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David Watsky Senior Editor / Home and Kitchen
David lives in Brooklyn where he's spent more than a decade covering all things edible, including meal kit services, food subscriptions, kitchen tools and cooking tips. David earned his BA from Northeastern and has toiled in nearly every aspect of the food business, including as a line cook in Rhode Island where he once made a steak sandwich for Lamar Odom. Right now he's likely somewhere stress-testing a blender or tinkering with a toaster. Anything with sesame is his all-time favorite food this week.
Expertise Kitchen tools | Appliances | Food science | Subscriptions | Meal kits
David Priest Former editor
David Priest is an award-winning writer and editor who formerly covered home security for CNET.
I've used many chef's knives and appreciate each one for its unique feel. But even a good chef's knife can become dull over time. Spending $150 or more can feel like a waste when your expensive knife cuts just as well as a $10 generic knife after a few months. This is why having a knife sharpener is a must, especially if you're looking to save.
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A sharp knife transforms your cutting experience into a smooth process, allowing you to slice through ingredients effortlessly. On the other hand, a dull knife can be frustrating and dangerous, as it requires more force to cut, increasing the risk of accidents and injuries. This is why you'll want to invest in a quality knife sharpener, it enhances not only the sharpness of your blade but also their longevity, too.
The good news is a kitchen knife sharpener doesn't have to be a huge investment. You can get started with a small amount, but keep in mind, as with any kitchen tool, what you put in is often what you get out: A little over $10 can get you measurable improvements to your blade while spending a lot more will get you a knife-sharpening system that keeps your chef's knife's edge as sharp as new in perpetuity.
With all that said, these are the best knife sharpeners for 2024.
What is the best knife sharpener overall?
There are lots of tools for knife maintenance -- I'm sure you're all familiar with the honing rod and knife sharpening stone or whetstone -- but I wanted the knife sharpening process to be a little easier. So CNET tested the heck out of some sharpeners to figure out which ones will always result in a sharp knife. With these recommendations, you won't have to worry about the angle or anything else, and you'll still get a razor-sharp edge from a formerly blunt knife. Here are CNET's picks for the best knife sharpeners for your chef's knife. We're going to update it as we test more products.
A note: This list is just for chef's knives. Other types of knives, like a hunting knife or a serrated knife, will need a different kind of sharpening kit or sharpening tool to combat a dull blade.
Best knife sharpeners of 2024
The best electric knife sharpener I used while testing was the $169 Chef's Choice Trizor XV, a bulky device with three separate tracks for bringing dull knives to a super-sharp 15-degree edge (many American knives are sharpened to a 20-degree angle). The Trizor also comes with thorough and helpful directions for use -- explaining unfamiliar terms and processes in straightforward ways. Plus, magnets on the sharpening tracks ensure the correct sharpening angle, so the risk of making mistakes while sharpening a dull blade on the diamond abrasives is pretty minimal.
The results of this professional electric knife sharpener testing were impressive. The sharp blade and smooth edge produced by the device meant I could slice through a tomato without squashing it or tearing the skin because of inconsistencies across the length of the edge.
The one downside of the Trizor electric sharpener is its premium cost ($169 is more than most people pay for a chef's knife, let alone the tool that sharpens it) and its bulky profile. If you have plenty of counter space or don't mind storing it in a cabinet, the Trizor is the best-performing device around.
If you're less interested in maintaining a perfect edge on your knife blade, and instead want an affordable, "good-enough" alternative, the $7 KitchenIQ 2 Stage Knife Sharpener might be for you. No, it won't fully resurrect an old, dull blade, but this sharpener can help keep up a better edge than usual with just a few passes through this manual knife sharpener's sharpening tracks each day.
The KitchenIQ sharpening system includes two tracks: a coarse sharpener (carbide blades) for setting the edge, and a fine sharpener (ceramic rod) for finishing it. When compared to other compact, non-electric products, like the $25 Anysharp Pro with only a coarse sharpener or the poorly performing $8 Kadell 3 Stages sharpener, the KitchenIQ manual sharpener stands out.
To test our knife sharpeners, we acquired eight identical chef's knives and dulled them using a Dremel. They still could cut tomatoes and pineapples (our two testing fruits), but not cleanly; essentially, we wanted our knives to behave like chef's knives that have seen years of use without much upkeep.
I tested the knives before sharpening them to be sure they all performed about as poorly as we wanted them to, paired each with a sharpener and labeled accordingly. I then followed the directions for each sharpener. Some sharpeners suggested passing the blade through "until sharp," and I did so until the improvements seemed negligible. Other sharpeners were more prescriptive, and I followed the directions precisely.
After sharpening, I tested each knife, looking at how much it squashed a ripe tomato and tore its skin while slicing, as well as how easily it sliced the skin from a ripe pineapple. I rated the cut with each fruit out of 10, noting my specific observations. The primary goals here were to see how sharp the edge became and how smooth it was across its length: a sharp blade shouldn't squash a tomato, and a smooth blade shouldn't tear its skin. A pineapple would test the same effects in a higher stress context -- cutting through a robust fruit in a non-straight pattern.
The most important element of a knife sharpener is its ability to sharpen an edge across the length of a blade. That said, plenty of other factors might make other devices a better fit for you. Here are some of those factors:
- Ability to sharpen different types of knives
- Cleanliness
- Sound
Generally, sharpening a serrated blade specifically requires a serrated knife sharpener, but you still may want to sharpen straight paring knives, boning knives, a fillet knife, cleavers or utility blades (or even a pocket knife or hunting knife). While the Chef's Choice sharpener is the best for chef's knives, both the Presto Three Stage and Work Sharp devices offer a little more flexibility for different blades. Presto, for instance, can adjust its slots to guide different blades more effectively. Work Sharp uses attachments and belts of varying coarseness for kitchen knives, pocket knives or scissors -- a modular approach that may put off casual cooks, but will likely appeal to DIY enthusiasts.
Despite fair results, the Work Sharp looks much more at home in a garage than on a kitchen counter.
David Priest/CNETAnother consideration is how clean your sharpener is: if you're sharpening in your garage, then you might not sweat the steel filings that sprinkle out of some sharpeners, like the Work Sharp or the Presto sharpeners. In a kitchen setting, cleanliness is a must, and Chef's Choice Trizor and the $23 AnySharp Pro sharpener were the cleanest. That said, all the above recommendations required minimal cleanup, if any at all.
Finally, sound is a concern for some -- and some of these devices are significantly louder than others. The Chef's Choice Trizor is slightly quieter than the Presto sharpeners, but none were silent. If you want a quiet option, non-electric sharpeners will be your best bet.
Out of all the testing, the only device that seemed to have no upside was the $8 Kadell 3 Stages Sharpener (no longer available), which wasn't as affordable as the KitchenIQ sharpener and also performed worse than any other sharpening tool I tested. Besides that one, it seems pretty much any knife sharpener is better than no knife sharpener. So invest in the high end or pick up a $6 tool. Either way, food prep will get a lot easier when you do.
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