Clean Up Your Sidewalks and Garden Beds With These Lawn Edgers for Homeowners

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If you want your yard to have that polished, professional look, you’re going to need some kind of lawn edger. These tools are designed to create a clean, deep notch where the grass meets the curb, sidewalk, driveway, or patio, creating a clear and visually appealing edge. In addition to a string trimmer and a lawnmower, a dedicated lawn edger is an important piece of a well-rounded landscaping tool collection.

The Best Lawn Edgers

• Best Overall: ECHO PE-225 Handheld Lawn Edger

• Best Battery-Powered: Greenworks Pro 80V 8-Inch Brushless Lawn Edger

• Best Corded: Worx 12-Amp 7.5-Inch Electric Lawn Edger & Trencher

• Best Gas-Powered: McLane 101-4.75GT-7 Gas Powered Lawn Edger

• Best No-Frills: Earthquake 41273 Walk-Behind Lawn Edger

What to Consider

Most lawn edgers use a motorized vertical blade to chop through anything in their paths and feature stabilizing wheels to help you stay on track. Stick-type edgers use a long handle, like a weed whacker, with a gas engine or electric motor at the top and the cutter at the bottom.

Stick edgers are lightweight and easy to store, but can take some time to learn how to steer so that you get the desired straight, clean notch. They’re also available as an accessory that you can attach to an existing machine, like our best attachment pick. These accessory-style edgers are the least expensive and take up minimal space, but you may experience vibration with these since they’re attached to the driveshaft near the main power head.

Walk-behind edgers are larger, typically gas-powered machines that use three or four wheels for maximum stability. These machines create the cleanest and straightest cuts, but are typically much more expensive than stick lawn edgers, and take up a lot of room in your garage or tool shed. We only recommend these for folks with large properties or landscaping businesses.

You can also achieve an effective result by using a manual edger. These are essentially a rounded blade attached to a long handle—you use your foot to stomp down the blade and chop through the grass. Manual edgers are affordable, but can take a while if you have a long edge to work with.

Safety

Edgers are like saws: As the blade spins, it can kick up dirt and small rocks. Occasionally, they can jam up from this debris, so make sure you wear safety glasses and, ideally, long pants to protect your shins from anything the blade kicks out.

Stick Edgers and Edger Attachments

They do work, but you may have to stop occasionally to clean the build up of dirt and small stones that accumulate behind the blade. They don’t produce enough torque to keep the blade turning through the material that builds up. The HART PowerFit Edger Attachment, which you can find below, was tested for the Yard & Garden Awards.

How We Selected

We used our expertise in lawn care and landscaping to recommend a selection of edger machines and accessories designed for use in the home, so you don’t end up with a large tool that’s overkill for your property. We prioritized lawn edgers from manufacturers we’ve tested products from and grown to trust, making sure to include a range of uses, styles, and price points.

PE-225 Handheld Lawn Edger

We’ve recommended Echo’s products for decades. This is a dedicated stick edger that’s well priced with enough engine for topsoil and typical cool-season grass. (For southern grass species, clay soil, or soil with small stones, you may need the company’s PE-2620 with a 25.4-cc engine).

The 21.2-cc engine that powers this machine takes a professional-grade 50:1 gas-oil mix, and the starting system has a spring-assist mechanism to make starting as easy as possible. We’ve tried other Echo products with the i30 starter and they are, indeed, very easy to start.

Pro 80V 8-Inch Brushless Lawn Edger

There aren’t many cordless options in edgers because it takes so much torque to do this job. That’s why Greenworks equipped this edger with an 80-volt brushless motor and a variable-speed trigger, designed for maximum torque only when you need it.

You can give the motor full power for deep cuts or cutting through clay soil, or back off the trigger for light cuts, such as refreshing the edge after weekly mowing. You’ll need to supply your own battery though, so this would be ideal for folks who already have a Greenworks tool collection.

