The Best Knife Sharpeners of 2025

Other Knife Sharpeners That’ll Get The Job Done

Knife Sharpeners Comparison Chart

How We Tested the Best Knife Sharpeners

Not every blade is a knife, nor is every sharpening job simple. On a long enough timeline, every blade gets chewed up, chipped, and spit out. We have used many of these systems for years, but newcomers and longstanding favorites were all put through a diverse wringer. 

The most consistent backbone of our head-to-head tests was Benchmade’s Station and Table Knives, whose edges we dragged (with a heavy heart) along bricks until they were chipped, dull, and damaged. The CPM-154 steel, edge geometry, and the latter’s partial serrations made them an excellent analog for how each sharpener would handle heavy restoration and reprofiling of a broad spectrum of steels. 

We also tested tool-oriented systems like the T-4 and Work Sharp MK.2 by reprofiling axes, machetes, and khukuris. Systems capable of sharpening saw teeth were put to task by touching up folding saws. Ultimately, every testee was thrown up against a broad array of different tools, edge geometries, and degrees of dullness. 

Our Testing Process

To get a good idea of how various sharpening systems performed in the real world, we tested each system against steels in three brackets. To approximate the maintenance of softer, lower-carbide steels often used in bushcraft blades, axes, budget EDC blades, and mid-range cutlery, we used each system to sharpen steels like 1050, 1095, 14C28N, and AUS10. 

The biggest range of testing was with the medium-high carbide content steels common to mid-to-high-end cutlery, fixed blades, and folders like S35VN, CPM-154, and M4. Lastly, to see how well each system held up to the hardest high-end EDC blades, we also used each sharpener with stubborn steels like S90V and S110V. A few diamond-based systems were also tested against ceramic knives.

Our Expert Testers

Our lead tester, Ian Graber-Stiehl, is an edge obsessive. He’s a “knife guy” through and through, who definitely doesn’t have a problem and can quit collecting anytime he wants. As a former bartender, cook, and hobbyist bladesmith, he’s lectured many coworkers about metallurgy and nearly strangled more than a few for chipping his santoku knife by tossing it in the sink. 

Moreover, he’s professionally sharpened blades for commercial kitchens, antique axe and sword collectors, sushi chefs, home cooks, hairdressers, horse trainers, woodworkers, and more — and never met a factory edge he didn’t completely reprofile within weeks.

Our testing team is also graced with Nick LeFort, a knife industry old hand who has been writing about knives for 10 years and is part-owner of Ragged Mountain Knife Works. LeFort also extensively tests knives, hatchets, and multitools for GearJunkie, so you know he’s wearing knives out enough to need a good sharpener or three.

Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose a Knife Sharpener

Sharpening Science

There are many approaches to sharpening, but the principles are all the same. How coarse a grit you should start at depends. (Pro tip: Different companies and types of abrasives have different grit sizes, but if a company offers the size of the abrasive particles in its stones in microns, this is a universal unit.)

The more material you need to remove, the coarser you should start. For simple sharpening, coloring in the edge of a blade with a black marker makes it easy to ensure you’re matching the existing edge angle. 

As you grind one side of a blade, you will form a burr: a thin, wiry piece of steel at the edge that folds over to the other side. A burr, especially with coarse stones, is easy to feel with your fingers or even see with the naked eye.

Form a burr on one side, then sharpen the other side until you form a burr in the other direction. Then move up in grit and repeat, sharpening each side until you form a burr and replacing the scratch pattern of the previous stone with the current, finer stone. 

After stopping at your desired grit, all that’s left is to break off that burr to reveal a fresh edge. This can be done in several ways: with hones, strops, or with a stone. Simply run the blade backward (think: the opposite direction of how you’d cut) at a slightly steeper angle on alternating sides until you break the burr off. Deburring, realigning warped edges, and light touch-ups are where hones and strops truly excel.

Different Strokes for Different Steels

Most steels tend to be relatively soft and easy to resharpen on almost any kind of stone, oil, and water. With these sorts of steels, the biggest hurdles are often repairing damaged edges, especially for thick blades like axes, hatchets, bushcraft knives, and khukuris. 

