Best Knife Sharpener for Keeping Your Blades Healthy (2025)

The Tormek is as easy to use as any pull-through knife sharpener, but offers the kind of blade customization you typically can’t get without a whetstone.

What we’d leave: This is not a criticism of the T-1 as much as a note of caution to anyone using it for the first time: This is a powerful piece of equipment. If you aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing, you can pull much more metal off your knife than you intended. So sharpen with care. Also, the honing wheel also doesn’t have any guides, so most users will need to go through a bit of trial and error when learning how to best polish their blades.

Best whetstone

For performance, price, and, most of all, ease of use, there’s no better whetstone set than this duo from Shapton.

What we love: Most whetstones are finicky and require soaking ahead of time to make sure your knife edge glides smoothly across their surface. Shapton’s artificial stones, however, only require a few drops of water during use to keep your knives gliding with ease. While that may seem like a slight usability boost, the low amount of water used allows the stones to dry out completely between uses, keeping your whetstone’s integrity intact and preserving its durability. When it comes to how well they sharpen your edges, the two different stone grits work miracles on even the dullest blades. The rougher 1000-grit stone can reshape your blade in just 5 to 10 passes, making it efficient and easier to maintain the same angle. Other medium to coarse grit whetstones don’t remove metal as efficiently, leading to extra strokes required and the possibility that the angle you’re holding your knife at changes. Keeping a consistent angle is key to developing a perfectly sharp edge that’s even on both sides, and Shapton’s 1000-grit stone allows you to do so with the fewest passes of any whetstone we’ve tested. That’s important because the more passes you need to take, the more opportunities to unintentionally change the angle.

Once you’ve ground in your new edge, the 5000-grit stone will set it with just a few polishing passes on both sides of the blade. In our testing, knives sharpened on the Shapton whetstone went from dull to cleanly slicing paper in just one sharpening. Both stones come in vented plastic carrying cases that help them dry out between uses, and each case also has rubber feet and can be turned into a base that holds your knife in place on the counter while sharpening. Whetstone sharpening isn’t for everyone, but if you’re willing to learn the technique, this set will have you refining your knives like a pro.

What we’d leave: There are only two downsides to this whetstone set: the price and the skill required to use it. At around $100, the Shapton whetstone set is a decent investment if you’ve never tried sharpening with a whetstone before. Still, it’s a high-performance set that costs less than half of some of its high-end competitors. The biggest hurdle is taking the time to learn how to use a whetstone properly—since there are no built-in angle guides, there is a skill level required to get what you’re looking for out of this set. If you’re a beginner, however, you can always snag a set of plastic angle guides to help you learn how to properly hold your knife.

The best manual pull-through sharpener: KitchenIQ Edge Grip 2-Stage Knife Sharpener

KitchenIQ Edge Grip 2-Stage Knife Sharpener

They don’t come more basic than the KitchenIQ, but they also don’t come cheaper. If you just want something to maintain basic blades on the regular, this gets the job done surprisingly well considering its price.

What we love: Pull-through sharpeners can get a bad rep in the kitchen knife community for lacking precision, but, for less than $10 at the time of writing, we think the KitchenIQ Edge Grip sharpener does enough to warrant a recommendation. With simple construction—a coarse sharpening slot with a carbide “V” and a ceramic honing slot—this little sharpener did bring a sharper edge to some of the duller knives we tested. This is basically a more aggressive version of a honing steel—it won’t completely reset a knife’s edge the way a whetstone or electric sharpener will, but it will refine and sharpen the edge that currently exists on your knife. And because the KitchenIQ is so small and convenient, you could run your knives through the honing slot after every use or two.