First: the shape of the garden, not its area
The square metres in every listing is an assumption with no document behind it, derived differently on each shelf, and it has its own page in the standards section here.
What actually constrains the choice is layout.
One open area, near a socket: a mains machine is the cheapest sensible answer and there is very little to maintain.
Several areas, beds, a corner behind a shed: a cable is the thing you will come to hate. Cordless or petrol.
A slope: a drive, and preferably on the rear wheels.
Rough ground, long grass, a lawn cut rarely: petrol, because it is the only one of the three that does not stop.
Storage that is tight: a folding handle and a deck under 40 cm, which is a real constraint people discover after delivery.
Second: the power source
Mains. Nothing to charge, nothing to service, lowest price. The cable decides your mowing pattern, and a longer one is not the solution — it is a bigger voltage drop and more to walk around.
Cordless. The constraint is energy, and energy is the pack rather than the mower. The cheapest listing on a cordless shelf is very often supplied without a battery at all, and that convention has its own page here. Compare complete kits with complete kits.
Petrol. No budget and no cable, at the cost of fuel that goes stale over a winter, an air filter, oil, and the highest guaranteed sound power level on the shelf by a clear margin.
Hand cylinder. Genuinely good on a small, level, well-kept lawn and hopeless on anything else. Nothing to run, nothing to charge, a clean scissor cut.
Third: the deck
Width is a dimension of the housing, and the strip it clears is narrower because every pass overlaps. Between 32 and 40 cm for a small enclosed garden, 40 to 46 for a normal domestic lawn, above that only on open ground.
Width and power have to match. A long blade needs torque simply to hold its speed, and a wide deck on an underpowered machine bogs in the grass it was bought for. This is the commonest mismatch at the cheap end of the cordless shelf.
Height adjustment matters more than it sounds. A central lever gets used through the season; four separate wheel bolts mean the machine stays on one setting all year, and that setting is wrong for half of it.
Fourth: the drive, and the catcher
A drive is worth having on a slope or on a heavy machine, and it adds weight and a belt that wears. On a flat lawn under a few hundred square metres, rarely necessary.
A catcher’s stated volume in litres is real. Its practical value is how often you stop, and on wet grass the effective volume is much less than the stated one because the material packs.
What none of it decides
The cut. No safety standard behind these machines measures cutting quality, and no maker publishes a figure for it. Deck shape and blade condition decide it, and neither appears in a listing.
How this site compares them
Within a family, on deck width, mass, height range and adjustment, catcher volume, guaranteed sound power, and — on cordless — pack capacity times platform voltage, with the carton contents stated. Across families, only with the assumption printed.
The questions that keep coming in
Where should I start if I have no preference?
With the shape of the garden rather than its size. An open rectangle takes almost any machine; a garden split by beds and paths rules out a cable and rewards a narrow deck, and that is a stronger constraint than area.
How much difference does the deck material make?
More than the listings suggest and it is never stated as a specification. A stiff deck holds the airflow that lifts grass before the blade arrives; a thin one flexes and the cut suffers in exactly the conditions you bought the machine for.
Is it worth buying into a battery platform?
If you will own more than one cordless garden tool, yes — the packs are the expensive part and sharing them changes the arithmetic. If this is the only cordless machine you will own, the platform is irrelevant and the complete kit price is what matters.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026