Top 10 Harbor Freight Tool Brands Ranked By Consumer Popularity

A newcomer to Harbor Freight is unlikely to be overwhelmed by the choices available. Standing and looking at a wall of nearly identical drills at wildly different prices can be a little more mystifying to someone with a passing familiarity with the store, and therefore knows that they're all manufactured (or at least contracted) by Harbor Freight itself. What a consumer often does in this situation is twofold: Look up reviews, and otherwise rely on brands to provide general information about the quality of a product.

Reading reviews and understanding brands turn out to be strikingly similar tasks. Brands are a curious thing, especially for a budget retailer like Harbor Freight ... often a pure expression of corporate will targeted at the margins of established markets. For example, some tool brands owned by Harbor Freight are clearly targeted at cost-conscious consumers of Snap-on tools. Other Harbor Freight brands compete with Walmart for the best deals on small, everyday tools. And everything in between. All of that is to say that the company could probably have told you which brands would be most popular before stamping a name on a single tool.

Harbor Freight lists 78 brands on its website, though there are more (like Ranger PPE) that aren't listed, along with brands like Betsy Flags that the company sells but does not manufacture. Teasing out which brands are actually most popular can be a challenge. Here's what we found, with some of the most popular ones being Icon, Bauer, and Fortress.

As with most tool retailers, it's impossible to escape the impression that Harbor Freight's ratings are a little skewed toward the positive. Of 4,924 products we tracked, the company lists two one-star products, 91 five-star products, 120 three-star products, and no two-star products. Of course, there's no way to reassign ratings and break through the facade, but since one-star items aren't entirely missing and there aren't an overwhelming number of five-star products, those are areas where consumers can be heard most clearly. So our simple formula for rating brands was to start at 100 (so the numbers stay positive no matter what), add the percentage of five-star products, subtract the percentage of one-star products, then subtract half of the percentage of three-star products, which are rare and probably signal some consumer displeasure.

We also looked at comparisons across brands by approximating randomness as closely as possible with high-volume keyword searches ("lb," for example, turns up 2,408 products), and by looking at new products. Brands that were most represented across keyword and new item searches were given special consideration or, occasionally, examined with a more critical eye. For example, Franklin had no one- or five-star products, but had the fourth-highest number of highly rated products by keyword/new item search. Evaluating these was an individual and largely subjective exercise. We also looked more closely at any brands with high scores but a small number of products, excluding any that were made statistically irrelevant by (for example) a very small number of ratings.

Badland, which you'll probably be tempted to pluralize, might be described as something of a niche brand that offers mostly winches and winch accessories. But trailering is big business, especially in North America, and that's where a lot of non-recreational winch use takes place. The most highly rated Badland products are a recovery rope and a snatch strap, which might seem paltry until you consider their prices ... $99.99 and $59.99, respectively. Of course, they also sell a broad range of popular winches.

Bauer is Harbor Freight's mid-tier cordless power tool line, which often outperforms more expensive tools from Harbor Freight and some well-known tool manufacturers to boot. There's also quite a lot of Bauer-branded accessories like drill bits and sandpaper. It's probably meaningful that two of the top four most highly rated Bauer products are a battery and a battery charger. The battery platform is well-regarded enough that many consumers have started to ask questions about whether Harbor Freight batteries are compatible with DeWalt and other high-end tools. Bauer had the second-most five-star products (six) in our review.

Chief tools might not be as familiar to DIYers as other Harbor Freight lines. This is one of the company's brands that's mostly targeted at professional users. It primarily offers pneumatic tools and accessories, including air saws, grinders, drills, and the like, which you're more likely to see in an auto repair or a metal fabrication shop. But they're popular, well-regarded, and useful; tools for anyone with a compressor and limited patience with battery-operated tools. Four Chief products have five-star reviews, including one tool, an air reciprocating saw.

Earthquake is another pneumatic brand that boasts a five-star tool, in this case, an air impact wrench. The Earthquake brand features fewer accessories, aside from air hoses, and focuses instead on pneumatic tools. The Earthquake XT impact wrench presents an ongoing tool mystery: Why make something as utilitarian as an impact wrench available in six colors? Some have suggested the point is to color-coordinate with U.S. General toolboxes, which simply extends the "why?" to a second brand. It's possible that the idea is to suggest the colors of competing brands like Snap-on and Mac Tools.

Since we're talking about the driving force of compressed air, it's only fitting that we discuss Fortress. Fortress is one of Harbor Freight's two brands of compressors, and seems to outperform the other (McGraw) handily. The highest-rated Fortress tool is a $1,199.99 jobsite wheelbarrow compressor, so the brand seems firmly in the commercial camp. But it does offer less expensive options like a consumer or light-professional-focused $159.99 pancake compressor and a $169.99 ultra-quiet hot dog compressor.

If Badland is a niche brand, you might conclude that the Haul-Master line of trailer accessories is niche as well. But trailers are a huge deal, with North America home to more than a third of the 18.4 million cargo trailers on the road today, and almost four million enclosed, flatbed, utility, and refrigerated trailers were manufactured in 2023 alone. To this trailer party, Haul-Master brings everything from 99-cent rope to $999.99 modular trailers. The brand did get dinged for three-star reviews, mostly on its EPDM tie-downs and one strangely sized innertube.

Hercules is Harbor Freight's professional line of power tools. (Seeing a pattern yet? It seems clear that the pro tools are more highly regarded than the cheaper consumer tools ... naturally.) The brand offers both cordless and corded tools, and Hercules-branded accessories outnumber its tools. A remarkable 16 Hercules products have five-star ratings, and include a cordless compound miter saw, high-torque impact wrench, and a vacuum pump. The battery platform is also reputable, and while it might vary from time to time, Hercules tool batteries have been found to use high-quality Samsung cells.

ICON is Harbor Freight's other professional line, and this time, they mean it. ICON tools were purpose-built to compete with very high-end, very expensive tool truck offerings. They might not ever say it out loud, but the brand is clearly built to supply automotive shops, featuring as it does such items as creepers, universal joint presses, automotive diagnostic software, toolboxes that are literally too tall for your garage, and more ratchets than you can shake a ratchet at. The tools themselves have an extraordinarily good reputation.

Harbor Freight's U.S. General brand comprises tool cabinets and tool cabinet-adjacent goods of all sorts. Almost everything is made of metal, and everything that isn't has a magnet in it somewhere. U.S. General ratings are a little skewed by the fact that all six five-star products are toolbox trim kits with only a few reviews, and the next six are those mini toolboxes that are all the rage. But the cabinets, toolboxes, carts, lockers, and accessories are well-regarded. The brand's single one-star product, another trim kit, has only one review, and it seems vaguely reluctant.

You've probably never heard of Vanguard. This Harbor Freight brand consists of 27 extension cords, replacement plugs, power strips, and cable management doodads. But it turns out to be memorable stuff. Once you've seen it, for example, it's difficult to go back to your workshop without the five-star Vanguard five-outlet power hub. Vanguard's 10/3 extension cords are the kind of things you plug in and then realize three years later that they're still powering half of your workshop. While Vanguard male replacement plugs can be a bit of a pain to reassemble, they work just fine.