Which Is Cheaper: Buying Tools At Harbor Freight Or Home Depot?

If you're in the mood to hear some immoderate opinions, strike up a chat with a tradesperson of almost any stripe and bring up the name Harbor Freight. You'll probably get passionate, and often ill-informed, opinions about the quality of Harbor Freight's tools, the quality of Chinese products in general, and the moral character of anyone who disagrees. And in recent years you've probably heard the persistent claim that Home Depot is actually cheaper than Harbor Freight. This is almost always untrue, and the exceptions are so rare one gets the impression that it's probably accidental. The most affordable tools for your home are still found at Harbor Freight.

We set about to prove whether Harbor Freight or Home Depot has the cheaper tools. We looked at reasonably common categories and identified the cheapest, most expensive, and average prices in each. We only considered products that were available locally (most Harbor Freight offerings and a small percentage of the products on Home Depot's website). Outliers that seemed likely to skew results, like Harbor Freight's Pittsburgh thumbwheel ratchet set, were discarded to keep things fair — but we kept the store's gold-plated ratchet and other Harbor Freight Icon tools you may want to reconsider buying in the mix.

We were surprised to see that Harbor Freight often offers more products from a category in its local stores than Home Depot offers even in "nearby stores." On the other hand, Home Depot offered more options in categories like table saws. So if you're looking for a variety of choices, do your homework online before heading out to whichever store seems to fit your needs best.

It's easy enough to determine which of two things is cheaper, but a little more complicated to figure out which of two stores is cheaper. If we mean "which sells the cheapest version of any given tool?" then the answer is that Harbor Freight's least expensive tools are less than half the price of Home Depot's. The single exception was Harbor Freight's cheapest table saw, which is $149.99, a whopping $0.99 more than Home Depot's cheapest, which is $149. Every other product category we looked at was at least 28% more expensive at Home Depot.

This isn't always a win for Harbor Freight, though. In some cases, it's a product of the very thing the company is often abused for — selling bizarrely inexpensive tools that are somewhere in the neighborhood of disposable. Consider the companies' cheapest pipe wrenches, for example. Home Depot offers a 10-inch Husky for $16.97, which seems about right, while Home Depot has an 8-inch Pittsburgh wrench for a $3.99. Unsurprisingly, some Harbor Freight customers have complained about the quality of the Pittsburgh wrench, including one who took to the reviews on Harbor Freight's website to share that he snapped his in two with his bare hands.

Interestingly, almost half the time, Home Depot's most expensive product in a given category was less expensive than Harbor Freight's most expensive product in that category. For example, the most expensive ratchet stocked by our local Home Depot locations was $41.97, while the most expensive ratchet at Harbor Freight runs a hefty $69.99. This reflects Harbor Freight's strategy of deploying its Icon and Doyle brands to compete with high-end offerings from companies like Snap-on, Wilton, and others.

An idea like "cheapest" can overlay all manner of price information, and sometimes be revealing. The average price within a category, for example, can tell you more about a company's prices for that category than the very cheapest product (assuming they have more than a couple of items in the category). For example, our local Harbor Freight stocks seven bolt-down bench vises with some semblance of an anvil. On average, the price difference between the two chains is only $4.47. This would seem to suggest that if you're buying somewhere in the middle of each range, as pros are prone to do, prices are likely to be comparable. But since the five closest Home Depot locations only offer three and the two most expensive are both $139, it might not mean much.

We also zoomed in on all the apparent anomalies. The only case in which Home Depot had the cheapest product in a category was its $149 table saw, which beat Harbor Freight's by $0.99. But the Home Depot saw is an 8 ¼-inch Ryobi with a 13-amp motor, while Harbor Freight's cheapest has a larger 10-inch blade and a slightly more powerful 15-amp motor. Similar discrepancies in specs also explained the cases where the most expensive model at Home Depot was cheaper than Harbor Freight's most expensive.

Finally, there are some cases in which the least expensive options are, practically speaking, as good as the most expensive. For example, you often don't need to spend a fortune on common hand tools like pry bars. In those cases, it usually makes sense to head to Harbor Freight.