Thick blade stock means sharpening requires removing more material. So, reprofiling an edge and repairing large chips can still be a slow affair. 

High-end EDC knives tend to trend toward steels that are chock-full of carbides, which are harder than the abrasives in traditional whetstones and oil stones. This allows them to hold an edge for ages. However, this can make sharpening (especially reprofiling) these steels an exercise in tedium.

As a general rule, if the name of the steel in a blade starts with “CPM” or “ZDP” — doing the bulk of your sharpening with either a diamond abrasive or powered grinder is a good way to make life easier. We recommend reading up on the specific steel your blades are made from, as it will pay off during sharpening.

Types of Sharpeners

Ultimately, the best sharpener for you is determined by a mix of what you’re sharpening, how often, where you work, your skills, and budget. 

A home cook on a budget needs a different sharpener than a professional sharpening ultra-hard steels, for example.

Even so, what’s more important isn’t the method. It’s the edge at the end. After all, an edge that cuts reliably is less likely to cut you.

Bench Stones

There are many types of sharpening stones, but they traditionally come in two broad categories: oil and whetstones. The abrasives in these stones — usually novaculite, silicon carbide, or aluminum oxide — can overlap quite a bit. The distinction is in how the abrasive particles are bound together, how you use them, and how fast they cut.

The abrasives in oil (or Arkansas) stones are bound tightly into a hard stone. This means they wear slowly and don’t need much maintenance. They’re also fantastic for polishing. 

However, a stone’s wear exposes fresh abrasives. So, less wear makes for slower sharpening, especially with very hard steels. Oil stones also clog more easily with steel particles or “swarf.” Fortunately, when an oil stone gets really clogged and discolored, a few minutes of warm, soapy water and a scrubby pad will clean it right up.

The abrasive particles in whetstones like the Suehiro CERAX 1010 or Sharp Pebble 1000/6000 are bound more loosely. This means the stones themselves wear more quickly and form an abrasive slurry. This makes for faster sharpening. However, most whetstones must be soaked in water before use and leveled more often than oil stones to stay flat, typically with either a diamond plate or a leveling stone. 

Plates embedded with diamond or cubic boron nitride (CBN) are less traditional but incredibly fast. Boasting, respectively, the world’s first or second hardest abrasives, plates like the DMT Dia-Sharp Diamond Stone sharpen quickly, require minimal maintenance, and stay perfectly flat. 

On the downside, diamond and CBN bench stones are often expensive, provide less feedback than traditional stones, and can be heavy-handed for lighter sharpening, removing more material than needed and leaving heavy scratches on the edge.

Manual Angle-Guided Sharpeners

These incorporate any of the above abrasives into a system that secures the blade, allows you to dial in the angle, and uses a guide arm that holds a stone to sharpen at a consistent angle. 

There are broadly two types of manual angle-guided systems. Clamp-based ones like the Wicked Edge, and Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite secure a blade in a clamp that can rotate to hit both sides of a blade. This makes them simple and easy to use. 

However, the actual sharpening angle of these designs depends heavily on how far the edge protrudes from the clamp. Likewise, the point of contact, and thus the sharpening angle, will change on heavily curved parts of a blade. So, for precision obsessives, an angle-measuring cube of some type may be necessary.

Table systems, like the Edge Pro, require holding a blade on an integrated table with the edge hanging off. Because the blade’s position can be manipulated, even with long and heavily curved blades, it’s much easier to keep a consistent angle. 

On the downside, these systems are a bit more involved to operate. You also need to account for the angle at which blades with no flat sides will rest — still making an angle cube a good idea. Swarf can also easily get on the table, scratching a blade’s finish as it’s drawn along. 

Electric Sharpeners

There’s no shortage of electric sharpeners. However, the best of them generally fall into two categories: belt systems and grinding stones. 

Belt sharpeners are the quick-grinding kings, but speed comes with costs. They’re noisy. Consumable belts are a secondary cost. And even with belt sharpeners marketed for kitchen use, we at GearJunkie recommend using a face mask to keep from inhaling steel dust if you’re grinding at low grits or for more than a few minutes at a time indoors.

