In the old days, cordless lawn mowers meant either fully-manual lawn mowers or petrol mowers, both were (and are) big, heavy and cumbersome and petrol mowers are extremely noisy.  These days, however, we have cordless lawn mowers which work off batteries.  These don’t have the power of the big, petrol lawn mowers, but they are much easier to use and perfectly suitable for use in smaller gardens.

If you’re definitely in the market for a cordless lawn mower then please feel free to skip right down to our “Best Electric Cordless Lawn Mower - A review” section.  If, however, you’d like to know a bit more about them, before you buy, then please keep reading.

The basics of cordless lawn mowers

For the most part, cordless lawn mowers work much the same way as regular corded lawn mowers, but there are a few key differences, which we’ve noted here.  Most of these revolve around the fact that they use batteries rather than plugging in to the mains.

Batteries

As far as we’ve seen, all modern cordless lawn mowers use Lithium Ion batteries, which basically means that you can charge and discharge them however you like without having to worry about “memory effect” (basically the battery getting confused about how full it is).  You will, however, have to treat them with a reasonable degree of care, for example, avoid exposing them to extreme hot or cold or letting them get wet, but this is standard with batteries in general.

Blades

Cordless lawn mowers do use proper blades (as opposed to cutting strings) but at the current time, as far as we can tell, all cordless lawn mowers are rotary lawn mowers, which means that blades turn around a central point.  What this means in practice is that cordless lawn mowers are fine for keeping your grass short, but on their own, they will not give you stripes.  For that you need a cylinder lawn mower (where the blades literally spiral around a cylinder) and/or a roller.

Having said that, cordless lawn mowers are intended for smaller lawns and lighter work, so you’re probably not going to have space (or time or inclination) to create beautiful stripes in any case.

Ergonomics

Ergonomics are important for all tools and we’d say particularly so for cordless lawn mowers as they are often used by older people.  All the cordless lawn mowers in our selection are comfortable and easy to use with minimal vibration.  If your hands are particularly sensitive (e.g. you have arthritis) then we’d recommend you use gloves.

For the sake of completeness, please note that while cordless lawn mowers are intended for light work, they do still have sharp blades, so take the usual safety precautions, although you are spared the hassle of having to be careful to avoid cutting the cable!

Cordless lawn mowers compared to hover mowers

We have a whole article on hover mowers, but if you just want a quick guide to comparing the two, here’s what you need to know. 

Hover mowers take their name from the fact that the lawn mowers literally hover on a bed of air (just like a hovercraft).  This makes them very light and maneuverable, but very few of them have grass-collection boxes, so you have to mulch or rake up after yourself.  You also have to be extremely careful with the cable as the maneuverability of hover mowers can make it very easy to cut it by accident, so it’s strongly advisable to take full safety precautions as injuries caused by cut lawn mower cables are some of the most common gardening injuries there are.

Cordless lawn mowers are regular lawn mowers and they are very unlikely to be self-propelled, but they are so light that they are very easy to push.  This lightness helps to make them maneuverable and the fact that they are cordless not means that you have complete freedom to move wherever you wish but also keeps you safe from the threat of cut cables.  While there is a limit to battery power, most cordless lawn mowers will run for about half an hour on one charge and if you really want to keep going, you can always swap out the batteries.

Best Electric Cordless Lawn Mower - A Review

We’ve picked these cordless lawn mowers on the basis of performance (functions and comfort/convenience) and price, in other words, value for money.  Please note that the Aerotek Ryobi and WORKX are all “naked” mowers, which basically means you buy the battery and charger separately (although you can sometimes buy bundles with the cordless lawn mower, battery and charger).  You can then use them in both the cordless lawn mower and any other tools you buy from that manufacturer.

Editors Pick

Ryobi ONE+ Cordless Lawnmower 

Runner Up

Greenworks Cordless Lawnmower

Best Budget

Bosch Home and Garden Electric Lawnmower

Aerotek X2 Series Cordless Lawnmower

• Cutting width: 400mm
• Height adjustments: 25 -
• 75mm (6 heights)
• Running time - 35 minutes
• Charging time - 2 hours
• Grass-collection box - 50L

This cordless lawn mower is very light and overall, it’s easy to use.  Its one slight quirk is that to start it you press the safety button and then pull a lever and then wait a couple of seconds and then the blades start.  We assume that this is some kind of added safety feature although we’re a bit confused about how it improves safety.

