The Best Knife Sharpeners

Work Sharp’s Precision Adjust Elite Kit ($140) is a fantastic option for those focused on bang for their buck, portability, and straightforwardness. Its clamp rotates with ease to sharpen either side of a blade. The stones integrate into a rotating housing, allowing them to stow and swap easily. The Precision Adjust’s angle setting system allows for minute adjustments, making matching the angle of any blade a breeze. 

The Elite Kit expands on a sensible grit progression system capable of quickly taking even extremely dull, high-hardness steels like S90V from dull to plenty sharp and relatively polished. And, at only a half-inch wide, the stones also easily sharpen recurved edges — a tricky blade profile to maintain. 

While it is high in precision, the Adjust Elite is a touch lower in accuracy. Like many clamp-based systems, the actual sharpening angle depends on the blade’s height and can vary significantly from the labeled angle settings. So, reprofiling — regrinding an edge to a different angle — calls for an angle-finder cube (like the one that comes with the Precision’s Big Brother).

We also found that reprofiling with the Precision Adjust is a slow affair. While the diamond stones make sharpening a breeze, their small size and relatively high starting grit aren’t the best for heavy regrinding. For quick tune-ups, we far preferred the belt-driven Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2.

Our biggest pet peeve was the clamp’s tendency to flex under pressure, changing the sharpening angle. However, this is easily solved with anything wedged between the clamp and the base to prevent flexing. A sharpener with a rotated clamp, like the Wicked Edge Gen 4 Pro, doesn’t suffer from this issue.

Overall, most of our nitpicks were only relevant on the margins: with heavy blades that made the system want to tip or when completely reprofiling super hard steels. For people simply looking to keep their EDCs and cutlery razor sharp with a system that is easy to use, quick to stow, and won’t break the bank, the Precision Adjust Elite Kit is a fantastically conscientious pick.

Pro Tip: The Elite includes an arm with a ceramic rod to knock the burr off an edge. Be sure to kick the angle setting a few degrees high so it hits the very apex of the edge.

DMT’s Dia-Sharp Stones, especially the double-sided 6-inch versions (starting at $55), are the king when it comes to quick, quality, compact, cost-effective freehand sharpening. Two stones, the Extra Coarse/Coarse and the Fine/Extra Fine, especially combined with DMT’s Magna Base Holder, can sharpen anything you can while taking up all of the space of a 1.5L bottle. 

Like any diamond stone, they do remove material aggressively. Likewise, what DMT considers “Extra-fine” is still a bit coarse for a finishing stone, in our minds. The company does offer an Extra-Extra-Fine finishing stone, but only single-sided, and not in smaller sizes. So, the Dia-Sharps may be overkill for light touch-ups. They also leave a pretty aggressive scratch pattern on edges, need to be dried completely before long-term storage to prevent rust, and are only as capable as your freehand technique is good. 

However, the Dia-Sharps punch well above their weight class, especially for EDC-ers and woodworkers. Modern medium- and high-end EDC blades are typically high in alloy components and harder than the abrasives traditionally used to sharpen blades. Many whetstones need to be soaked before use and leveled every so often. 

These Diamond stones never require leveling or soaking and can quickly remove material from even the hardest modern steels. Since not every company’s “grits” are the same size, DMT’s forthrightness about how many microns a given grit is extremely useful. The stones don’t, however, have a handle like the Smith’s Diamond Combo Sharpener, so you’ll need a flat surface to get your work done.

Simply put, if you need to quickly put a razor’s edge on just about any cutting tool (other than maybe a recurve blade) in just about any steel while carrying little, the DMT Dia-Sharp Stones are a premier pick. Hence, they have been the go-to workplace sharpener for us through years of tending bars where coworkers chipped blades every shift.

Pro Tip: The 6 x 2″ stones were our pick, but you don’t have to stick with one size. DMT’s Magna Base kit can easily accommodate just about any size diamond stone.

There is a good reason why the Wicked Edge Gen 4 Pro ($1,000) is at the top of the wishlist of every EDC fanatic and pro sharpener we know. It makes getting incredibly sharp and consistent edges a breeze at a professional pace — with accessories. 

The backbone of the Gen 4 is a double-sided diamond-based abrasive system that allows for easy adjustment of both sides. Simply clamp a blade in, match the angle (made especially easy with the micro-adjustor), or set a new one, and get to grinding with both hands  — for a price. 

The Gen 4’s biggest downside is that its high price is the starting point, not the end. Even without the micro-adjust and storage shelf (which aren’t strictly necessary), the limited accommodations of the vice, the inherent variability of a clamp system, and the quality you’d have to turn out to justify the price make additional accessories necessary. 

