Cheap laptops often feel like it, but the best budget laptops make you feel like you're not sacrificing anything important without costing an arm and a leg.
I know because my team and I test and review dozens of laptops from top manufacturers, so we get a chance to see what the best cheap laptops are every year. More importantly, I was a starving student once, and a career in journalism has only heightened my appreciation for tools that deliver more value than you pay for.
That's why I typically recommend the Acer Aspire Go 15 as the best budget laptop to most folks: decent performance, a good keyboard and plenty of ports help it look and feel like a decent Windows 11 laptop despite costing under $500.
If you can afford something nicer, you can often get the lovely OLED-equipped Asus Zenbook 14X OLED for under $800. That's a good deal on a cheap laptop that looks and feels premium thanks to its OLED display and good speakers—just don't expect the best battery life.
Without further ado, here's the rest of our most recommended cheap laptops in a regularly-updated list of the best budget laptops we've tested!
The quick list
In a hurry? Here's a brief overview of the laptops on this list, along with quick links that let you jump down the page directly to a review of whichever laptop catches your eye.
I recommend the Acer Aspire Go 15 the most because it's a good Windows 11 laptop that can be yours for under $500. It gives you a comfy keyboard, decent performance writing and editing and 10+ hours of tested battery life. The speakers suck, however, and the webcam isn't great either.
Samsung's Galaxy Chromebook 2 is a premium Chromebook that will get you through a day of work or school for under $500. While its aging hardware and the limitations of ChromeOS make it less capable than the Aspire 5 it's also cheaper, and the gorgeous QLED touchscreen and decent speakers make it feel premium laptop.
The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED laptop has a wonderful display, but the main reason it makes this list is due to its aggressive price point. For just $699, you get a screen that easily outdoes far more expensive laptops that don't boast an OLED panel; one that produces incredibly vivid colors and fantastic HDR support.
The $999 MSI Cyborg 15 is the most expensive laptop on this list, but we included it because gaming laptops run more expensive than most and this is the cheapest one we recommend since it comes with a cutting-edge Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, a 13th Gen Intel CPU and a solid 144Hz 15.6-inch display.
Lenovo's Chromebook Duet 3 delivers a great display, a decent port selection and enough power to get work done for under $500. It's one of the best Chrome tablets you can buy, and the included keyboard cover helps it double as a surprisingly effective 2-in-1 Chromebook.
Alex Wawro is a lifelong journalist who's spent over a decade covering tech, games and entertainment. He oversees the computing department at Tom's Guide, which includes managing laptop coverage and reviewing many himself every year.
The best budget laptops you can buy
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The best budget laptop overall
I like the Acer Aspire Go 15 well enough, but what I really love about it is the price.
This laptop debuted with an MSRP of $299, and when I got one in for review I was shocked at how decent it is for that price. The keyboard is comfy, the 15.6-inch screen is pretty bright and readable, and the underpowered Intel Core i3 CPU is still powerful enough to drive a web browser so I can write emails, surf the web and watch videos.
Admittedly, this laptop chugs under heavy load and can't do much in the way of serious gaming or video editing. Also, the 720p webcam is pretty disappointing. But it's a steal at this price, and if you really hate the camera that much you can spend some of the cash you save on a standalone webcam.
Read our full Acer Aspire Go 15 review.
The best budget Chromebook
The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 is a budget laptop that doesn't feel like one, with a slick ultraportable design, a sharp-looking QLED touchscreen, and solid 8-hour battery life. It's also going to sound great, plus its aging 10th Gen Intel Core i3 configuration still provides a ton of speed for Chrome OS.
We weren't as happy with the vertical travel in its keyboard, which is a bit shallow. This creates a slight learning curve you'll adapt to over time. But to get a Chromebook that looks this good (the Fiesta Red color option stands out in a sea of silver and black laptops) and feels this premium for under $500 is a great deal.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 review.
The best budget OLED laptop
The Asus Zenbook 14X OLED is currently the best budget OLED laptop you can find. It's hard to fully stress just how good its screen is. "Sensational" does the job, though. This 16:10, 2.8K (2800 x 1800), 120Hz refresh rate panel essentially has no flaws, aside from the fact OLED isn't the brightest display tech. Other than that, screen uniformity and color reproduction are jaw-dropping.
If you want an OLED laptop to consume media, browse the web or do some 1080p gaming, you won't be disappointed in the Asus Zenbook 14X OLED. The DCI-P3 rating of 109.4 and Delta-E score of 0.23 are both competitive, but neither tell the full story of how impressive the 14X OLED and its screen are in the flesh. We love this laptop.
Read our full Asus Zenbook 14X OLED review.
The best budget gaming laptop
The MSI Cyborg 15 is a budget gaming laptop that doesn't look it.
The flashy cyberpunk-inspired styling on this laptop's chassis conceal some pretty capable gaming components, including a 13th Gen Intel Core CPU and an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU in our review unit.
Hardware like that allows this laptop to kick out some pretty good frames per second on the 15-inch 144Hz display while you're gaming, and the keyboard is comfy and satisfying to type on so you can write all day and game all night.
While it's not the best gaming laptop on the block, this is a great deal for the low price. This laptop debuted at $999 and can sometimes be found for less, so it's a steal. Sure, the display could be brighter and the battery life isn’t great, but as long as you keep it plugged in while gaming this is a hard deal to beat.
Read our full MSI Cyborg 15 review.