Once you have it running, you’ll soon discover how quiet it is and the controls are fairly basic and very intuitive.  You change the cutting height by means of a lever at the side and the grass-collection box automatically stops the motor when it’s full so you always know when you need to empty it.

Assembling this cordless lawn mower is essentially common sense and that’s just as well because its manual is just awful and sadly we can’t find any YouTube videos to which we can point you.  The content is bad, the standard of the English is worse and frankly there really is nothing good we can say about it.

On the whole, however, it’s largely irrelevant, the one point you will need to know is that there is a fairly large plastic insert located at the rear of the cordless lawn mower.  This is a mulching plug and if you leave it in your clipping will go over your lawn.  If you want them to go into the grass-collection box, then you need to remove it.

Flymo Mighti-Mo 300

• Cutting width: 30 cm
• Height adjustments: 25mm - 65mm (5 heights)
• Running time - 20 minutes
• Charging time - 2 hours
• Grass-collection box - 30L

To be honest, we’d question calling this cordless lawn mower “mighti” anything and, to be fair, apart from the name Flymo doesn’t advertise it as such.  It advertises it as being very small, very light, very easy-to-use and very affordable and, in short, perfect for smaller lawns.  We’d say this was a fair summary of its capability.

We have to point out that, at the current time, this lawn mower does have one major design issue, which is that the battery unit is a pain in the behind to handle.  Basically, you have to make absolutely sure that the battery is latched on properly, otherwise the cordless lawn mower will keep cutting out.  At the same time, however, you have to do this without applying excess force on the contacts, which are nowhere near strong enough to take it and we doubt any damage caused this way would be covered by the warranty.

Frankly, we had very mixed feelings about putting this cordless lawn mower on our list, but we decided just to list its pros and cons and let readers decide for themselves.  Basically, if you have a really small area of grass to cut, then we think this could be a decent cordless lawn mower but if your cutting anything larger than a tennis court, we’d say you should look at other options.

Greenworks Tools 2500067-A

• Cutting width: 35cm
• Height adjustments: 20mm - 80mm (5 heights)
• Running time - 30 to 40 minutes
• Charging time - One to two hours
• Grass-collection box - 40L

As you may already have guessed from the specifications given above, this is a nice little cordless lawn mower for a nice little price.  The only thing we would say about this cordless lawn mower is that does struggle with grass which is in a bit of a bad way (e.g. particularly long or particularly thick) and/or is wet.

To be fair, this isn’t really that unusual.  Cordless lawn mowers are designed for fairly light work, it’s just that this cordless lawn mower seems a bit more sensitive than most.  In short (no pun intended), you’d need to be careful using this cordless lawn mower right after heavy rain and if your grass is long and/or dense then you’d need to be prepared to start on the highest setting and work your way down.  The good news is that the height setting is easily changed via a lever.

For the most part, however, this cordless lawn mower is a great choice for people who have smaller lawns and who just want a nice, easy-to-use, fairly quiet cordless lawn mower to get the job done.

WORX WG779E.2

• Cutting width: 34 cm
• Height adjustments: 20mm - 70mm (6 heights)
• Running time - 30 - 40 minutes
• Charging time - one to two hours
• Grass-collection box - 30L

As with the Ryobi, running time and charging time assumes you are using the standard recommended batteries (2*20V 2.0Ah) and that your lawn is in a fairly decent state (not overgrown or waterlogged).

The two big selling points of the WORKX cordless lawn mower are that it has “Intellicut” technology, which basically means that it adjusts the power used to the condition of your lawn and the fact that it has “cut-to-edge” technology which “reduces uncut grass around edges”.

Frankly, in our opinion, this is a nice, little cordless lawn mower for people who have small lawns and keep them in a fairly decent state.  It’s not a grass-munching monster, but it’s not sold as one or priced as one.  It just does a decent job at a decent price without any bells or whistles but also without any hassle.

Best Electric Cordless Lawn Mower - Conclusion

Objectively, the Aerotek is probably the best cordless lawn mower out of the list (although it’s manual isn’t) but the others all have their good points, even the Flymo.  Although its weak point has to be acknowledged, if you just have a tiny bit of lawn to keep tidy, it could genuinely be the best cordless lawn mower for the job.