1. The list in brief
2. Best overall
3. Best under $300
4. Best Windows laptop
5. Best for students
6. Benchmark comparisons
7. Recently reviewed
8. How to find the right laptop
9. FAQs
10. How we test
11. Why trust Laptop Mag
Searching for one of the best laptops under $500 can feel like a monumental task. Even the best budget models lack the flashier features of pricier machines, and it’s hard to know if you’re buying something that will last. But affordable laptops that nail the essentials — and even throw in a bonus feature or two — do exist.
Setting realistic expectations is crucial in this price range. If your needs are basic—web browsing, writing papers, streaming, or using productivity apps—there are solid sub-$500 laptops that can handle the job. These machines are great for students, kids, or anyone looking for a reliable secondary device without breaking the bank. While you’ll find Windows options here, the best Chromebooks often offer better value.
Naturally, some tradeoffs come with the lower cost. Don’t expect top-tier specs, high-end graphics, or premium materials. You should expect slower processors, limited storage, and decent displays. Still, the best budget models make smart compromises, and every laptop on our list has one standout feature: long battery life. If you know what you need, a budget laptop can absolutely be worth it.
This page is regularly updated with our latest reviews to reflect Laptop Mag’s top picks for 2025.
Click to view recent updates to this page
Update log
5/5/2025: Added FAQs, testing charts, and Acer Chromebook Spin 312. Updated "how to choose" section.
The Quick List
Best overall
The leveled-up Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus offers AI-infused next-level performance in a fun, affordable 2-in-1.
Best under $300
The Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook’s OLED display and 13+ hours of battery life make it a near-perfect Chromebook. Since it's detachable, you can have a laptop and tablet experience.
Best Windows laptop
The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 is a compromise between price and power. It is one of the few Windows laptops that won't combust at this price.
Best for students
Great battery life, smooth trackpad, and a colorful 12.2-inch display matched with a reasonable $450 price tag.
Joanna Nelius has reviewed laptops and computer hardware since 2018. Her work has appeared in The Verge, USA Today, Gizmodo, PC Gamer, and Maximum PC. She holds an MFA from Chapman University and works as a creative writing instructor.
Best overall
If you're looking for a modern laptop that won't break the bank, we cannot recommend the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus enough. That's a mouthful, so I suggest it is a lot of work. But here it is, in all of its Intel Core i3 glory. Slap on 8GB of RAM and a 1080p display, and you have quite a decent laptop for just under $500.
While you might expect poor performance from a Chromebook, the IdeaPad Flex 5 averaged a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 5,384, just above the 5,259 Chromebook average. It's also far above the performance of the Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook's average of 1,727 and the Lenovo Flex 5 14 (Intel)'s average of 3,841.
To make that performance even more valuable, this is a Chromebook. That means you won't run into intensive tasks as often as you would with a Windows laptop. On top of that amazing AI-backed performance, it also offers close to 10 hours of battery life. That'll take you into overtime (paid, or else call me).
One of my favorite features about the IdeaPad Flex 5i is its design. You won’t get stuck with a clunky laptop that looks like it came straight out of battling Windows 95. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this was a premium laptop by the looks of it. It comes in at 12.4 x 9.0 x 0.8 inches and 3.6 pounds. It’s not the lightest or the thinnest, but it makes up for it by being a sturdy shoulder to lean on.
Yeah, its 14-inch, 1080p display isn't colorful, but its 16:10 aspect ratio gives you more vertical space to work with.
See our full Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus review.
Best under $300
The Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook has been at the top of this list for years, and that's only recently changed because we want to make room for more up-to-date products. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is an absolute champion.
Regarding our synthetic benchmark tests, the Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook has some of the most underwhelming performance on this list. The Duet 5 Chromebook's Geekbench 5 multi-core average of 1,727 is well below the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 (Intel)'s 3,841 average. It is above the Acer Chromebook 317's 1,137, though both laptops fall below the Chromebook average of 2,253.
This baby is packed with a 13.3-inch, 1920 x 1080 OLED display. It reproduced 85.2 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and averaged 361 nits of brightness. Those numbers we’d see in premium laptops — and some of those more expensive items don’t get as bright or colorful. And an OLED panel is an impressive addition. You’d find those in gaming laptops, MacBook competitors, and big TVs.
Speaking of dissing premium laptops, this detachable will also get you 13 hours and 31 minutes of battery life. That’s almost enough battery life to land on our laptops with the best battery life page. That alone is an excellent package for under $300. But there's more! This is a detachable 2-in-1, meaning it can go from a tablet to a full laptop. And unlike some pricier detachables, this machine includes the keyboard and cover (I wish that weren't boast-worthy, but it is).