Acute, especially asymmetrically-ground Japanese chef’s knives will call for a Low Angle Adapter. Blades over 3/16″ thick will require alternative jaws, which, even then, tap out shy of extremely meaty blades like traditional khukuris. Reprofiling blades and mirror-polishing blades for discerning customers will call for a digital angle finder and a suite of extra stones.

The tradeoff here is simple: For the vast and overwhelming array of blades that people pay to have sharpened, chef’s knives, EDC blades, hunters, filet knives — even that one Christmas gift ceramic santoku that’s been rattling around dull in a drawer for a decade — there isn’t a more consistent, user-friendly system for getting amazing edges. Not to mention… the Gen 4 Pro is just sexy.

If the price of the Gen 4 Pro galls you, you can get a similar style and cheaper sharpener in the KME Precision Deluxe Kit (or even the Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite), you just give up the better centrally-clamped knife position. The clamp on the Wicked Edge simply works perfectly, which helps to explain the price.

Pro Tip: Clamp systems tend to leave a steeper edge angle near the tips of curved blades. With the Gen 4, it’s a breeze to reposition a blade in the clamp so the belly of a blade will sit at the same height, and be ground at the same angle, as the rest of the knife.

Smith’s Diamond Combo Sharpener ($20) has had a place in our pockets for over 10 years for good reason: It’s simple, and it works. Yes, there are field sharpeners with more bells and whistles. Work Sharp’s Guided Field Sharpener, for example, comes with two diamond plates, multiple ceramic rods, an angle guide, a strop, and a broadhead wrench. It also comes with a higher price tag and more weight. 

There are smaller and lighter field sharpeners, like the glut of pocket pull-through sharpeners all over the market. But rarely do they put on as good of an edge. For a field sharpener, a stowable and streamlined capability is the name of the game. Fittingly, the Smith’s Diamond Combo handle can sheath the diamond plates. This protects the abrasives and your pack alike while providing a slim, packable, weather-resistant profile.

We also found the handle ergonomic, putting distance between your hands and edges while making field sharpening easy. Likewise, the grits of the diamond plates are more than enough to put a working edge on just about any blade. 

The Diamond Combo is exactly what a field sharpener should be: cheap, easy to pack, hard to break, and effective on everything from hunting knives and broadheads to fishing hooks and multitools. We might reach for the Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker a bit more often if we’ve got more downtime in camp, but for pure on-the-go versatility, this sharpener is where it’s at.

Pro Tip: Short sectional strokes along a blade, followed by a few passes on the fine grit at a slightly steeper angle make it a breeze to deburr and micro bevel an edge — giving you a keen edge in no time. 

There is no shortage of pull-through sharpeners marketed for kitchen knives, but the Tormek T-1 ($371) is the best we’ve ever used. The vast majority of kitchen-oriented sharpeners are manual pull-through carbide stones that often damage edges. Electric pull-throughs can get an edge relatively sharp but typically offer little variability in angle range and mediocre permanence. 

The Tormek T-1 is another beast entirely. Its 600-grit stones made short work of restoring even relatively damaged edges. The 8-22 degree range makes it easy to match the edge angle of almost any style of cutlery. The felt and magnet thoughtfully integrated into the clamp made it easy to ensure that blades didn’t get scratched while drawing them through.

We did find it to be slow at completely reprofiling edges — something that would be helped by Tormek offering a wider range of replaceable wheels. This is where a belt sharpener, like the Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2, takes the lead, as swapping out different grits is simple. Although incredibly simple to use, a slow hand can also easily round out the tip or heel of a knife over time.

The T-1 also sits at a niche nexus. It can sharpen most blades but is best in a kitchen. It’s large for a home kitchen sharpener but a bit limited for professional kitchens. 

However, between a whisper-quiet motor, an integrated handle, and a frankly gorgeous design, the Tormek T-1 wouldn’t be out of place on any countertop. With a wide angle range, an effective abrasive system, and the ability to accommodate everything from the smallest paring knife to the largest bone cleaver, the T-1 is a premier pick for passionate chefs — both home and line cooks alike. 

Pro Tip: While the T-1’s clamp is great for most blades, especially flexible ones like filet knives, removing it allows the T-1 to easily accommodate tall cleavers.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a cutting tool the Tormek T-4 Bushcraft ($590) can’t put a professional-quality edge on. Throughout our testing, the only edge it couldn’t tackle were saws, hair clippers, and the meaty convexed recurves of khukuris. For everything else, the T-4 is a premier pick.

At its core, the T-4 Bushcraft is a rotary, water-cooled whetstone grinder/leather strop combo with jigs for knives and axes alike, which can match or regrind nearly any edge, to nearly any angle: chisels, pocketknives, cutlery, woodturning equipment, pizza cutters, even tungsten carbide, and ceramic blades. Most recently, we used the T-4 while on deployment with a wildland fire crew in Nevada to keep their pulaskis shaving sharp.

