The Best Portable Grills for Camping, Tailgates, and Beach Parties

Camping trips, road trips, tailgates, closet-size outdoor spaces—there are a lot of scenarios that call for a portable grill. So we set out to find the best portable grill, because unfortunately, many of the factors that make a grill portable can also keep it from working well. Lighter materials that are easier to transport end up being flimsy and bad at conducting and retaining heat; shrinking a grill down to a size that easily fits in an already-full car can make it so small that it’s hard to cook on. We made it our mission to find portable grills that are smartly designed and made from high-quality materials—grills we’d be happy to use, not just because they’re easy to bring out to the woods or the parking lot, but because they perform just as well as their full-size grilling cousins. Read on for our top picks. For more details on how we tested and what we looked for, scroll down to the bottom.

From a pure cooking standpoint, we think you’ll get more flavor out of a charcoal grill every time. But we’re choosing to recommend one of each style of grill here, and we remain agnostic as to which is the “best overall.” When thinking about portable grills, there are considerations that go beyond flavor: Will you have the space to transport a bag of charcoal? Will you have time to light a charcoal grill? Will you have the ability to clean up after a charcoal grill wherever you’ve taken it? Do you even want to? Both our charcoal and gas winners here are excellent, so you’ll just need to determine how you intend to use your grill before deciding which type to buy.

There’s nothing else quite like the Nomad on the market today. It is simply a brilliant piece of engineering. The design features an anodized aluminum suitcase, small enough that it might be able to fit in an overhead compartment; within it you’ll find a cast-aluminum cooking box and heavy-duty stainless steel grate. When closed, this portable grill is easy to carry one-handed (as easy as something that weighs almost 30 pounds can possibly be) thanks to a soft, grippable handle. When opened it has 212 square inches of cooking space—that’s enough for a whole chicken with room to spare, a rack of ribs, or close to a dozen turkey burgers. You can double the surface area if you get an extra grate. And the design of the grill surface—made of small hexagons instead of slim bars—is incredibly effective at keeping food from sliding down into the coals. Flipping and turning food on the Nomad was easier than on some grills I’ve used that had twice the space to maneuver.

But wait, there’s more. The Nomad is designed to smoke as well as grill. It has two magnetic vents which, when set to half open, allow the grill to stay at 250°F for an hour. I checked the grill every 20 minutes and was able to keep it at that temperature on less than a full chimney of charcoal.

One final feature that separated the Nomad from most other portable charcoal grills I tested: The outer shell stayed fairly cool to the touch. Even when the grill heated to over 400°F, I was able to place my hand on top of the closed lid without incident. I also put a piece of scrap wood underneath it to see what damage the bottom of the grill might do when heated up. The wood was unscathed. For that reason, I’d feel comfortable placing it on a picnic table without fear of doing irreparable damage (if you have an $8000 live edge table, you might still want to exercise caution).

The only part about using the Nomad that I didn’t love was emptying it. Because it needs to be emptied while completely open, it was hard to lift when attempting to dump the ash into a bin. On its website Nomad suggests using a shop vac to get all the spent charcoal out. I have no doubt that that would do the trick, but if you’re off on an adventure an hour from an electrical outlet, a shop vac might not be practical. That said, I’m hard pressed to imagine a better camping grill than this. The Nomad does cost more than anything else I tested, but it was unparalleled both in how it cooked and how easy it was to move.

Both Weber gas grills I tested were effective and easy to cook on, but the nod goes to the Traveler here for its passionate embrace of portability. The Traveler has wheels, which is helpful because it is large enough—thanks not only to its 320 square inches of cooking area, but also to a very helpful built-in shelf—that it might be hard to move otherwise. It also folds down flat for easy storage and easy transport. When folded up, the legs become a handle that you can pull behind you as if you’re walking with a nice roller bag. The legs on one side of the grill become a sort of handle when the grill is folded up; you can walk with it, kind of as if you’re pulling a nice roller bag. It has some other nice design touches, like the ability to transition the grill from folded to cook-ready with one hand, and a lid that locks automatically for transport and storage. The Weber Traveler heated up quickly, and I met no resistance when turning food on the porcelain-enameled cast-iron grates. Of all the grills I tested, the Traveler was the easiest to set up and use. Like most portable gas grills, it uses small propane canisters, but it can also use a full-size propane tank with an adapter, so it’s backyard ready if you want to use it as your primary grill.

Since you’ve come here looking for a portable grill, we thought it made sense to recommend one for those of you who prize portability above all other features. Everything but the grill grate on the GoBQ is made of flame-retardant fabric, and the whole thing weighs nine pounds and packs easily into something about the size of a knife roll. It would probably even fit in a purse, if you had a big purse.

But, crucially, the GoBQ also performed quite well during the cooking tests. The grill is bigger than it seems, with 196 square inches of grilling area. It was actually bigger than several other grills I tested that didn’t fold up nearly as compactly. Maneuvering food on the cooking grate was easy, and the carrying case unrolls into a lid that gives at least some control over the temperature, which is a surprising plus on a grill this light and stripped down.