The only downsides to this machine are its relatively weak performance and lack of a stylus. But for the price, it's pretty damn good.
See our full Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook review.
Best Windows laptop
It's a challenge to find a Windows laptop for under $500 that won't be DOA when it gets to your doorstep. That's where the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 (Intel) comes in. Another chunky name for another star on this list. It's got everything you need to make a laptop work at this price — strong performance, over 14 hours of battery life, and a comfortable keyboard. The battery life alone is enough to sell me on this machine, as we've seen plenty of budget and premium laptops die before they could get across the 8-hour mark.
The IdeaPad Flex 5 performed well in our lab, but it failed to blow us away. The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 (Intel) averaged a score of 3,841 on Geekbench 5's multicore benchmark. This is above the Chromebook average of 2,253 and is also well ahead of the Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook (1,727) and Acer Chromebook 713 (1,137). However, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus does have far snappier performance.
How was the keyboard so comfortable? Each stroke was met with a tactile click at the end, encouraging our fingers to tap dance across the deck at top speed. It was a little more shallow than we would’ve liked, but the typing experience was pleasant overall.
When we first reviewed the IdeaPad Flex 5 it hovered around $500-$650 depending on the configuration, but you can now find it for under $500 or even $400 for the base model, making it an even better value and easily the best Windows laptop under $500.
However, it might be more difficult to find the Intel version, but if you see the AMD Ryzen 3 model, it’ll likely offer the same benefits just with slightly different performance and battery life. Since we didn’t test it, we can’t say for sure.
See our full Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 review.
Best for students
The best under $500 laptop for students is a Chromebook I wish every student at my school had access to: the Acer Chromebook Spin 312. It'd be a major upgrade from the pre-pandemic Dell's that fill the laptop charging cart in my classroom.
Its silver-coated chassis makes it look more expensive that it actually is. It's not the thinnest laptop we've ever reviewed, but it is one of the lightest at just under 3 pounds. (I wouldn't want to carry anything heavier between classes all day!) The battery can last up to 10 hours and 33 minutes fully charged, too.
A couple small, unique features make this laptop standout; Acer's OceanGlass touchpad is the smoothest I’ve ever felt on a budget laptop — even compared to some expensive Windows laptops. The Corning Gorilla Glass coating on the Spin 312's 12.2-inch display makes colors appear more vivid than what the IPS panel can actually produce.
According to Laptop Mag's tests, it covers only 55% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. But the colors don't look desaturated, and the contrasts are more dramatic, compared to how they would look on an IPS panel with the same color coverage and no coating.
The keyboard isn't the worst I’ve ever tried, even if it does have a strange clicky-squishy feel that makes the thinness of the plastic keycaps really noticeable. But the Spin 312 is a 2-in-1 laptop, so if taking notes by hand is more your style you won't need to worry about that — not until its time to type that essay on George Orwell's 1984, at least.
See our full Acer Chromebook Spin 312 review.
Benchmark comparisons
Click to view chart data in table format
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus | Lenovo Duet 5 Chromebook | Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 | Acer Chromebook Spin 312 |
Geekbench 6 (Higher is better) | 5,384 | NA | NA | 4,477 |
Geekbench 5 (Higher is better) | NA | 1,727 | 3,841 | NA |
Jetstream 2 (Higher is better) | 272.91 | 70.1 | NA | 215 |
CrXPRT 2 (Higher is better) | NA | 55 | NA | 140 |
Handbrake time ((MM:SS), lower is better) | NA | NA | 25:30 | NA |
Battery life - Web surfing (HH:MM) | 09:43 | 13:31 | 14:16 | 10:33 |
SSD transfer speeds (MBps, higher is better) | NA | NA | 565.9 | NA |
DCI-P3 Color Gamut (Higher is better) | 46.5% | 85.2% | 45% | 55% |
Display Brightness (Nits, higher is better) | 306 | 361 | 200 | 277 |
Hottest temperature (95 degree comfort threshold) | 89.5 | NA | 94 | 91.5 |
Recently reviewed
Not every laptop can make the best laptops under $500 page; we review new laptops every week and over 100 laptops yearly. But here's a look at our most recently reviewed laptops that didn't make this page either due to a fault, price, battery life, display brightness, or something else.