The T-4 easily hangs with our heavy hitters. With the right setup, it can grind edges just as consistent and sharp as the Wicked Edge Gen 4 in less time, and with more range. It loses out on size, utility for thick convexed tools like axes, and (without diamond stones) speed against the Work Sharp Ken Onion MK.2 — but is far quieter, cleaner, more precise, and can’t overheat an edge. 

The Tormek T-4 has a pro-quality jig and a stone for almost every type of tool. The downsides: It’s by far the most complicated system to set up and use here, and those accessories add up. After extra stones and jigs, it’s not hard for the T-4 system to blow past the Gen 4’s high price tag.

The tradeoff? The ability to get incredible results on almost any type of blade. So much so that our sharpening guru Ian Graber-Steihl said that if he could only have one guided system for sharpening everything, both client’s tools and his own alike, it’d be the T-4. After all, if a Tormek can’t sharpen it, you’d probably have to do it by hand anyway. 

Pro Tip: While Tormek offers tools for setting the angle, combining a measuring tool like this one with a grinding wheel calculator or using a diamond wheel with a jig that allows you to grind on the side of a wheel makes angle-setting leagues easier. 

KME, especially its Precision Knife Sharpening System Deluxe Kit ($335), doesn’t excel in any one thing — but certainly earns top marks in almost everything. It’s among the smallest, quickest, most portable, easiest to use, and well-built systems in our lineup.

All KME kits come with a case for easy transport and storage. Between the build quality and swiveling stand, once set up, it offers the slickest, best-feeling operation of any manual system we’ve tested. 

KME’s stones are among the smallest we’ve tested, but punch well above their weight class. The 50-grit “Beast” diamond plate included in the Deluxe Kit is particularly aptly named. The coarsest stock stone of any kit we’ve used, it makes heavy grinding leagues quicker than any other system in the lineup. Even the 100-grit coarse diamond plate included in the brand’s more cost-wise R.P.S.H. Combo Kit is a speedy beast in its own right.

Our biggest complaints were just the limited angle range and kit options. As with any clamping system, the actual grinding angle depends on the height of the blade, but the 17-30-degree range trends steep for acute cutlery. Likewise, without any micro-adjustment system, dialing in the angle can be a bit finicky. This keeps the KME from ranking higher in our lineup, but with a good eye, you can make it work.

The Deluxe is also the only KME kit that includes a suite of diamond stones and a base. Others, like the R.P.S.H. Combo, lack the base, as well as the fastest-cutting and highest-polishing stones. Compared to others in our lineup, we tended to prefer the perfect-every-time aspect of the Wicked Edge Gen 4 Pro (even at the price).

Even so, any KME kit, especially the Deluxe, is a safe bet. Its portability, speed, and ability to be used sans base make them practical for travel sharpening (perfect for those who end up sharpening familial knives during the holidays). KME’s extensive accessories, from axehead sharpeners and convexing kits to mirror-polishing strops, also allow any of its kits to be expanded into a truly impressive system.

Of all the systems we’ve tested, none are as good at sharpening as consistently or to as high a finish — right out of the box — as the Edge Pro Apex 4 Kit ($285). Unlike most of the other manual systems here, the Apex isn’t a clamp-based design — which, without a careful hand, changes the sharpening angle slightly as you run along the curve of blades.

Instead, the Apex allows you to set and slide the blade along a table. This means that the sharpening angle doesn’t change with the height of the blade either — usually eliminating the need for an angle measurer. On the downside, it can be more difficult to account for the angle at which full flat-ground blades, or those with only small flat portions, rest on the table. 

The Edge Pro also offers some of the largest and finest grit stones of any angle-guided system on the market. This makes it, for our money, the easiest system for those obsessed with fine, mirror-polished edges. The tradeoff is that even the coarsest of the stock stones reprofile hard steels slowly, and themselves wear relatively quickly. 

The guide arm also doesn’t have any micro-adjustment for angle-setting, and the suction cup base doesn’t like to adhere to every surface — making the Apex finicky to set up without some accessories like the bench mount. Without some prep, it’s easy to scratch up the finish of knives as you draw them along the table, since steel particulates tend to collect there. 

However, the Edge Pro Apex 4 Kit is an OG. Offering arguably more in-house and aftermarket accessories and stones than any platform we’ve tested, the Apex can be expanded into one of the most economical pro-grade manual knife sharpeners on the market — some experience, time, and assembly required.

There are far faster and more consistent overengineered options in 2024, but few compare to the streamlined versatility of a good whetstone. A good freehand sharpening session is one of the most spiritual experiences a knife obsessive can have — second only to your significant other finding the bill for the last knife you bought. And few whetstones provide a better quality experience than the cost-conscious Suehiro CERAX 1010 ($33).