Durability is the one question mark for the GoBQ. After cooking for a little more than an hour, I noticed fraying in the piece of fabric immediately below the charcoal basket where I had used a firestarter. If food drips on to the coals, causing a flare-up, I’d also expect some fraying. The company suggests covering that piece of fabric with aluminum foil. That will undoubtedly extend the life of the material, but is something to be aware of before use. All in all, the GoBQ really shined for something in such a small package.

I tried to cover both the “portable” part and the “grill” part in my testing. After unboxing, (fortunately almost none of these grills required much in the way of assembly) I carried each one a block down from my house and a block back, noting how easy the handles were to hold, and if a grill’s size and weight distribution made it challenging to walk with. For those grills with wheels, I walked them around a large, uneven lawn with plenty of divots to see how they rolled.

Then I fired them up. For the gas grills, I noted how long they took to heat up, and if they would overheat when left alone set on high. In my opinion, a portable grill that quickly shoots up over 550°F is more of a challenge to use. For the charcoal grills, I noted how long they stayed hot enough to cook with by holding my hand over the grate every 15 minutes. I wanted it to remain at medium-high, which meant I should only be able to hold my hand there for about three seconds. I then cooked several things on every grill: turkey burgers, large sausages, and corn on the cob. I picked those because they seemed like common use cases for camping or tailgating.

There were only two grills that seemed capable of true indirect cooking or smoking: The Nomad and the Oklahoma Joe’s Rambler. Both had vents at the top and bottom of the grill to control airflow, enough space in the cookbox to separate the food from the fire, and high quality thermometers to check temperature. For these two I set the vents halfway open and checked every 20 minutes to see how close to 250°F the temperature stayed over the course of an hour.

If it’s hard to move, it isn’t actually a portable grill; it’s just a grill that’s smaller than you’d like it to be.

I wanted a charcoal grill that did not rapidly lose heat because its materials were too thin. I wanted a gas grill that kept a nice even temperature once it was set.

It should be easy to get underneath those burgers and flip them over.

Did the grates clean off easily? Were the ash catchers easy to empty?

In a world where the Nomad didn’t exist, the Oklahoma Joe’s Rambler would be the top charcoal choice here. This grill feels like Oklahoma Joe’s just hit one of their full-size grills with a shrink ray. It had the same solid construction, the same easy-to-work-with grates, and it even had a chimney vent on top that provided excellent temperature control. The charcoal basket was on adjustable hooks, so I could bring it closer or further from the grates depending on how hot I wanted them. It performed just as well in the indirect cooking test as the Nomad. But the things that made the Rambler a great grill are also the things that made it harder to move. Carrying it two blocks was not impossible (and considering the quality of the grill, it may be an effort worth undertaking) but it required more exertion than any of the other charcoal grills. It also required more assembly of the wrench and screwdriver type, though it still only took about 30 minutes.

The Weber Smokey Joe portable grill is a bargain at under $70. And it was totally fine when it came to the cooking tests. If price is your number one consideration, you may want to think about it. It’s also a very small grill and very light, which kept it from being as effective as the heavier charcoal grills I tried. It actually has even less grilling space than the GoBQ. It also wasn’t as easy to move as the GoBQ because…nothing was as easy to move as the GoBQ.

The Everdure Cube by Heston Blumenthal is a cute little charcoal grill that’s easy to carry and comes in a number of color options. The removable snap-on tray and storage container are nice features. It’s easy to handle the grill even when lit because of the cool-touch handles. Ultimately, I found food fell in between the bars of the grate too easily and the grill itself was too small to be useful. Also, the lack of any lid at all was a deal breaker.

The Coleman Roadtrip 285 just felt flimsier than the Weber Traveler. And though it was on wheels, folding and unfolding the legs of the grill weren’t intuitive. There was much finger pinching. At 20,000 BTUs, this was the most powerful grill I tried. It provided a great sear, but when combined with the thin material that also meant that the temperature gauge pushed 600 degrees if I didn’t keep an eye on it, and it felt harder to maintain heat control. The grates were also mostly closed, making it more like a grill pan than a grill.

The Weber Q2200 is a great propane gas grill. In terms of cooking, it performed almost identically to the Traveler. But the Q2200 is a tabletop grill and it is so wide, even with the two side tables folded, that I wouldn’t want to carry it too far. (There is a smaller version, the Q1200, which I did not test, but has a similar design) The Traveler’s design is much smarter for someone who needs to take their grill on the go. This would be a good grill for someone who had a smaller outdoor space and needed something stationary, but smaller than a typical home gas grill. Like the Traveler, the Weber Q2200 can also accommodate a full-size propane cylinder with an adapter. The push-button ignition is battery powered, which I actually found slightly easier to use.

If you’ve decided you want a portable charcoal grill, there is nothing like the Nomad—it’s expensive but worth it. Not only is it easy to pack and carry, it excelled at every cooking task I gave it. If you prefer a portable propane grill, Weber’s Traveler combines the quality Weber grills are generally known for with a smart design that is ready to take on the road.