How to choose one of the best laptops under $500
To make your shopping process a little easier, we put together some tried-and-true guidelines to help you choose the best laptop for under $500.
Budget: What you get for the money
You can find decent Windows laptops and great Chromebooks for under $500. But pay close attention to the specs — everything from internal hardware to keyboard quality. We thoroughly the good and bad of cheap laptops in our reviews, so you'll know what laptops offer more or less for their price.
If we haven't reviewed it, we recommend typing the laptop's name into your favorite search engine followed by "review." You should find what you need to make an informed decision.
Screen Size: 12 to 14 inches for portability
Screen size can tell you a lot about a laptop's overall portability. 12-, 13-, and 14-inch models are generally the lightest and thinnest, and most $500 and under laptops come in these sizes.
Form factor: Clamshell or convertible?
Clamshell (traditional) laptops often have better features for a lower price, but there are a decent number of convertible laptops with a 360-rotating display (2-in-1s) or detachable keyboard that are just as inexpensive. If you want to use your laptop as a notebook or drawing tablet, either of those forms could work for you!
Just keep in mind that a 2-in-1 in tablet mode will be thicker since the display folds back to meet the bottom of the keyboard — and that also means the keys face outward. Laptops with detachable keyboards don't suffer from the same awkwardness.
Battery Life: 10+ hours
Even a sub-$500 laptop should have enough battery life to last an entire workday before it needs a charge. We recommend buying one with at least 10 hours of battery life, according to our tests.
Specs: What's the best for $500 or less?
If you come across a cheap laptop with 16GB RAM, a 256GB storage drive, and an Intel 13th-gen processor or newer, then you might have found one of the few options out there with the best specs for the price.
What you'll come across more often are sub-$500 laptops with some combination of 8GB RAM, 128GB or less of storage space (the slower, eMMC kind), and a MediaTek Kompanio or Intel N-series processor. You'll get more mileage out of those specs with a Chromebook than with a Windows laptop, though.
FAQs
Q: Are budget laptops worth it?
A: If you don't use a laptop for anything more than checking email, watching videos, or doing homework in Google Docs, there's a good chance you'll be pleasantly surprised by the quality of today's cheap laptops. Some feature snappy processors, clicky keyboards, or colorful displays.
But as Laptop Mag reviews editor, Rami Tabari, points out, not all budget laptops are a great deal. Even on sale. It's crucial to keep the laptop's potential longevity in mind, especially when it comes to battery life.
Q: Are laptops getting cheaper?
A: There are lots of factors that ultimately determine laptop pricing (like tariffs), but the average price of a laptop has stayed relatively the same over the last several years while their overall quality has improved. If or when tariff hikes hit laptops, it's likely they'll be significantly more expensive — and it could become even harder to find a quality laptop under $500.
Q: When are laptops cheapest?
A: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are when you'll usually see the best deals on laptops, but many manufacturers and retailers have great deals throughout the year. (We keep track of the best laptop deals you can get right now, so check 'em out.)
How we test the best laptops under $500
We put each laptop through extensive benchmark testing — both synthetic and real-world — before they end up in the hands of our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers, and heat management.
In our benchmark testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and DCI-P3 color gamut of the laptop's display. For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 5 and 6 and 3DMark professional graphics tests.
To determine real-world performance, we task the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and to duplicate a 4.97GB multimedia file. Our real-world graphics test is the Sid Meier's Civilization 6 Gathering Storm benchmark with medium settings at 1080p resolution.
We also run heat tests by playing a 15-minute full-screen video and measuring temperatures in different areas of the laptop. Last but not least, our battery test consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. For MacBooks and premium Windows 11 laptops, a runtime of over 9 hours is considered a good result, whereas gaming laptops and workstations that can stay powered for longer than 5 hours deserve praise.
After completing lab tests, each laptop heads to our expert reviewers for in-depth, hands-on evaluation. They spend several days using the laptop in their everyday workflows — writing, editing, video calling, streaming, and more — to get a feel for how it performs in the real world. This combination of technical analysis and lived-in experience helps us deliver a well-rounded, honest perspective on every laptop we review at Laptop Mag.
See this page on How We Test Laptops for more details on our benchmarking procedures.
Why trust Laptop Mag
Laptop Mag reviews over one hundred different laptops every year, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We're not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming.
We are 100% independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades, and we continue to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on.
Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it.
Our editorial trustworthiness is enforced by one of the world's largest technology publishers, Future Publishing. As a company, we have unrivaled experience across every tech sector — and we're the group's specialist for all things mobile tech.
