Best Chef's Knives Under $100 of 2025: 7 Tested for Edge Retention, Comfort, and Value
You don’t need to spend two hundred dollars on a chef’s knife to cook well. The $70 knife in the right hands outperforms the $300 knife in the wrong ones — and there are excellent blades available under $100 if you know where to look. The hard part is filtering out the dozens of cheap stamped blades with terrible edge geometry that dull after one meal prep session. We tested seven chef’s knives under $100 across multiple styles: Western, Japanese-style gyuto, Chinese cleaver, and nakiri. Each was used for three weeks of daily cooking — dicing onions, slicing raw chicken, mincing herbs, and breaking down the occasional squash. Here’s what we found. ...