The best budget Chrome 2-in-1
The list of great budget laptops is dominated by Chrome devices, and the Lenovo Duet 3 (or Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 3, depending on where you buy it) is the best Chrome tablet that can be yours for as low as $359. This is effectively a bigger, more expensive follow-up to the Chromebook Duet Lenovo released in 2020, a surprisingly capable and inexpensive Chrome tablet that's still on this list.
We loved the original Duet for its great battery life, solid performance and decent packed-in keyboard cover, all of which could be had for roughly $250. Lenovo's new 11-inch Duet 3 costs a bit more, but it also delivers a bigger, brighter display, more ports, and the added power of a beefier Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 chip. It's one of the best Chrome tablets you can buy, and the fact that Lenovo includes the keyboard cover at no extra cost helps it double as a surprisingly effective 2-in-1 Chromebook.
While you can also consider the original Lenovo Chromebook Duet a good buy if you're short on cash, those who can afford it will be well-served by this excellent Chromebook.
Read our full Lenovo Duet 3 Chromebook review.
Battery life testing results compared
One of the things you should think about when deciding which laptop to buy is how long it lasts on a full battery.
That's why we run every laptop we review through a series of battery tests to see how long it actually lasts on a full charge, rather than trusting manufacturer claims.
Note that these tests don't reflect real-world use patterns since we have to set every laptop to the same settings in order to do fair comparisons. Thus, while the times listed here are accurate and useful as a comparison point, your own experience with a laptop's battery life will likely vary quite a bit.
That's because when we run our battery test we set the laptop display to 150 nits of brightness (which is on the dim side) and set it to endlessly browse the web via Wi-Fi until it dies. Then we repeat the process a few times and average the results.
However, when you use your laptop you're probably adjusting brightness on the fly, doing all sorts of different tasks at the same time and generally putting the machine through more of a workout than it gets in our test. So while I stand by our testing and the battery life results we compare in the chart below, I want to be clear that your own experience will vary!
| Laptop | Battery life (tested) |
| Acer Aspire 5 | 8:05 |
| Asus Zenbook 14X OLED | 8:24 |
| Lenovo Duet 3 | 10:30 |
| Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 | 07:50 |
| MSI Cyborg 15 | 05:05 |
How to choose the best laptop for you
There's some things to keep in mind when you're hunting for a good cheap laptop. You’re not going to get bleeding-edge performance or a super premium design. And you might have to make a few compromises on the display, such as how well it handles colors and how bright it gets. But that doesn’t mean you have to make do with a laptop that feels cheap; rather, you’re looking for one that's affordable. So here are a few things to keep in mind when shopping for a laptop.
Battery life: Know how long you generally need your laptop to last without being plugged in before you buy. If you plan to mostly leave it plugged in at a desk then get whatever you like, because you won't notice the limitations of even a laptop with bad battery life like the MSI Cyborg 15.
But if you need your laptop to last at least 8-10 hours on a regular basis without carrying a charger, say because you want to carry it for work or school, then you'll want to pick something longer-lived. To ensure you don't have to lug the power cable around I recommend a laptop with upwards of 10 hours of tested battery life (something we test in every laptop we review), like the Acer Aspire Go 15.
Chrome or Windows? You can't get a MacBook for under $1,000 unless you use a discount or wait for a sale, so if you're on a tight budget and in a hurry you should probably pick between ChromeOS and Windows.
Chrome OS offers a lightweight operating system that will run on even the most basic hardware, yet still offers a comprehensive suite of abilities and web-based apps to get a lot of day-to-day computing tasks done. Furthermore, it now supports Android apps, so if you just need to browse the web and use an occasional app you're fine with a Chromebook like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3.
Windows 11, on the other hand, requires a little more power to ensure it runs smoothly. But it supports a huge range of software, far more than Chrome OS can currently dream of. And it's more capable, more customizable and more usable with touch than ever. If you want a laptop that you know can run just about every app you can get, get a Windows laptop like the Aspire Go 15 or Zenbook 14X OLED.
Clamshell or convertible: Budget laptops generally come in two varieties — traditional clamshell laptops or dynamic 2-in-1 convertibles. Clamshells are usually the cheaper of the bunch, and provide a traditional laptop experience with a keyboard and often a non-touch screen. But if you want a touchscreen device that can also double as a tablet, convertibles or tablets with detachable keyboards (like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3) are worth considering.
Don't settle for less than 1080p: Unless you're truly strapped for cash, you shouldn't settle for cheap laptops with a 1366 x 768 display or lower. That's not full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution, which is effectively the standard now. These days plenty of affordable notebooks start with a display resolution of 1080p, and though it may seem like a small issue, not having a 1080p screen will make a difference when it comes to streaming Netflix shows or staring at webpages for hours on end.
How we tested these laptops
To find the best laptop, we run every machine through a rigorous suite of benchmarks and real-world tests to gauge how it will perform during everyday use.
We measure the average brightness and color quality of each laptop's display using our in-house light meter and colorimeter. For general performance, we run our machines through tests that include Geekbench 5 (CPU performance), as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities. We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine's hard drive is, and a custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.
When testing Chromebooks, we run our machines through web-focused tests that include JetStream 2, a Web-based benchmarking suite that runs over five dozen tests designed to measure how well systems handle the kind of applications they’re most likely to encounter on the Internet.
When testing dedicated gaming laptops, we run benchmarks for popular games such as Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Far Cry 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2. For more information on our testing process, check out our guide to how we test.