12-Amp 7.5-Inch Electric Lawn Edger & Trencher

Edging, especially at full depth, takes lots of torque. That’s why the Worx is powered by a powerful motor—the same kind of current that a mid-duty circular saw draws.

But the Worx has more than just power going for it. Its depth adjustment is simple and tool-free: Flip the latch on the side open and move the wheel and mounting bracket to the desired depth, then flip the lever shut.

Another feature we find intriguing is the machine’s cut line indicator, a drop-down fin that rides in the trench you’re cutting, steadying the machine and making mis-cuts a lot less likely.

101-4.75GT-7 Gas Powered Lawn Edger

This is the ultimate high-torque edging solution. The McLane lawn edger is U.S.-built and solidly constructed, weighing about the same as a small-engine lawnmower. It has a thick-bar stock frame, ball-bearing wheels, and a ball-bearing cutter head that tilts, allowing you to edge at an angle (horizontally or vertically).

The spacer between the front wheels makes this even more versatile than your standard edger. Leave the spacer in place for making straight runs, or remove the spacer and slide the wheels together and reinstall the spacer on the outside for edging curves with a tight radius.

The curb-riding feature lets you set the front wheels together so they ride along the curb while the blade cuts the notch between the curb and the grass. (There's definitely a learning curve with this maneuver, so be patient).

Unlike many gas-engine edgers for which the blade turns automatically when the engine is started, the McLane is equipped with a handle-operated clutch mechanism that allows you to disengage the blade until you’re ready to make cuts.

41273 Walk-Behind Lawn Edger

We’ve tested a variety of Earthquake machines over the years, and they deliver on the brand’s promise of no-frills power. While we haven’t tested this particular Earthquake model, after reviewing its specifications, it looks in line with the low-cost power-equipment that’s made the brand so popular among consumers.

In terms of layout and configuration, it’s much like the McLane above, complete with a clutch-activated blade. It’s got an engine appropriate for this class of equipment, a multi-angle cutter head, and an odd (though robust) debris catcher made from short chain links.

If your taste in outdoor power equipment tends to be old-school simplicity, give this edger some serious consideration.

PowerFit Edger Attachment

We like the product development we’ve been seeing with Hart power tools and that includes this 40-volt trimmer, available at Walmart. Hart is a brand of TTI, the parent company of Milwaukee and Ryobi, so this level of product development comes as no surprise.

We gave the string trimmer a good, sturdy workout in grass and weeds and found that its power, lack of vibration, and the reliability of its bump feed were all commendable. Then we removed the string trimmer attachment and slipped on the 8-inch vertical wheel edger and used it to form the edge on a garden path and along some flower beds. That’s far more rugged work than we had a right to expect from the tool (it doesn’t have quite enough torque to keep the edger head from getting clogged with dirt), but the fact that we could do such demanding edge work was pretty remarkable.

You should be aware that this trimmer doesn't have string heads that are easy to lock and unlock when they are new. It takes several lock-unlock cycles. The harder you work the trimmer, the more difficult it will be to unlock the spool head. Our testing is severe, however, and we found that after a thorough thrashing, we could not unlock the string head.

Bottom line: lock and unlock the string head several times when the trimmer is brand new to get a feel for it and to wear in the head’s locking mechanism. Thereafter, take it easy. This is a good trimmer, but it’s not commercial grade equipment.

Handheld Saw-Tooth Lawn Border Edger with T-Grip

This manual edger from Ames is an affordable to alternative to the heavy-duty machines on our list, especially if you don’t have a ton of edging to do. Although it requires a decent amount of physical effort, the simple design allows you to maintain maximum control during use, unlike automatic options that can be a challenge to keep on track.

Plus, since it takes up about the same amount of space as a rack or hoe, you shouldn’t have any trouble hanging it or storing it when the job’s finished. We’re also big fans of the convenient footplate, which lets you sink the blade into soil with ease.

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