Much of freehand sharpening comes down to feedback and hardness. Whetstones with more softly bonded particulates typically form an abrasive slurry more quickly but require longer soaking times before use. Harder stones offer better feedback and shorter soak times but clog with swarf more quickly. 

Suehiro consistently manages to hit a sweet spot, with its CERAX 1010 being a standout. It wears somewhat quickly, but cuts fast for a medium grit stone, offers tons of feedback on edge orientation, and doesn’t clog with swarf easily. 

The CERAX 1010 is slow for badly damaged edges and ultra-hard high-carbide steels, but for simply livening up dull edges, it’s so much of a dream to work with that we genuinely lament that our edges rarely get dull enough to break it out. To be sure, there’s a learning curve to sharpening with a whetstone, which is why we recommend a guided system for most folks. But for those willing to slow down, it’s perfect.

For a complete freehand sharpening system, the Suehiro 5/6-Piece Sharpening Kit offered by Burrfection bundles two of our favorite whetstones, the CERAX 1010 and Rika 5000, into one fantastic package.

The Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker ($127) is the touch-up king. It is simplicity at its finest, with a pair of medium and fine stones that can be set at 15 or 20 degrees per side, a horizontal mounting option for shallower angles, and the ability to stow the entire system into itself. 

Aside from quick touch-ups, there is another place where the Sharpmaker shines the most: micro beveling. This practice of taking a few swipes at a slightly steeper angle than the edge was sharpened is a great way to knock the burr off an edge and bring it back to hair-popping sharp. 

A precision system, this is not. If you’re looking to put a perfect mirror polish on an edge or restore a chipped blade, the Sharpmaker isn’t the move. Reprofiling an edge with the Sharpmaker goes beyond an exercise in patience. Like the pocketable Smith’s Diamond Combination Sharpener, the Sharpmaker is better suited to quick and dirty sharpening in between big jobs.

We tend to reach for our Smith’s field sharpener a bit more (due to the lower fiddle-factor compared to the 7-piece Sharpmaker), but there’s much more versatility in this kit — something that makes more sense as a basecamp sharpener. With the optional diamond stones, we found it quick and easy to touch up even relatively dull, high-carbide steels like S90V and CPM-20CV without having to break out the big toys and whetstones.

Whetstones aren’t sexy sharpening solutions, but they are danged reliable. Knifemaker Nick LeFort cut his teeth on stones like the Sharp Pebble 1000/6000 Whetstone ($40), and while he’s got access to sharpeners with far more widgets and gizmos, it’s a simple whetstone like this that he uses when he wants to zone out with his knives.

Simple as simple can be, the 1000/6000 whetstone is a dual-grit aluminum-oxide unit that settles into a bamboo and silicone base to keep it from working its way around your workbench. Aluminum-based stones like this are best soaked in water, and after a 10-minute dip, it’s ready to go.

LeFort says that most folks looking to spruce up their kitchen cutlery will find more utility on the white 6000 grit side, as it’ll hone edges that aren’t dull and return them to that factory pop. The blue 100 grit side, on the other hand, is where the “EDC and outdoor crowd looking to bring their knives back to their original luster will most likely start off.” 

Sharpening on the Sharp Pebble isn’t difficult, but it does take some practice. Working up a good slurry of material aids in the sharpening process, but you’ll need to clear it once it begins to build up. Thankfully, the Sharp Pebble also comes with a 20-degree guide for sharpening, though this won’t cover all angles some knife owners are looking for.

Aluminum-oxide stones like the Sharp Pebble are certainly cheaper than ceramic whetstones like the Suehiro CERAX 1010, and they also won’t have as long of a lifespan. But for someone who doesn’t want to jump up to even a budget angle-guided unit like the Work Sharp Precision Adjust Elite, the $40 it takes to get into the Sharp Pebble 1000/6000 Whetstone may be more palatable — you’ll just need to practice.

Hot take: As vital as stones are, a good strop is vital for maintaining a blade. We have gone months keeping our favorite chef’s knife shaving sharp sans stones — and we’ve found that few strops maintain an edge with the style, quality, and sharpness of Burrfection’s Rolled Buffalo Strop ($63).

Buffalo hide naturally tends to contain fewer silicate abrasives than some high-end horsehair hides. However, compression concentrates these abrasives on the surface. This, combined with the toughness of Buffalo hide and how easy it is to load with stropping compounds, make Burrfection’s compressed buffalo strop our unequivocal favorite. 

It comes perfectly flat with rubberized feet to prevent slipping. Burrfection offers three base options: polycarbonate (our waterproof, budget-conscious favorite), tempered glass, and Hinoki wood. Every one of them makes for a gorgeous and utilitarian addition to any kitchen counter — exactly where we keep ours, at the ready.