Systems like the Work Sharp MK.2 scale down the power and speed of a grinder. With more slack, the chances of the belt overheating a blade are lower, though that slack means that you’ll get a slightly more convex edge. Adjustable angle guides make sharpening more precise and easier. That said, the dust and noise remain. 

On the other end of the scale are powered grindstones. Although there are some systems like the Tormek T-1, which are meant to be used dry, the majority of grinding systems meant to be used for sharpening are water-cooled, like the Tormek T-4. 

These are the behemoths of the list and easily the most complex systems. Their grinding wheel — either a whetstone, CBN, or diamond-embedded wheel — rotates through a water trough. They remove material incredibly fast. Running at low speed, they make little noise. With the stones constantly covered in a film of water, you’ll never overheat the blade, and the swarf collects neatly in the trough. 

Home Kitchen Sharpeners

Keeping your kitchen cutlery sharp is a simple task, and kitchen knife sharpeners are the style that most will encounter in daily life. These can range from simple leather strops to keep a blade honed to electric pull-through styles that do the work for you.

Kitchen knives have much less variability in bevel angles and profiles, meaning that sharpening them can be less hands-on. The blade steel of kitchen knives also tends to be softer, meaning that a single grit can be used to take your knife from dull to slicing sharp again.

Pull-through style kitchen sharpeners are the easiest out there, and often only a few passes through one will get you back up and running. These sharpeners aren’t as precise, however, so if you’ve been gifted a nice Santoku knife, it’s better to use a guided electric sharpener, or, better yet, learn to use one of the manual angle-guided units we’ve highlighted.

Electric sharpeners can quickly restore an entire knife block to shape, and countertop units require only passing the blade through a few times. These units won’t impress knife hobbyists, but are the better tool for those simply interested in getting lunch prepared.

We believe that rolling style sharpeners like the Work Sharp Rolling Knife Sharpener are a solid in-between for enthusiasts and the simply hungry. This sharpener is dead simple to use, but allows for varying angles and sharpening grits to be used.

Price & Value

Most sharpeners tend to break down pretty neatly into a few different price brackets. On the ultra-budget end of the scale are the DIY solutions that run a few bucks: sandpaper clamped to a mousepad or a homemade strop of leather glued to a 2×4. Then you’ve also got your fully electric countertop rotary sharpeners, which can command north of $500. Consider what you’ll be sharpening most, and how nice of a polish you want to put on your blades.

Budget

The $15-35 range is where you typically find touch-up tools like quality strops, hones, and pull-through sharpeners. The Smith’s Diamond Combination Sharpener ($20) is a great field tool, but it won’t do much more than tune up an edge.

Bench stones, especially when comparing oil, whet, and diamond stones, can range quite a bit. However, the vast majority fall into the $30-100 range. For home and hobbyist sharpeners, stones like the Suehiro CERAX 1010 ($33), Sharp Pebble 1000/6000 ($40), and DMT Dia-Sharp ($55) will offer the greatest versatility and bang for your buck of any offering.

Mid-Tier

From $140 to $350 is where most precision sharpeners fall: angle-guided system kits (most manual clamp or table-centric systems, and some powered). These typically come with a suite of different grit abrasives. The manufacturing companies also typically offer numerous optional attachments for different types of blades. 

Equipment in this range is typically much faster and more precise than freehand sharpening. The Work Sharp MK.2 ($300) belt sanding set-up is a dream to use and super versatile. With experience and accessories, these systems can be expanded into nearly pro-grade kits.

Premium

At the $400-1,500 end of the scale, we get into pro-grade systems that are capable of precision, versatility, and exceptional speed. Gear like the Wicked Edge Gen 4 Pro, the Tormek T-4 (and its bigger brother, the T-8), or full-on belt grinders can speedily regrind dozens of blades in a day.

However, the expense is hard to justify for non-pros — be they professionals at sharpening or in fields that involve working with a lot of sharp tools, such as trail builders, chefs, woodworkers, landscapers, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions