the Best Stove for Actually Cooking?
Definitely the Firebox Nano paired with the gas burner and diffuser plate. There’s a weight penalty for all that, though. The titanium version is 8.5 ounces, but it cooks like a Coleman camp stove thanks to that diffuser plate. As noted above, it is possible to heat a 10-inch pan out to the edges, something no other backpacking stove has pulled off in my tests.
If you don’t want to carry that much weight, the MSR PocketRocket Deluxe offers the best flame control, though there is no way to spread out the flame and evenly heat your pans. Note that aluminum pans heat more evenly than titanium (and they’re much cheaper), so pairing the PocketRocket Deluxe with an aluminum pan will give you the best results in my experience.
All that said, be honest with yourself about cooking in the backcountry. I enjoy it, and I do do it, but I only do it when it makes sense. If you’re trying to cover 20-30 miles a day, cooking a complex meal isn’t what you want to do at the start and end of every day. For those trips, keep it simple, keep it light.
How Much Should My Stove Weigh?
As little as possible while still being functional. Seriously, it depends on what you want to do. If you’re solo and you just want enough water to rehydrate a pouch of food you can get by with something around an ounce or two. If you want to cook up a proper meal for tired children, it might be worth carrying a little extra weight.
Should You Buy a Stove System?
That’s up to you. They do often make life on the trail easier, thanks to the way most stove-pot combo systems click together and pack down nice and small. But if you’re looking to go ultralight and cut weight as much as possible, the answer is definitely no. A small, lightweight pot with either the MSR PocketRocket Deluxe or BRS 3000 and a DIY foil windscreen weighs less than any integrated stove system I’ve tested. Pro tip: make your own lightweight pot lid out of some heavy duty foil to save even more weight.
Why Don’t You List Boil Times?
Because fast boil times are a silly number made up by the industry so that it would have something to compare and brag about. The time it takes to boil water depends on factors no one can control in the real world, including starting water temp, ambient air temp, altitude, wind, and more. Even if you control for all of those factors to try to abstract out a number, it won’t tell you anything because some stoves are better than others in the wind, so you can’t extrapolate anything about their performance in still air that will map to their performance in wind. All of which makes boil times a completely useless number.
What Backpacking Stove Do You Use?
I own several stoves, but honestly, usually I am cooking on whatever I am testing for this guide. On the rare occasions I don’t have a new stove to test … it depends. For solo trips covering good distances I use the top pick, the MSR PocketRocket Deluxe. When I’m bikepacking or backpacking with my kids, I use the Firebox Freestyle stove split into two units, one with a Trangia spirit burner and one with the gas burner. Dividing all that up between 4 people keeps the weight reasonable (total weight for this setup is 26 ounces) and effectively gives me a 2-burner stove and a twig fire, which is nice when you don’t know what you’ll be able to buy when resupplying on the trail. In cold weather, I rely on an MSR WhisperLite International that I’ve had for almost three decades. I kind of hate it, but it’s reliable.
Tips and Tricks
Once you have a stove, get familiar with it. Canister stoves are pretty simple. Screw on the canister, turn the knob, and light. However, other stoves, especially liquid fuel stoves, require a little practice to really get it dialed in.
I went outside and made coffee on these stoves every morning for months, playing with variables like simmer controls, canister position, different fuels, windscreens, and more in all kinds of conditions. Even though I’ll never actually make coffee in a moka pot on the trail, the experience with each stove means I know how each stove behaves under different conditions. Do something similar until you’re familiar with how to control the flame, how to maximize fuel efficiency, and what to do when the wind blows. Here are some other things I’ve learned over the years about using backcountry stoves:
- Boiling water doesn’t mean a rolling boil: Unless you’re trying to sterilize water, you don’t need to get to a full rolling boil to rehydrate a meal and doing so is a waste of fuel. I usually shut the stove off when bubbles are just starting to form on the bottom of my pot. This is plenty hot enough to rehydrate freeze-dried or dehydrated meals.
- High is not max efficiency: I hate the noise of canister and pressurized white gas so I’ve never had this problem, but many people I’ve camped with seem to think the burner should always be on high. This is usually a waste of energy (the BRS 3000T is an exception, it really pretty much does need to be high). This is where experimenting and learning how your stove works helps. Time how long it takes to boil water at different burn levels and use the lowest setting that still effectively boils your water.
- Remember the weight and volume are not the same: I know, it has been forever since I had high school chemistry too, but remember that weight and volume are different despite the fact that both are often listed in the abbreviation oz. One fluid ounce of alcohol does not weigh one ounce (it weighs .8 ounces). One fluid ounce of white gas also does not weigh one ounce (it’s about .75 ounces). This is important when you’re trying to work out the weight of canisters and fuel bottles.
- Your cooking pot matters: The size and shape of your cookware matters—some boil faster than others on different stoves. Check out this in depth YouTube rundown of different stove and pot combos to see what I mean, but one takeaway is that again, this is something worth testing with your stove.
